In "A Good Café on the Place St.-Michel," the hero, Tatie, goes into a café to get out of the winter rain and writes a short story at a table. He drinks a café au lait, a rum St James, a second rum St. James.

St. James rum is from Martinique. It has a rich sugar-cane flavor.

The story writing goes well.

He orders a tray of oysters-on-the-half-shell and a half-carafe of dry white wine to go with them.

He expects to receive some money from articles he has written for the Toronto paper, and contemplates going to Austria, to a chalet, with a pension, to ski.

He can give up the studio he rents to write in--it's too cold up there, in the winter--and pay the rent on the place he rents on the 74 rue Cardinal Lemoine, which is nominal.

He is tired, from writing his story. Like after sex.

His wife likes the idea of going to Austria, to ski.

They have pet names for each other. I don't think Tatie is the diminutive of Aunt. But I don't know.

That's about it. Winter is coming. He writes a story he thinks is very good, but he won't know until tomorrow when he rereads it.

He earns money writing newspaper articles, but he can do that anywhere.

The rent in Paris is nominal. The pension at the chalet is nominal. Transportation from France to Austria is nominal.

We have learned a lot in a short prose vignette. Hemingway's working title for A Moveable Feast was PARIS SKETCHES.

Maybe he will write about Paris in Austria, like he is writing about being up in Michigan, in Paris. (Or write about being in Paris, in Cuba.)

He compares the good café to an evil café, Café des Amateurs, full of the drunkards of the quarter, including poivrottes, or female rummies, on their wine drunks.

He is not a drunkard, with the sour smell of dirty bodies.

He is numero uno. America's Greatest Writer.

By the time he gets around to writing A Moveable Feast he will have won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

And be a sour-smelling rummy.

Methinks the lady doth protest too much.

His fourth wife, when he commits suicide, by blowing his head off with a shotgun, will say it was an accident.

One reason he commits suicide is he can't end the book. He can't write a preface. He is blocked. It quit working. Whatever it was.

It used to be there. In Paris.

That's a long time ago now, Pops.

Shit used to be blacker and richer.