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Yellow and Raspberry. Ferdinand escapes Sergeant Matthew by becoming "Master of the Horse" to a French magician and his assistant, a lady named "The Flower of San Francisco." ("He sawed off my head every evening . . ." recounts the Flower, "and two matinees besides Rrr! . . . Rrr! . . . The blood flowed down to the orchestra . . . The spectators would faint!") But by this time Ferdinand has almost decided that the trenches of Flanders are safer and cozier than the walks of Lambeth.
The pace and din of Guignol's Band are too fast and deafening to hold up to the very end, and the string of fantastic adventures grows increasingly limp and raveled. By then Cèline has, as always, succeeded in hammering his sharpest hallucinations deep into the reader's head. Spit-curled Cascade, lantern-bearing Dr.Clodowitz, sovereign-stuffed Titus van Claben—such characters are engraved in the memory for keeps. No visitor since Thomas Wolfe has described London with such off-beat perception and passion—not the London the tourist or the Briton has ever seen, but the insane metropolis "painted like fog with some yellow and raspberry added" that Cèline alone is capable of seeing.