The Garin Death Ray

That season the entire Paris business world assembled for lunch at the Hotel Majestic.

Men of all nations were to be met there, with the exception of the French.

Business talks were conducted between courses and contracts were signed to the accompaniment of orchestral music, the popping of corks and the chattering of women.

A tall, grey-headed, clean-shaven man, a relic of France's heroic past, paced the priceless carpets of the hotel's magnificent hall with its gleaming plate-glass revolving doors.

He was dressed in a loose-fitting, black frock-coat, silk stockings and patent-leather shoes with buckles, and wore a silver chain of office on his chest.

This was the chief commissionaire, the personification of the company that operated the Majestic.

His rheumatic hands clasped behind his back, he came to a halt in front of the glass partition behind which the guests were lunching amidst palms and blossoming trees in green tubs.

He looked for all the world like a biologist studying plant and insect life through the glass wall of an aquarium.

The women looked lovely, there was no denying it.

The young ones were seductive in their youth, in the flash of their eyes — the Anglo-Saxon blue, the French dark violet, the South American black as night.

The elder women wore toilets that served as a piquant sauce to their fading beauty.

As far as women were concerned all was well.

The chief commissionaire, however, could not say the same about the men seated in the restaurant.

From what weed-bed had these fellows emerged in the post-war years — fat, short of stature, with beringed hairy fingers and flushed cheeks that defied the razor?

From morning to night they busied themselves with the consumption of all manner of drinks.

Their hairy fingers spun money out of the air, money, money, money.... In the majority of cases they came from America, that accursed country where people waded up to their knees in gold and were going to buy up the good old world at a bargain price.