Laughing Torso

LIFE
In the Quarter were two Japanese. They were
known as " Les Japonais" They were a great
success at parties. One was Foujita, who has since
become world famous, and the other was Kavashima
who is also a well-known painter and spends his life
in Germany and America. They were pupils of
Raymond Duncan. They wove the material that
their clothes were made of and made their own
sandals. They wore their hair in fringes with bands
of ribbon round their heads, and Greek robes and
sandals. They danced Greek dances and worked
all day. Diego Rivera, the Mexican artist, did a
Cubist painting of them both together with square
faces. It was exactly like them, although far from
realistic. It was what Jean Cocteau would describe
as "plus vrai que le vrai."
Kisling, the Polish painter, came each evening to
the Rotonde. He wore his hair with a fringe too.
He was thin and very good-looking. He had a dis-
pute with a painter called Gottlieb and they
arranged to fight a duel. Rivera was one of the
seconds. They went out of Paris. A cinema man
with a camera was there and we saw it on the pic-
tures the same evening. Kisling came to the
Rotonde with a cut on his nose and was considered
a great hero. I think that if he had washed the
blood off it would not have been visible. Very
seldom we went to Montmartre. I went once to the
Lapin Agile. Ghil (note the pun) was an old man
who looked like the " old man of the sea." He wore
a far cap and had a long beard. This was the
cabaret where Picasso and Max Jacob and all the
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