Paul Gallico

Le 26 décembre à sept heures du matin, le paquebot Poseidon, quatre-vingt-un mille tonnes, faisait route vers son port d'attache de Lisbonne après un mois de croisière le long des côtes d'Afrique et d'Amérique du Sud, lorsqu'il se trouva pris soudain dans une houle inexplicable, à quatre cents milles au large des Açores. Il se mit à rouler comme un porc dans sa bauge.

Mrs Harris realised that she was leaving England behind her and was about to enter a foreign country, to be amongst foreign people who spoke a foreign language and who, for all she had ever heard about them, were immoral, grasping, ate snails and frogs, and were particularly inclined to crimes of passion and dismembered bodies in trunks.

Following upon the cablegram which reached Schreiber at his office that afternoon were long-distance telephone calls,miraculous ‘conference' conversations spanning oceans ad continents, in which five people - one in London, two in California, two in New York - sat at separate telephones and talked as though they were all in one room, and by the time Mr Schreiber, a stocky little man with clever eyes, returned home that early evening, he was simply bursting with excitenent and news.

Mrs Harris realised that she was leaving England behind her and was about to enter a foreign country, to be amongst foreign people who spoke a foreign language and who, for all she had ever heard about them, were immoral, grasping, ate snails and frogs, and were particularly inclined to crimes of passion and dismembered bodies in trunks. She was still not afraid, for fear has no place in the vocabulary of the British char, but she was now all the more determined to be on her guard and not stand for any nonsense. It was a tremendous errand that was taking her to Paris, but she hoped in the accomplishing of it to have as little to do with the French people as possible.