Memoir From Antproof Case by Mark Helprin Page B

too boyish. It never occurred to me that most women might not be interested in getting to know a boy in a straitjacket who sat at a table at the Café de l'Opéra winking, blinking, and raising his eyebrows at them.
    Many soldiers were still in uniform, no longer burdened with the immediate fear of death, well rested, sunburned, some not too much older than I—all heroes and victors. The streets sang with wonderful green buses and trolleys that had yellow tops, and open-air platforms at the back. I would have loved to have jumped on and off them as they were moving. I would have loved to have held a French girl in my arms and kissed her. It would have been the first time I had kissed a girl.
    Something was very beautiful as Paris awakened from war. Life from every quarter had begun to flood in. The trees were the softest green I had ever seen, greener than in the valleys of the Shenandoah or the Hudson, an ancient and delicate color that I will never forget.
    Château Parfilage maintained a small office in Montreux purely for prestige. For the English-speaking world and the French, a lakeside address, with red tulips in well tended beds by the water, was ideal for a mental institution. The Germans preferred the mountains, the Italians the sea, and famous and rich people a place where noxious gasses bubble up through the mud.
    Château Parfilage was very much in the mountains, but the Germans had become disenchanted with its methods, so, to attract the English and the French, who, after the war, were extraordinarily crazed, the directors rented office space in Montreux. "Oy nivir seen a newt hotch ass shmal ant affice-like ass this," Spinney said, looking around. "Oy've bratcha anuther newt, Sisther, boot whar iss he supposed ta sleep?"
    A tiny nun, no less than my age now, unbuckled my jacket and set me free forever, explaining that it was a sin to put anyone, much less a child, in such a thing.
    "Sisther, whot if the divil's in 'im, ant he's throshin like to kill himsolf ar soomeone alse?"
    "You put him in the middle of a wide meadow," she said, "where he will be alone with God and the ants."
    Within twenty minutes she and I were on a small train winding through the hills above the lake. It was. a bright, blue day. We opened the window, and I leaned out to feel the wind and smell the sun-warmed vegetation. What could be better than to be on a train crawling steadily through sunlit uplands, with open windows, and mountain air gusting in, pulsing with the rhythm of the rails? On the climb to Château Parfilage we were lifted into a world of brilliant white—the white of snowfields, ice, and clouds.
    When Sister Jacob de Meunière saw that I was content with the Alpine sun that glinted across high prairies of clean ice, shf said, "If once you were insane, you are probably insane no longer, but you must stay with us for time enough to convince those who cannot believe, or see, or know, that you have achieved by long and painful labor what God has just given you in a burst and in a flash."
    After the train, we went by pony cart. When the pony wanted to eat, he stopped to graze, and Sister Jacob knitted. I jumped out of the cart at these times and often as it was moving (during most of my life, and certainly in my boyhood, I thought it better to be able to jump on and off a moving conveyance than to be the richest man in the world). I ran to the edge of steep defiles, to see the view. As I remember it, my stepping on and off and circling the slow-moving pony was something close to the movements of a foal or a kid. Funio does this, and he breaks into spontaneous dances. A child moving freely is one of the most beautiful things one can behold. When my father took me surfcasting at Amagansett I would go ahead on the beach road, stooping to grind the heather between my fingers for the scent, rising to run on soft sandy stretches that led to the cold blue sea.
    So high that you could see France straight to the west