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LAUGHING    TORSO

consoled me a little for Frank's departure. I visited
the Pole, who, I think, had missed me a good deal.
I started work at once and was able to afford a
model. A Polish girl came and I painted her por-
trait in a fawn coloured " cloche " hat. I met, one
day, a rich American woman. She was very amus-
ing and had an enormous apartment near the
Champ de Mars. She drank a great deal of cham-
pagne and asked me to paint her portrait. She was
fat, very smart, and heavily painted. I was to be
given four thousand francs. I got a large canvas
and began. She sat very badly, and very soon got
angry with me, as she said that I had insulted her.
All her enemies were delighted with it. I went
occasionally to her flat, but life there was much too
rough for me. When she got angry she would
become violent. One day she got annoyed with
some man and seized some geraniums that were in
a pot. She rooted them out and threw them at him,
and the pot afterwards. Fortunately, the man had
just slammed the door and the pot crashed against it
as the door closed. She paid me about fifteen hun-
dred francs, but I never got any more, and I believe
that it was eventually hung up in the butler's bedroom.
She afterwards lost all her money, got some kind
of job, and behaved in a very courageous manner.
I met at the Dome two very charming men. One
was Meriel Cooper and the other was Ernest B.
Schoedsack. They had just come back from the un-
explored parts of Persia and had done their first big
film called " Grass." Cooper was a small fair man
with a large forehead, and Schoedsack was one of the