We separated for a while and looked at paintings individually, and then Hemingway called us over and pointed to a picture labelled, in large letters, “Catharine Lorillard Wolfe” and, in small ones, “By Cabanel.” “This is where I got confused as a kid, in Chicago,” he said. “My favorite painters for a long time were Bunte and Ryerson, two of the biggest and wealthiest families in Chicago. I always thought the names in big letters were the painters.”

After we reached the Cézannes and Degases and the other Impressionists, Hemingway became more and more excited, and discoursed on what each artist could do and how and what he had learned from each. Patrick listened respectfully and didn’t seem to want to talk about painting techniques any more. Hemingway spent several minutes looking at Cézanne’s “Rocks—Forest of Fontainebleau.” “This is what we try to do in writing, this and this, and the woods, and the rocks we have to climb over,” he said. “Cézanne is my painter, after the early painters. Wonder, wonder painter. Degas was another wonder painter. I’ve never seen a bad Degas. You know what he did with the bad Degases? He burned them.”

Hemingway took another long drink from his flask. We came to Manet’s pastel portrait of Mlle. Valtesse de la Bigne, a young woman with blond hair coiled on the top of her head. Hemingway was silent for a while, looking at it; finally he turned away. “Manet could show the bloom people have when they’re still innocent and before they’ve been disillusioned,” he said.

As we walked along, Hemingway said to me, “I can make a landscape like Mr. Paul Cézanne. I learned how to make a landscape from Mr. Paul Cézanne by walking through the Luxembourg Museum a thousand times with an empty gut, and I am pretty sure that if Mr. Paul was around, he would like the way I make them and be happy that I learned it from him.” He had learned a lot from Mr. Johann Sebastian Bach, too. “In the first paragraphs of ‘Farewell,’ I used the word ’and’ consciously over and over the way Mr. Johann Sebastian Bach used a note in music when he was emitting counterpoint. I can almost write like Mr. Johann sometimes—or, anyway, so he would like it. All such people are easy to deal with, because we all know you have to learn.”

“Papa, look at this,” Patrick said. He was looking at “Meditation on the Passion,” by Carpaccio. Patrick said it had a lot of strange animals in it for a religious painting.

“Huh!” Hemingway said. “Those painters always put the sacred scenes, in the part of Italy they liked the best or where they came from or where their girls came from. They made their girls the Madonnas. This is supposed to be Palestine, and Palestine is a long way off, he figures. So he puts in a red parrot, and he puts in deer and a leopard. And then he thinks, This is the Far East and it’s far away. So he puts in the Moors, the traditional enemy of the Venetians.” He paused and looked to see what else the painter had put in his picture. “Then he gets hungry, so he puts in rabbits,” he said. “Goddam, Mouse, we saw a lot of good pictures. Mouse, don’t you think two hours is a long time looking at pictures?”

Everybody agreed that two hours was a long time looking at pictures, so Hemingway said that we would skip the Goyas, and that we would all go to the Museum again when they returned from Europe.

It was still raining when we came out of the Museum. “Goddam, I hate to go out in the rain,” Hemingway said. “Goddam, I hate to get wet.”

Charles Scribner was waiting in the lobby of the hotel. “Ernest,” he said, shaking Hemingway’s hand. He is a dignified, solemn, slow-speaking gentleman with silvery hair.

“We’ve been looking at pictures, Charlie,” Hemingway said as we went up in the elevator. “They have some pretty good pictures now, Charlie.”

Scribner nodded and said, “Yuh, yuh.”

“Was fun for country boy like me,” Hemingway said.

“Yuh, yuh,” said Scribner.

We went into the suite and took off our coats, and Hemingway said we would have lunch right there. He called room service and Mrs. Hemingway sat down at the desk to finish her letter. Hemingway sat down on the couch with Mr. Scribner and began telling him that he had been jamming, like a rider in a six-day bike race, and Patrick sat quietly in a corner and watched his father. The waiter came in and passed out menus. Scribner said he was going to order the most expensive item on the menu, because Hemingway was paying for it. He laughed tentatively, and Patrick laughed to keep him company. The waiter retired with our orders, and Scribner and Hemingway talked business for a while. Scribner wanted to know whether Hemingway had the letters he had written to him.

Hemingway said, “I carry them every place I go, Charlie, together with a copy of the poems of Robert Browning.”

Scribner nodded, and from the inner pocket of his jacket took some papers—copies of the contract for the new book, he said. The contract provided for an advance of twenty-five thousand dollars against royalties, beginning at fifteen per cent.

Hemingway signed the contract, and got up from the couch. Then he said, “Never ran as no genius, but I’ll defend the title again against all the good young new ones.” He lowered his head, put his left foot forward, and jabbed at the air with a left and a right. “Never let them hit you solid,” he said.

Scribner wanted to know where Hemingway could be reached in Europe. Care of the Guaranty Trust Company in Paris, Hemingway told him. “When we took Paris, I tried to take that bank and got smacked back,” he said, and laughed a shy laugh. “I thought it would be awfully nice if I could take my own bank.”

“Yuh, yuh,” Scribner said. “What are you planning to do in Italy, Ernest?”

Hemingway said he would work in the mornings and see his Italian friends and go duck-hunting in the afternoons. “We shot three hundred and thirty-one ducks to six guns there one afternoon,” he said. “Mary shot good, too.”

Mrs. Hemingway looked up. “Any girl who marries Papa has to learn how to carry a gun,” she said, and returned to her letter-writing.

“I went hunting once in Suffolk, England,” Scribner said. Everyone waited politely for him to continue. “I remember they gave me goose eggs to eat for breakfast in Suffolk. Then we went out to shoot. I didn’t know how to get my gun off safety.”

“Hunting is sort of a good life,” Hemingway said. “Better than Westport or Bronxville, I think.”

“After I learned how to get my gun off safety, I couldn’t hit anything,” Scribner said.

“I’d like to make the big Monte Carlo shoot and the Championship of the World at San Remo,” Hemingway said. “I’m in pretty good shape to shoot either one. It’s not a spectator sport at all. But exciting to do and wonderful to manage. I used to handle Wolfie in big shoots. He is a great shot. It was like handling a great horse.”

“I finally got one,” Scribner said timidly.

“Got what?” asked Hemingway.

“A rabbit,” Scribner said. “I shot this rabbit.”

“They haven’t held the big Monte Carlo shoot since 1939,” Hemingway said. “Only two Americans ever won it in seventy-four years. Shooting gives me a good feeling. A lot of it is being together and friendly instead of feeling you are in some place where everybody hates you and wishes you ill. It is faster than baseball, and you are out on one strike.”

The telephone rang, and Hemingway picked it up, listened, said a few words, and then turned to us and said that an outfit called Endorsements, Inc., had offered him four thousand dollars to pose as a Man of Distinction. “I told them I wouldn’t drink the stuff for four thousand dollars,” he said. “I told them I was a champagne man. Am trying to be a good guy, but it’s a difficult trade. What you win in Boston, you lose in Chicago.” ♦