And day after day, week after week, while he sought an opening, he very nearly starved. In a couple of months he had arrived at the conclusion that the fight in London was more sordid and more dispiriting than the direst poverty in Paris. About this time he came in for a distasteful piece of hack journalism, that brought him a disproportionate loathing and an inadequate reward of five pounds. He was strongly tempted to invest a part of this sole capital in returning to France. A couple of days later a letter arrived through the London branch of the Paris bankers from Henri de Poincy, back in the South of France on a holiday. He asked for Ethan's private address, and said if he did not hear something satisfactory by return he would conclude the beastly English climate had made him ill; in which case he was straightway coming over to look Ethan up, and persuade him to return to his friends in Nice. If he did not hear by wire or letter in three days, De Poincy would come to London and see what was the matter. They were all anxious at his silence.
This determined the matter. Gano was not going to have his old friend find him in his present plight. Besides, he already owed him money, and had sworn to himself that he would not meet De Poincy again till he could go to him with the sum in his hands. Henri was far from well off, and, since his father's death the year before, had helped to support his sisters. Ethan wired: "Leaving London; quite well; remembrance to all; writing," and took the night-boat to Dieppe. He delayed further communication till he knew Henri would be back in Petersburg, and by that time he was able, by living on next to nothing, to return a part of the loan, and to represent himself as intensely glad to be in his old haunts again. These haunts were in reality very new, albeit in Paris; but he did not enter into details further than to say he was rediscovering the fact that he could write French much more easily and much better than he could English, and was doing some book-reviewing for the _Lendemain_.
He might have added, but did not, that he was getting at first-hand a very considerable knowledge of the darker side of life, but had no impulse to make artistic use of it. It did not stimulate, it did not even interest--it paralyzed him. "If I'd had the makings of a genuine poet in me," he admitted to Henri de Poincy afterwards, "those years might have buffeted some good work out of me. But _my_ muse was a miserable time-server, like the rest of my fine acquaintance. She left me when I wanted bread. The fact was, I was _feeling_ life too keenly to write about it. Poetizing in the face of such suffering as I saw and shared seemed a drivelling impertinence. Life was more terrible, more tremendous than anything any poet had said about it, or _could_ say."