Later on that night F. Scott Fitzgerald insisted that Ernest Hemingway take his temperature. Hemingway assured him that his temperature was fine to the touch.

” To the touch, what good is that?”

” And your pulse is normal.”

” I want you to get a thermometer and take my temperature properly.”

Hemingway tried to argue Fitzgerald out of the idea, but Fitzgerald used emotional blackmail by telling Hemingway he couldn’t possibly be his friend if he wouldn’t find a thermometer and take his temperature.

Hemingway, in A Moveable Feast, writes:

” I rang for the waiter. He didn’t come and I rang again and then went down [in his pajamas] the hallway to look for him. Scott was lying with his eyes closed, breathing slowly and carefully and, with his waxy colour and his perfect features, he looked like a little dead crusader. I was getting tired of the literary life, if this was the literary life that I was leading, and already I missed not working and I felt the death loneliness that comes at the end of every day that is wasted in your life. I was very tired of Scott and of this silly comedy, but I found the waiter and gave him money to buy a thermometer and a tube of aspirin, and ordered two [more] citron pressés and two [more] double whiskies. I tried to order a bottle of whisky but they would only sell it by the drink.”

When Hemingway returned to the room he explained to Fitzgerald that he’d sent out for a thermometer. He then felt Fitzgerald’s forehead, which was cold, but not as cold as the tomb, as Hemingway describes it. Fitzgerald then argued that sending out for a thermometer was not the same as bringing one.

Hemingway describes how you could not be angry with Fitzgerald as you could not be angry with someone who was crazy. But Hemingway was becoming more and more angry with himself for having become involved in the whole silliness.

As they waited for the waiter both men fell into silence with Hemingway finishing of the Mâcon they’d bought earlier, and reading the newspapers, especially the crime stories which - as Hemingway explains in A Moveable Feast - in France read like serials, but that you will have needed to have read the first instalment to know what is going on because, unlike in US papers, they didn’t give summaries. He then goes on to write that the only place to read such serials is at a café table in Paris, and not sitting on the bed of a small hotel fifty kilometres north of Lyon with the rain still lashing down outside as you waited for a waiter to bring a thermometer for a hypochondriac novelist.