They stroll in the Luxembourg Gardens, they go to a party, they gossip, and we overhear their private reflections. Like writers, ideas have their eras, as undeniable at showing their vintage as gray hair and wrinkles. D’Ardelo, who has just heard from his doctor that his medical tests are negative, nevertheless tells the others that he has cancer. Elsewhere, “On woman’s erotic body there are certain golden sites: I always thought there were three such: the thighs, the ­buttocks, the breasts. golden sites represents an erotic message.” But these are messages a novelist would not put in the mouth of a modern male character unless he was trying to characterize him as an irredeemable sexist.

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Persons: Ramon, Charles, Alain, D’Ardelo, Khrushchev, Caliban, It’s Ramon, “, There’s, ”, Stalin, Kalinin, antic, Marie de Medici, ­ Nietzsche, Sartre, Madame Franck, Sigmund Freud, Henry Miller, Brigitte Bardot Locations: Luxembourg, D’Ardelo’s, Soviet Russia, Eastern Europe, West