Page 41, “The Persuasion”
The capacious floor-through flat, with pale lemon silks that draped from fifteen-foot ceilings to the floor, mouldings carved with garlands of flowers, and sofas and chairs in green-and-yellow chinoise, belonged to a friend of Tonin’s grandfather, a member of the French diplomatic corps who’d been posted out to Algeria.
We quickly had a little routine. Both early risers, we got up around six. Tonin would make the coffee while I went downstairs to get the papers (the Herald Tribune for me, Combat!, the new student movement daily for him) and two croissants. Then we’d work for a few hours, me on the articles about the Paris scene that I’d arranged to send to LNS; Tonin organizing meetings between the student leaders and members of the press and government, establishment figures he’d met as a child through his grandfather. (It turned out the missed meeting with the French student leaders was a translation problem—they had come at deux and thought Tonin was bringing quatre people with him; Tonin had thought they’d said only deux of us could come at quatre.) At night, we rolled up the rugs (the babaloochies, he called them) and, as I’d explained to Bird, we danced—jazz, folk, Motown, classical, African—and danced.
Tonin had one other stop in the rotation. With his grandfather’s help, he’d hired an American attorney living in Paris to help a draft-resister holed up there. Ernest and Tonin had struck up an instant friendship at the Brinkley interview in London, when Ernest mentioned that he was a China scholar and Tonin responded that he’d been there once as a child with his grandfather. Two or three times a week, Tonin—and sometimes I—took bags of cheese and bread and wine to the pale thin redhead from Washington State, staying for a few hours to talk about war and loyalty and whether Marshall McLuhan made any sense.
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