Ceaselessly, inexorably, a valet would come and go, bearing notes on a tray.

Then there were the purveyors of Industry and Art; rubicund horse-dealers in white overcoats; inventors with large rolls of paper; antiquarian booksellers carrying in their pocket ‘an almost unbelievable find’ – a ‘unique’ edition by Ulrich Zell or ‘Lapidanus’. Inside No. 202, a befuddled Jacinto scurried back and forth, scribbling at his desk, making telephone calls, nervously untying packages, eluding, as he came and went, some man waiting in ambush for him and who would emerge out of the darkness of the antechamber brandishing like a blunderbuss a petition or a catalogue!

At midday, a silvery, melancholy gong would sound, calling us to lunch. With Le Figaro or Les Nouveautés open before me on my plate, I always had to wait at least half an hour before my Prince would come tearing in, consulting his watch and, with a look of exhaustion on his face, give vent to his eternal complaint:

‘Yet another dreadful night beset by dreams! I tried sulfural, I summoned Cricket to rub me with turpentine, but nothing worked!’

He surveyed the contents of the table with an already jaded eye. No dish, however rare, tempted him, and since, in his morning tumult, he smoked innumerable cigarettes that dried his throat, he would then start gulping down a great glass of water – oxygenated, carbonated or sparkling – mixed with a very rare, extremely expensive and disgustingly sweet brandy made from Syracuse moscatel. Reluctantly, with the hesitant point of his knife, he would pick disconsolately at a sliver of ham or a morsel of lobster and then call impatiently for coffee – Moka coffee despatched each month by a man in Dedjah, and made very thick, Turkish style – which he would then stir with a cinnamon stick.

‘And what about you, Zé Fernandes, what are you going to do?’

‘Me?’

Leaning easily back in my chair, my thumbs hooked in the armholes of my waistcoat, I said:

‘Oh, I’m just going to mooch around like the idle dog I am.’

My solicitous friend, still stirring his coffee with the cinnamon stick, diligently listed the many delightfully civilised things I could do in the City, but each time he mentioned an exhibition, a lecture, a historical monument, a walk, he would immediately give a disconsolate shrug and say:

‘No, don’t bother, it’s probably not worth it!’

He would light another of his Russian cigarettes, which bore his name emblazoned in gold on the cigarette paper. He would stand for a moment at the Library door, nervously twirling the ends of his moustache and listening to what his administrator, the sleek and majestic Laporte had to say; then, followed by a manservant and carrying under his arm a huge bundle of newspapers for the journey, the Prince of Great Good Fortune would get into his coupé and plunge into the City.

On days when Jacinto’s social calendar was less packed, and the March sky charitably bestowed on us a scrap of watery blue, we would set off after lunch for a stroll through Paris. These slow, aimless walks had, in our student days, been one of Jacinto’s greatest pleasures, because it was while out walking that one could most intensely and most minutely savour the City. Now, however, despite my company, these strolls only irritated and fatigued him, in desolate contrast to the state of glowing ecstasy they had once provoked in him. With some alarm (even with a degree of sorrow, for I am a good man and it always saddens me to see a belief destroyed), I realised, on the first of our afternoon strolls down the Boulevards, that the seething mass of humanity on the pavements and the sombre flow of carriages along the streets distressed my friend with the sheer brutality of their haste, their egotism and their noise. Leaning on, nay, clinging to my arm, this new Jacinto began to regret that the streets of Civilisation were not surfaced with rubber, for rubber clearly represented to my friend a discreet substance that would dull the coarse rumble and roar of things. Amazing! Jacinto wanting rubber to insulate his sensibility from the workings of the City! He would not even allow me to stand gawping before the same gilded and mirrored shops he had once described as ‘precious museums of the nineteenth century’.

‘It’s a waste of time, Zé Fernandes. Such poverty of imagination, such a lack of invention! Always the same Louis XV fleurons, the same plush fabrics. It’s a waste of time!’

And I would stare wide-eyed at this transformed Jacinto. What shocked me most of all was his horror of the Crowd, of certain effects of the Crowd, which only he noticed and which he called ‘grooves’.

‘You won’t be aware of them, Zé Fernandes, because you’ve just come up from the country. But these “grooves” represent the one real inconvenience of Cities! It could be the strong, brazen perfume some woman gives off as she passes and which lodges in your sense of smell and contaminates the air for the rest of the day. It could be a phrase overheard in a group of friends and which reveals a world of deceit or pedantry or stupidity that remains stuck to your soul, like a spatter of mud, reminding you of the vastness of the swamp yet to be traversed. Or, my friend, it could be an individual whose unbearable pretentiousness or bad taste or impertinence or vulgarity or hardness of heart presents you with a vision of such repellent ugliness that you simply cannot shake it off. These grooves, Zé Fernandes, are quite dreadful, but then again, they are the minor miseries one has to put up with in an otherwise delicious Civilisation!’

All this was specious, possibly puerile, but it revealed to me a cooling of that devotee’s passionate commitment to the City. That same afternoon, if I remember rightly, we penetrated into the very depths of Paris: the long streets, the miles of houses, all of them the colour of brownish rubble and bristling with chimneys clad in black lead, all of them with their windows closed, their skimpy curtains drawn, suffocating and smothering the life within. Nothing but brick, iron, mortar and plaster, straight lines and sharp corners – barren and rigid. And from ground to rooftop, covering the façades and balconies and devouring the walls, were signs and hoardings and more signs and hoardings.

‘Jacinto, this Paris of yours is nothing but a vast, vulgar bazaar!’

And more out of a desire to probe my Prince’s feelings than out of any real conviction, I indicated the ugliness and sadness of these buildings – harsh warehouses, whose floors were actually shelves crammed with humanity, a humanity pitilessly catalogued and filed away: the better-looking and the more expensive on the freshly varnished bottom shelves, the vulgar and the workaday on the top, in the garrets, on bare pine shelves, with the dust and the silverfish.

Jacinto, a look of horror on his face, murmured: ‘Yes, it is ugly, very ugly!’ Then waving one buff-coloured glove in the air, he immediately added:

‘But what a marvellous organism, eh, Zé Fernandes! What solidity! What productivity!’

Where Jacinto had most changed, it seemed to me, was in his once quasi-religious love of the Bois de Boulogne. As a young man, he had constructed large and complicated theories around the Bois and would declare, with the shining eyes of the fanatic, that the City went to the Bois each afternoon in order to reinvigorate itself, receiving from the presence there of Duchesses, Courtesans, Politicians, Financiers, Generals, Academicians, Artists, Club members, and Jews, the consoling certainty that all of its personnel were just as numerous, vital and active as ever, and that not one contributory element to its grandeur had disappeared or died.