Hugger-Mugger in the Louvre

Bibliographical Note

        
This Dover edition, first published in 1986 and reissued in 2015, is an unabridged, unaltered republication of the work first published by Random House, New York, in 1940.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Paul, Elliot, 1891–1958.

        
     Hugger-mugger in the Louvre / Elliot Paul.

        
         p. cm.

        
     eISBN-13: 978-0-486-80324-1

        
        1. Evans, Homer (Fictitious character)—Fiction. I. Title.

        
PS3531.A852H8 1986

        
813'.52—dc23

86-6336

Manufactured in the United States by Courier Corporation
25185302 2015

www.doverpublications.com

To my former colleagues on the staff of the Boston Public Library, from whom I learned much about life and a bit about art and letters now and then.

Dear Reader:

In accordance with his promise contained in the preface of
The Mysterious Mickey Finn,
the author is beginning
Hugger-Mugger in the Louvre
with the understanding that the principal victim is dead before the reader begins Page One.

This story was written for the reader's amusement, and not for his edification or enlightenment. If he tastes the true flavor of Paris in its best American days, or learns anything about art or antiquity, the author asks him to keep it dark, in order not to frighten timid customers.

Elliot Paul

    
1   One Way of Getting Back at Women

    
2   In Which Notes Are Taken on Finance and Physiology

    
3   A Husband's Dilemma, and Other Unforeseen Events

    
4   The Quick, The Dead and Some Others In Between

    
5   Of the Ravages of Discourtesy

    
6   A Sock Filled with Sand, and Joyce's Ulysses

    
7   The Equivalent of a Third-Class Funeral

    
8   When a Body Meets a Body

    
9   A Little Algebra Proves a Dangerous Thing

    
10   In Which the Dragnet Tangles with Ben Hur

    
11   Certain Pitfalls That Travelers Should Keep in Mind

    
12   Which Causes a Lawyer to Burst into Song

    
13   A Miraculous Draft of Calling Cards

    
14   As It Was in the Beginning, More or Less

    
15   The Crossing of Trails in a Madhouse

    
16   In Which Some of the Findings Are Pickled While Others Are Not

    
17   Aurora, Pluvius and Cupid All Play the Field

    
18   Dealing in Part with the Psychology of Attire

    
19   Another Calculation Involving
x
, the Unknown Quantity

    
20   The Sudden Death of a Couple of Grasshoppers

    
21   Nocturne

    
22   An American Falls Under the Spell of the Old World Charm

    
23   In Which Love and Duty Become Irreconcilable

    
24   The Law Is Honored in the Breach and Elsewhere

S
IX
o'clock in the evening is a comforting hour at the Café du Dôme, and especially in the early summer, a season when Paris enjoys a brief stretch of stimulating weather and Montparnasse is in mild transition from the dearth of winter inhabitants to the rush of tourist traffic later on. The regulars of the quarter will have set aside the duties of the day and will not have plunged themselves into the whirl of pleasures of the night. They will be seated on cane-woven chairs around small but sturdy tables, sipping appropriate liquids and conversing, if at all, in a restful easy way. A few will have paper-bound books that require no concentration and the minimum expenditure of effort to hold them up, others will be scanning the headlines of the evening papers or glancing at pages three to eight in the hope of finding amusing or sensational news.

The twilight in Montparnasse is an elusive process, not a matter exclusively of light and shade or the sinking of the sun to rest. There is involved a spiritual significance, a subtle blending of moods and change of pace. The eventual darkness, stymied by the rose-colored and amber street lamps, does not

        
. . . fall from the wings of night

        
Like a feather is wafted downward

        
From an eagle in his flight.

    
Neither can it be called, in the words of that other chap from Harvard:

        
The violet hour

        
That brings the sailor home from sea

        
The typist home at tea-time
. . .

The fact is, that although the famous quartette of Montparnasse cafés have entertained a staggering number of poets in their time, none of the latter has done justice to the evening hour, when easels and typewriters have been forgotten; when dinner and gay companionship are in prospect; when, in short, there is nothing to do that can be classified as work until tomorrow or the day after. The waiters, of course, are working. But they know their customers' needs and supply them with so few lost motions that they do not seem to be exerting themselves at all.

Homer Evans was sitting near the center of the
terrasse
with a group of his friends; Hjalmar Jansen, the hearty Norwegian-American painter; plump Rosa Stier, who was on her third Pernod in celebration of a portrait that had just been paid for; Tom Jackson, the reporter, who was doing his yearly stretch on the New York
Herald
and had not yet been fired; and Harold Simon, who had been commissioned to do both the Old and New Testaments in woodcuts—text and illustrations—and had rounded out the day by carving that profound passage,
Hebrews 13-8,
which read, according to his absent-minded punctuation:

“Jesus Christ! The same yesterday, today, and forever.”

It was true that few events had taken place in the quarter in the course of the months just passed. The murder of Ambrose Gring
*
and the resulting exposure, thanks to Evans, of the Royalist plot and the American tax-dodging ring, had been reposing on the shelves of history slightly more than a year and since that time Montparnasse life had drifted placidly along, with nothing more exciting than an occasional tourist brawl, a wedding of one of the favorite cashiers, and an unforgettable evening when M. Chalgrin, the proprietor of the Dôme, had entertained the Gold Star Mothers. On that occasion, a playful group of models, made up by Jansen and wearing old costumes filched from the Comédie Française, had complicated the party to such an extent that three of the genuine mothers went A.W.O.L. for four days and were retrieved in time to catch the boat back to America only by the heroic work of the former Sergeant Frémont, now chief of detectives of the Paris police.

The evening on which this story begins did not, at first, give promise of being an eventful one. Homer Evans was planning to attend a concert of ancient French music, which he always contended was unjustly neglected, and was waiting for the appearance of Miriam Leonard, who was faithfully completing her afternoon hours of practice on the harpsichord, in order to invite her to accompany him. Now up to the time when they had experienced their amazing adventure in connection with the case of
The Mysterious Mickey Finn,
Homer would never have asked anyone to go with him where music was to be played. Of all the arts, music meant the most to him and in hearing it he fell into a state of receptivity that was disturbed by human contact. A year ago, if anyone had told him he would listen to Monteclaire's enchanting
Plaisirs champêtres
side by side with a beautiful and eager young woman, Homer would have raised his eyebrows and smiled his sardonic but tolerant smile. However, Miriam, he had long ago decided, was an exception to all rules. The question was: would she consent to go? She had such fine scruples against intruding on his privacy, she was so fanatically insistent on leaving him essentially as he had been before the swift rush of events had brought them together, that Evans was uneasy for fear she might leave him with an empty chair beside him and in his veins that insidious virus of loneliness he had felt, but not often, in the preceding year.

Somewhat behind time, a small truck drove up to the newsstand on the corner of the
rue
Delambre, a bundle of
En-Tout-Cas, Paris-Soir
and other evening papers was dumped roughly to the sidewalk, and a moment later Achilles, the sixty-eight-year-old newsboy with the sparse gray beard, came cackling toward Homer like the Ancient Mariner and, with a malicious look of triumph in his eye, placed a copy of each paper on the table at Evans' place.

It must be explained at this point that Achilles had strict orders not to hand newspapers to Evans but to leave them on a little table in the hallway just outside his apartment in the
rue
Campagne Première. Homer by no means lived in an ivory tower, nor even a zinc one. He kept abreast of world affairs. Indeed, his minute awareness of what was happening elsewhere was a source of continual astonishment to his friends. But he liked to read newspapers when he felt like it, and not at the moment when for obscure commercial reasons some publisher was pleased to dish them out.

“What's the idea? Are you stewed already, you old buzzard?” asked Hjalmar Jansen of the grizzly old man.

“I'm not a sponge like you,” Achilles retorted with spirit. “And furthermore, if I claimed to be a painter, I'd learn to paint whiskers that didn't look like putty. A fine one you are to be talking about men being drunk. You haven't gone home sober since your old man took you to the Paris Exposition in 1900.”

“Give Achilles a Pernod,” roared Rosa Stier.

“It's a wonder you can spare one, the way you pour 'em down,” the old man said to her. Then he added to the waiter: “You owe me one Pernod. Don't forget. Just now I've got to sell these papers. I'll make a clean-up this afternoon.” With that he hurried away.

Evans, when the old man so pointedly disregarded his instructions, had made no remonstrance. With his deep insight into human nature he had known from the first that old Achilles was no fool. If the man sold papers at the same stand year after year, no doubt he liked it that way. Achilles was sharp and intelligent. His wit had flashed across that same
terrasse
several decades—in lean times and prosperous days, in peace and in war-time. If he impudently planked
En-Tout-Cas
under Evans' nose, Homer was quick to grasp the fact that the occasion was an exceptional one. Nevertheless he sighed.
Les Plaisirs champêtres
of Monteclaire! Was it possible that he would not hear that night the deliberate andante, that movement attuned to the days gone by, the era of kings and courts, of a lusty peasantry and the red-cheeked women of Boucher in the threshing fields? Evans was in every sense of the word a modern man, accepting his own preposterous age with all its implications; but the past, as well, was real to him. And whenever a harpsichord began that slow movement of the
Plaisirs champêtres
he could feel the clock go back—no nervous pulse, no fear of the end of time or of afternoon or evening.