Free Joshua Then and Now by Mordecai Richler

York publisher in town, he found out which hotel he was staying at and lay in wait for him in the bar. But, to be fair, he was also obliging. If you were without hashish, Markham, an abstainer himself, would provide. He was there to help when you had to move. He never made a pass at anybody else’s girlfriend. But possibly because he seemed to incorporate all these virtues in one restless, yearning body, just about everybody felt ill at ease in his presence. They used Markham, but they never trusted him, and Peabody was gratuitously insulting. “Tell me, Bill, do you set yourself a number of words to write each day?”
    Joshua had first met Peabody at 1 a.m. on an enchanting spring night outside the Café Royal, now Le Drugstore, on Place St.-Germain. 1951 it was. Elegant, spare, jauntily dressed, favoring asnap-brim fedora, Peabody was already a legend in the
quartier
, drinking his way through an inheritance, zooming from St.-Germain to Montparnasse and back again in a battered
deux-chevaux
, merrily denouncing everybody he met in the cafés as resoundingly third-rate. Energy and pushy Jewish mothers were not quite enough, he delighted in warning them. Talent would also be required. Marcel Proust made them look sickly. Jane Austen knew more than they did.
    Joshua espied Peabody often enough striding down the boulevard, not only the last of the family railroad money, but the world itself his inheritance. One night, soft with slanting rain and the smell of roasting chestnuts he would pluck a schoolteacher at random, the most innocent of American girls, from a table at the Mabillon, and sweep her off for a week in an
auberge
only he knew of on the banks of the Loire, rendering the husband she had yet to meet inadequate forevermore. Another night, after having painstakingly arranged an assignation at the Café de Flore with the visiting aunt of an old Exeter classmate, he would sit across the boulevard at the Café Royal well past the appointed hour, watching out of the corner of his eye as his quarry, alone at her table, increasingly distraught, turned back one scruffy importuning stranger after another until, all hope abandoned, she rose to depart. Only then would Peabody dash gaily across the boulevard, zigzagging through the oncoming traffic, to carry her off without apology or dinner to the seediest hotel in the
quartier
, a fleabag, where he would coolly strip her of what remained of her dignity, thrust her into a taxi when he was finished, and be back at the Café Royal within the hour to rage against the depravity of the times.
    Peabody was bankrolling and editing a little magazine, a typically snobbish and quixotic venture, with stories and poems in French, Spanish, and Italian as well as English, lavishing the last of his inheritance on his favored writers. He had never spoken to Joshua, he did not even acknowledge him on the street, so Joshua was delighted to catch the fastidious Peabody early one morning in the Café Royal, saddledwith the embarrassing, complaining Melrose – Melrose, the banished Hollywood scriptwriter. Joshua, who had enjoyed a winning afternoon at Maison Lafitte for once, was in rare high spirits. He stood at the bar, rocking drunkenly, shamelessly eavesdropping on their conversation. Then he buttonholed Melrose as they stepped outside.
    “I wonder if you know,” he said, “that on this very square, in front of that church, in the spring of 1557, the gentry of this charming
quartier
gathered in their thousands for a burning. Two Huguenots, who refused under torture to deny their faith, were dragged right out here and offered mercy: if they renounced their heresy, they would be strangled before they were roasted –
à point
, it goes without saying. If not, their tongues would be ripped out of their mouths. They didn’t take the Fifth,” Joshua said, leering. “They had the natural dignity to say no, without equivocation, and out came their tongues, the crowd roaring more, more.