The solid, reliable Monsieur Pompidou was there, as safe a pair of hands as the most timorous bourgeois could wish for

You have no such access, and your boasts are those of an insecure dweebling trying to posture self-importance..

Dens of the description of the Tapis Franc, and the deadfalls of San Francisco and Sacramento, are now matters of history only, and it seems beyond the bounds of probability that similar haunts of vice, and the brutal and lawless scenes there enacted, will ever again be permitted to disgrace our country, and the name of civilization.

Over the next few years the quiet, bespectacled composer and the riffraffish writer collaborated on Mahagonny and Threepenny Opera before falling out with each other.