accepted by the Luxembourg. To my shame, I must admit that I could
not make head or tail of them. Without much searching, I found an
apartment on the fifth floor of a house near the Lion de Belfort. It had
two rooms and a kitchen, and cost seven hundred francs a year, which was
then twenty-eight pounds. I bought, second-hand, such furniture and
household utensils as were essential, and the _concierge_ told me of a
woman who would come in for half a day and make my _cafe au lait_ in the
morning and my luncheon at noon. I settled down and set to work on still
another novel. Soon after my arrival, Gerald Kelly took me to a
restaurant called Le Chat Blanc in the Rue d'Odessa, near the Gare
Montparnasse, where a number of artists were in the habit of dining;
and from then on I dined there every night. I have described the place
elsewhere, and in some detail in the novel to which these pages are meant
to serve as a preface, so that I need not here say more about it. As a
rule, the same people came in every night, but now and then others came,
perhaps only once, perhaps two or three times. We were apt to look upon
them as interlopers, and I don't think we made them particularly welcome.
It was thus that I first met Arnold Bennett and Clive Bell. One of these
casual visitors was Aleister Crowley. He was spending the winter in
Paris. I took an immediate dislike to him, but he interested and amused
me. He was a great talker and he talked uncommonly well. In early youth,
I was told, he was extremely handsome, but when I knew him he had put on
weight, and his hair was thinning. He had fine eyes and a way, whether
natural or acquired I do not know, of so focusing them that, when he
looked at you, he seemed to look behind you. He was a fake, but not
entirely a fake. At Cambridge he had won his chess blue and was esteemed
the best whist player of his time. He was a liar and unbecomingly
boastful, but the odd thing was that he had actually done some of the
things he boasted of. As a mountaineer, he had made an ascent of K2 in
the Hindu Kush, the second highest mountain in India, and he made it
without the elaborate equipment, the cylinders of oxygen and so forth,
which render the endeavours of the mountaineers of the present day more
likely to succeed. He did not reach the top, but got nearer to it than
anyone had done before.

Crowley was a voluminous writer of verse, which he published sumptuously
at his own expense. He had a gift for