WHEN I first went to live in Paris, a few years after World War II, I went as the proverbial young pilgrim in the footsteps of Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. I firmly believed that Paris was where all good Americans went when they died—but that it was even better to get there beforehand. I was steeped in the literary lore of the '20's and '30's, and of course Gertrude Stein's salon at 5 rue Christine played no small part in my imagination.

As I embarked from New York, a college friend, a tall and bony young man who had passed the war successfully in Europe, gave me a letter of introduction to Alice B.Toklas. Like quite a few of the more presentable young American soldiers left knocking about in Paris after its liberation, he had found his way to the Stein-Toklas menage. He had gone often to the open houses which Gertrude held for young American G.I.s, Brewsie and Willie was the result of Gertrude's knowing these young men. My friend was neither the Brewsie nor the Willie type. He told me that as he had entered the drawing room for the first time, Gertrude had said dramatically, "Don't move! Stand right there! Look, my friends, at last a perfect Greco!"

Regrettably, by 1949, Gertrude Stein was dead, but Alice B. Toklas, he told me, still lived at 5 rue Christine and occasionally received friends of friends. My El Greco friend, who was an entertaining and faithful letter writer, had kept in close touch with her.