A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway Read Free Book Online

side of the river.

    'Are you hungry again?' I said. 'Us. Talking and walking.'
    'Of course, Tatie. Aren't you?'
    'Let's go to a wonderful place and have a truly grand dinner.'
    'Where?'
    'Michaud's?'
    'That's perfect and it's so close.'
    So we walked up the rue des Saints-Peres to the corner of the rue Jacob, stopping and looking in the windows at pictures and at furniture. We stood outside of Michaud's restaurant reading the posted menu. Michaud's was crowded and we waited for people to come out, watching the tables where people already had their coffee.
    We were hungry again from walking and Michaud's was an exciting and expensive restaurant for us. It was where Joyce ate with his family then, he and his wife against the wall, Joyce peering at the menu through his thick glasses, holding the menu up in one hand; Nora by him, a hearty but delicate eater; Giorgio thin, foppish, sleek-headed from the back; Lucia with heavy curly hair, a girl not quite yet grown; all of them talking Italian.
    Standing there I wondered how much of what we had felt on the bridge was just hunger. I asked my wife and she said, 'I don't know, Tatie. There are so many sorts of hunger. In the spring there are more. But that's gone now. Memory is hunger.'
    I was being stupid, and looking in the window and seeing two tournedos being served I knew I was hungry in a simple way.
    'You said we were lucky today. Of course we were. But we had very good advice and information.'
    She laughed.
    'I didn't mean about the racing. You're such a literal boy. I meant lucky other ways.'
    'I don't think Chink cares for racing,' I said, compounding my stupidity.
    'No. He'd only care for it if he were riding.'
    'Don't you want to go racing any more?'
    'Of course. And now we can go whenever we want again.'
    'But you really want to go?'
    'Of course. You do, don't you?'

    It was a wonderful meal at Michaud's after we got in; but when we had finished and there was no question of hunger any more, the feeling that had been like hunger when we were on the bridge was still there when we caught the bus home. It was there when we came in the room and after we had gone to bed and made love in the dark, it was there.
    When I woke with the windows open and the moonlight on the roofs of the tall houses, it was there. I put my face away from the moonlight into the shadow but I could not sleep and lay awake thinking about it. We had both wakened twice in the night and my wife slept sweetly now with the moonlight on her face. I had to try to think it out and I was too stupid. Life had seemed so simple that morning when I had wakened and found the false spring and heard the pipes of the man with his herd of goats and gone out and bought the racing paper.
    But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there, not even poverty, nor sudden money, nor the moonlight, nor right and wrong, nor the breathing of someone who lay beside you in the moonlight.
    7 The End of an Avocation
    We went racing together many more times that year and other years after I had worked in the early mornings, and Hadley enjoyed it and sometimes she loved it. But it was not the climbs in the high mountain meadows above the last forest, nor nights coming home to the chalet, nor was it climbing with Chink, our best friend, over a high pass into new country. It was not really racing either. It was gambling on horses. But we called it racing.
    Racing never came between us, only people could do that; but for a long time it stayed close to us like a demanding friend. That was a generous way to think of it. I, the one who was so righteous about people and their destructiveness, tolerated this friend that was the falsest, most beautiful, most exciting, vicious, and demanding because she could be profitable. To make it profitable was more than a full-time job and I had no time for that. But I justified it to myself because I wrote it, even though in the end, when everything I had written, was lost, there