Free B004MMEIOG EBOK by John Baxter Page B

quickly,” she said.
    “Why? The next seminar isn’t for twelve months.”
    Dorothy looked cross. “You don’t think I’m going to put people through that again? I told Andrew this morning that we wouldn’t need him for the other two walks.” She snapped her Filofax closed. “The next one’s tomorrow, at three.”

Chapter 17
The Opium Trail
    At the next peg the Queen turned again, and this time she said, “Speak in French when you can’t think of the English for a thing—turn out your toes as you walk—and remember who you are!”
    LEWIS CARROLL, Alice in Wonderland
    S tanding on boulevard du Montparnasse next afternoon with an empty feeling in the pit of my stomach, I watched my first tour group convene.
    Just tell them some of your stories.
    How easy she made it sound.
    What stories?
    About whom?
    A musicologist friend, in a moment of weakness, once agreed to lecture an arts group on the history of Western music. Plunging in at Gregorian chant, he staggered out of Stockhausen and serialism two hours later to be met by an accusatory stare of a lady in the front row, who hissed “You forgot Scriabin!”
    In ones and twos, the members of my group straggled out the front door—two pairs of middle-aged ladies in sensible shoes, a pretty but dazed girl who appeared to be suffering from terminal jet lag, and a short, bald man with a heavy red beard. Would it be politic to mention that he was a near-look-alike for Landru? Probably not.
    “Is that everyone?”
    “One other lady thought she might come,” said one woman, in a heavy Southern accent. She looked over her shoulder at the empty doorway. “But I guess she changed her mind.”
    Six, out of a possible fifty. Word of Andrew’s soporific stroll had spread.
    “Perhaps we’d better start . . .”
    I introduced myself, then said, almost shouting over the traffic noise, “We’re standing on boulevard du Montparnasse . . .”
    Within a minute, I started to feel some sympathy for Andrew. Street corners are no place to explain anything more complex than the way to the nearest métro stop. And unless you have a voice trained to project, anything you say barely travels two meters before fading into the general city din.
    I had an additional problem, which had only dawned on me the previous evening as I went over my possible route. The eastern end of boulevard du Montparnasse, where the seminar held its courses, lacked even one site of literary interest. Nobody of artistic significance had lived, died, or slept here. It explained why Andrew started his tour in front of Deux Magots. At least there he had something to talk about.
    Half a kilometer away lay the Luxembourg Gardens, Odéon, and a plethora of significant locations. It was just a question of going there. What would Hemingway do? I made a dangerous decision and pointed toward rue Vaugirard.
    “Now we need to walk.”
    “How far?” asked the girl with the weary look.
    “Hardly any distance at all,” I lied. Buying time, I asked, “Where are you from?”
    Telling me about Omaha kept her alert for two blocks, but as we began the third—and still only halfway to the Luxembourg—she faltered.
    At this point, providence intervened and changed my life. By chance, we’d paused by an antique shop.
    “Good grief!” I said, staring in the window. “Look at that!”
    The slim metal tube, richly enameled, and prominently displayed on a stand, was obviously the star item of the shop.
    “An opium pipe!” I said, mostly to myself. “Do you know how rare they are? You almost never see them on sale. I wonder what he wants for it . . .”
    With the exception of alcohol, no narcotic exercised such a potent influence over European art and culture as opium. Alfred de Musset smoked it. Lord Byron drank it as laudanum, dissolved in spiced alcohol. Opium’s chemically refined forms of morphine and heroin provided a faster, more intense sensation, but artists and thinkers preferred the drug raw. It allowed