The Devil in Broad Daylight [antikvár]

"Why Cotton?" asks a Pans (1951) entry in her red leather diary, this query interlaced among plane departures, telephone numbers and places to have been at noon yesterday, half a recipe and stubs of india pages occasionally used tor the lighting of cigarettes off a gas stove. "Why, anyway?" An exploration ensues—extracts from a conversation with her then friend Adelaide, a freethinker and amateur painter, an expatriate Chicagoan nested high in a moldering hotel on the Cité. " 'Yes, why?' probes Adelaide, looking up from Camus. 'To me he doesn't give off anything, if you know what I mean. What's his reason for being, in other words? What is it he plans to doT 'Fly an airplane,' say I, and look out at the view. Same Pantheon, same river, same Sorbonne students doing whatever they do. 'And that's all?' 'All he can think of, apparently. It's all Lindbergh did.' 'Come on, A.J. Be sane. Does he read anything, for instance, or like music, know anything about art or speak French?' 'No, (sigh) but he wears a clean shirt and shaves and bathes somehow, and doesn't have to line up for an Embassy handout every month, and when all your "good book"- reading, French-speaking operagoers are back running their daddies' drugstores he'll still be doing what he likes best to do, which is fly his own beat-up plane.' 'Proving what?' 'Proving you're not required to prove anything, and that people who make the most noise about doing it never do. Proving he's not sick in the head. Me, I'm tired of sick in the heads. Free-loaders,