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The two famous men had corresponded for years, exchanging sketches and photographs. But this was the first time they had ever met, and their meeting was complicated by the fact that Chaplin spoke no French, Cami no English.
With Waldo Frank, Dudley Malone, and others, he went to the Lapin Agile and there enjoyed what he called "an evening of rareness"— due mainly to the haunting beauty of the playing of the violinist Rene Chedecal, and the atmosphere of intelligent creative power that was wrapped around the place.
After the exhilaration of Paris and his reception there, his visit to Germany was at first disappointing — for his films had not reached that country and he was unknown there — and later compensated for by his meeting with Pola Negri at the Palais Heinroth, Berlin's most exclusive and expensive night club of the period. They were immediately attracted to each other. If Mildred Harris had been typical of one kind of woman whom Chaplin always found attractive, Pola Negri represented to the highest degree the other type of woman he was always drawn towards.
She was a Pole, extremely beautiful in a subtle and exotic way, a sophisticated and experienced woman of the world. From their first meeting, they were inseparable; and what had seemed at first the least exciting part of his European tour was transformed by her advent. She opened for him the great houses of Berlin, and he achieved the same social distinction he had already enjoyed in London and Paris.
On one occasion, he was present with her at a formal dinner in one of the great baroque palaces abounding. His total ignorance of German forced him into so many gaffes — as when he joined in the toast to himself, or toasted the wrong bride-to-be that, by the time he was called upon to make a speech, he had lost his nerve entirely.
He rose to his feet, a very small man at a very large banquet, licking dry lips, and praying for speedy death. Suddenly, he caught sight of Pola Negri further down the vast table, her large dark eyes fixed upon him in understanding and amusement, her mouth curved in the slightest smile. As though she had opened the way for him, he began to mime his speech. Not a single word came from him; there was a profound silence in the vast hall, until, at a signal from him, the Russian musicians launched themselves into wildest Cossack music. Chaplin, bringing his mimed speech to its silent peroration, left his seat and danced. He danced to his hostess, his host, the betrothed couple for whom the dinner was given, and finished his dance on his knees before Pola Negri, kissing her outstretched hand. Sober Teutons shouted and clapped and yelled for more; a society famous for its rigidly conventional behaviour, its unbreakable shibboleths, took to its