Free Everybody's Autobiography by Gertrude Stein Page A

in the village became afraid of him and the lack of a kidney troubled his pretty Portuguese wife who could cook everything and whom he had converted to protestantism, more and more until we had the country doctor to see her. He said she had better quit working and they had nothing except themselves but finally they separately left and the Alsatian was left behind in the village and was even more frightening to them and so we once more had to find another couple as we were expecting guests just then, and the Alsatian finally disappeared too.
    I never get over the fact that you are very likely to know everybody a long time and the difference between knowing them a long time and not knowing them at all is really nothing. Anyway nobody can get lost any more because the earth is all so covered with everybody and everybody is always moving around and you always seeeverybody and nevertheless very often you never see any of them again. This is what happened then.
    Some one said that there were a couple somewhere on the mountains so we went to see them. They were there, the priest not the priest there but the priest elsewhere recommended them and we took them. They were not a couple that is they had not been then when the priest recommended them and were they now, they did not seem to be one. She had everything the matter so the doctor said whom we finally called in to see her and he took her to the hospital and he said they never have enough patients in the hospital so they would keep her and he the husband went out in to the hallway and fell and so he decided he would leave us and her. So once more we were without a couple and we went to Lyon to get one. This time we got a Polish woman and a Czechoslovak husband and that seemed better. She was a very good cook and said she hoped she would be happy although she never had been and he said he liked to be a mechanic but he did not like to lie under a car with his legs sticking out and if you were an automobile mechanic this is what you had to do so he decided that he would be a valet de chambre but he had been and was a pretty good mechanic.
    The Picabias came.
    We had just had a bathroom and a water closet put in and running water. Up to this time we had bathed in a rubber tub and had the water brought in from the fountain. In France you do not have a pump you have a fountain.
    And then the Picabias came and Picabia has now a Swiss wife well anyway the water closet was stopped up it was late at night and it was flooded. I called Jean who woke up and immediately he manipulated something and stopped the flow of water and stopped the flood. Now we all can do it but he was the first one to manage it and we were pleased with him.
    As I said I had been finding Francis Picabia more and more interesting. I had known him many years and had not cared for himhe was too brilliant and he talked too much and he was too fatiguing, besides that I had not cared for his painting. I did not care for the way it resembled Picasso and I did not care for the way it did not resemble him. But now I was changing. Perhaps he was changing that however I do not quite believe.
    In a way it was Francis Rose who first interested me in Picabia’s painting and that was because I found Francis Rose the only interesting one among the young men painting and insofar as he had learned anything he had learned it from Picabia and not from Picasso.
    One might say they were both called Francis and anybody called Francis is elegant, unbalanced and intelligent and certain to be right not about everything but about themselves. At least such has been true of any Francis as Francis in history or as I have known them. Francis Rose was all that and Picabia was coming to be all that.
    Picabia objects to Cezanne is it because he is jealous of that painting or is it because he is right about it. Everybody of that period was influenced by Cezanne but he says he was not and was not.
    Picabia’s father was a Spaniard born in Cuba and