Laughing Torso

BACK TO PARIS AND CELEBRITIES
He was not in. We did not know what to do, so we
closed the door. We were quite certain that Modig-
liani was still with us and fancied at night that we
could hear his footsteps walking through the studio.
It was certainly a most sinister place.
We worked during the daytime. I painted Still
Life and worked at the Academy from the nude in
the afternoon. We did a great deal of work. We
had a tabby cat. Once we were all very broke,
myself, the Pole, and the Arab. For three days we
could not find a penny, we did not mind much about
ourselves, but we were so sorry for the cat, who had
to starve also. We had a lot of Modigliani's books
and in despair the Pole took one on philosophy and
read it to us. As he turned over the pages he sud-
denly came to a HUNDRED FRANC NOTE.
Modigliani's wife used to hide money away from him
and this was one of his notes. We were so delighted
that we rushed into the nearest workmen's restaur-
ant, taking the cat with us, ancl ate and drank to
Modigliani's health the whole evening. The poor
cat ended in a very tragic way. One evening we
were reading and the cat began to run round in
circles, We realized that it had gone mad so we
locked it up in the lavatory and went out. We dared
not come home until the next morning. We sat in
cafes all night and at eight in the morning came
home to find an apparently dead cat. We went to
bed as we were very tired and suddenly heard a most
dreadful howl. We opened the door of the lava-
tory and found that the cat was really dead. The
next thing to do was to dispose of the body. We