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installed, and those that were didn’t always work. Nor did the club provide towels—though such a service was, the receptionist explained, “envisaged”: shorthand for something that might take place in the future. They did, however, present him with a welcome gift that reflected exactly the Parisian concept of health—a bag of chocolate truffles.
    Carrying the battle to the enemy, I asked, “Do you exercise?”
    Odile didn’t blink. “My weight hasn’t changed since college. Nor my blood pressure. But if these were my figures . . .” She tapped her computer screen with her nail. “ . . . I would probably take up the marathon.”
    As a concession, I walked home down rue Gay-Lussac and rue Soufflot, rather than waiting for the bus.
    For the first time in a while, I paid attention to the Parisians passing me. Slim and erect, showing barely a gram of excess fat, they stepped out briskly, as full of good health as they were of croissants, foie gras, fried potatoes, steak, red wine, and cheese.
    How did they do it?
    I reviewed the physical state of the Anglo-Saxon expatriate community. Pale, slouching, sagging, habitually out of shape—we were a sorry advertisement for the intellectual life. It was little consolation that some notable physical wrecks preceded us: Gertrude Stein, chronically obese, thanks to the cooking of her companion, Alice Toklas; Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, invariably plastered; Henry Miller, who, if he took any exercise at all, preferred the horizontal variety, in bed with a prostitute; and shuffling James Joyce, who went everywhere by taxi, always at someone else’s expense.
    But then, as if to counterbalance single-handed the combined weight of this dropsical pantheon, there was Hemingway.
    Back in the 1920s, when he lived on Place de la Contrescarpe, he would often have passed along this very sidewalk. It took little imagination to imagine him doing so now; I heard that light but forceful boxer’s footfall as he moved to overtake me, fists clenched, arms powering, breathing deeply, perspiring but with energy undiminished by the kilometer-long walk—thinking, perhaps, of the beer and potato salad he’d enjoy for lunch at Brasserie Lipp.
    Then he was past, leaving a scent of leather and fresh sweat. I watched his figure diminish, the fabric belt across the lower back of his old-fashioned tweed jacket tightening over those tensing muscles, notebook showing in his right-hand jacket pocket, his mind swimming with visions of trout in Michigan streams and the dust and blood of the bullring. I could hear him sneer, as Bill Gorton sneers to Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises : “You’re an expatriate. You’ve lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around cafés.”
    He was out of sight now, across rue Saint-Dominique, on the last downhill stretch to where the Medici Fountain spouted clear water in the sun. To his left was the green glory of the Luxembourg Gardens. Then under the colonnade of the Odéon Theatre, pausing for a few minutes to browse the booksellers’ stalls. And after that, across Place de l’Odéon, and into rue de l’Odéon, descending to the little shop with the wooden sign hanging over the sidewalk, the sober face of Master Will Shaxsper. . .
    Ernest , I thought, I need your shoes.

Chapter 8
The Importance of Being Ernest
    Turning up from St. Germain to go home past the bottom of the gardens to the Boulevard St. Michel one kept Shakespeare and Company to starboard and Adrienne Monnier’s Amis des Livres to port, and felt, as one rose with the tide toward the theatre, that one had passed the gates of dream—though which was horn and which was ivory, neither of those two rare friends would ever undertake to say. Why should they? It was enough for a confused young lawyer in a grand and