Page:Storm Over Paris.pdf/12

bootmaker by trade, a jolly, lighthearted nature, quick moving, with laughing eyes, small and set close on either of his snub nose, with deep black curly hair on his round head, and with flashing white teeth. He was somewhat short in build, but had the muscles of an athlete.

Yet Yaska could not prevent Anna from falling deeply in love with her teacher at the evening school, with the principal actor at the Mogodor Theatre, and with half a dozen assorted cinema stars.

Most of all she nursed a silent longing for Jean, the fleshed symbol of her yearning for life. Jean who had seized hold of her imagination even before she had felt the soil of France beneath her feet. It was not as an abstract figure, born out of the idle fantasies of all the novels she had read, but it was with the love of a bride for her destined groom that she longed for him. Jean and Paris! These to her were a single image. She could not imagine one without the other.

Since the hypothetical Jean was a painter, he must spend his time in the Louvre. And if not in the Louvre, then in the Luxembourg Gardens, in the Ecole de Beaux Arts, or the library of Ste. Genevieve. Or perhaps in the Metro. Or on the boulevards. Or on the terrace of La Coupole. In concert halls. At the grave of Heine. He was near and yet far, like a vagabond moon tinting a tree with gold, beckoning her soul to creative fulfillment.

Anna never gave up her search. None of her friends knew how dear and intimate to her were the streets and alleys of the Quartier Latin on the left bank of the Seine. On the days when there was no work, she spent her time walking about where the young students gathered, eyeing sensitive fingers turn the pages of books at Guilbert's, watching and envying the carefree students who moved through life as though the world were covered with a feather blanket.