Grey Roses

When I was a child some one gave me a family of white mice. I don't remember how old I was, I think about ten or eleven; but I remember very clearly the day I received them. It must have been a Thursday, a half-holiday, for I had come home from school rather early in the afternoon. Alexandre, dear old ruddy round-faced Alexandre, who opened the door for me, smiled in a way that seemed to announce, 'There's a surprise in store for you, sir.' Then my mother smiled too, a smile, I thought, of peculiar promise and interest. After I had kissed her she said, 'Come into the dining-room. There's something you will like.' Perhaps I concluded it would be something to eat. Anyhow, all agog with curiosity, I followed her into the dining—room—and Alexandre followed me, anxious to take part in the rejoicing. In the window stood a big cage, enclosing the family of white mice.

I remember it as a very big cage indeed; no doubt I should find it shrunken to quite moderate dimensions if I could see it again. There were three generations of mice in it: a fat old couple, the founders of the race, dozing phlegmatically on their laurels in a corner; then a dozen medium-sized, slender mice, trim and youthful-looking, rushing irrelevantly hither and thither, with funny inquisitive little faces; and then a squirming mass of pink things, like caterpillars, that were really infant mice, newborn. They didn't remain infants long, though. In a few days they had put on virile togas of white fur, and were scrambling about the cage and nibbling their food as independently as their elders. The rapidity with which my mice multiplied and grew to maturity was a constant source of astonishment to me. It seemed as if every morning I found a new litter of young mice in the cage—though how they had effected an entrance through the wire gauze that lined it was a hopeless puzzle—and these would have become responsible, self-supporting mice in no time.

My mother told me that somebody had sent me this soul-stirring present from the country, and I dare say I was made to sit down and write a letter of thanks. But I'm ashamed to own I can't remember who the giver was. I have a vague notion that it was a lady, an elderly maiden-lady—Mademoiselle ... something that began with P—who lived near Tours, and who used to come to Paris once or twice a year, and always brought me a box of prunes.

Alexandre carried the cage into my playroom, and set it up against the wall. I stationed myself in front of it, and remained there all the rest of the afternoon, gazing in, entranced. To watch their antics, their comings and goings, their labours and amusements, to study their shrewd, alert physiognomies, to wonder about their feelings, thoughts, intentions, to try to divine the meaning of their busy twittering language—it was such keen, deep delight. Of course I was an anthropomorphist, and read a great deal of human nature into them; otherwise it wouldn't have been such fun. I dragged myself reluctantly away when I was called to dinner. It was hard that evening to apply myself to my school-books. Before I went to bed I paid them a parting visit; they were huddled together in their nest of cotton-wool, sleeping soundly. And I was up at an unheard-of hour next morning, to have a bout with them before going to school. I found Alexandre, in his nightcap and long white apron, occupied with the soins de propreté, as he said. He cleaned out the cage, put in fresh food and water, and then, pointing to the fat old couple, the grandparents, who stopped lazily a-bed, sitting up and rubbing their noses together, whilst their juniors scampered merrily about their affairs, 'Tiens! On dirait Monsieur et Madame Denis,' he cried. I felt the appositeness of his allusion; and the old couple were forthwith officially denominated Monsieur and Madame Denis, for their resemblance to the hero and heroine of the song—though which was Monsieur, and which Madame, I'm not sure that I ever clearly knew.

It was a little after this that I was taken for the first time in my life to the play. I fancy the theatre must have been the Porte St. Martin; at any rate, it was a theatre in the Boulevard, and towards the East, for I remember the long drive we had to reach it And the piece was The Count of Monte Cristo. In my memory the adventure shines, of course, as a vague blur of light and joy; a child's first visit to the play, and that play The Count of Monte Cristo! It was all the breath-taking pleasantness of romance made visible, audible, actual. A vague blur of light and joy, from which only two details separate themselves. First, the prison scene, and an aged man, with a long white beard, moving a great stone from the wall; then—the figure of Mercedes. I went home terribly in love with Mercedes. Surely there are no such grandes passions in maturer life as those helpless, inarticulate ones we burn in secret with, before our teens; surely we never love again so violently, desperately, consumedly. Anyhow, I went home terribly in love with Mercedes. And—do all children lack humour?—I picked out the prettiest young ladyish-looking mouse in my collection, cut off her moustaches, adopted her as my especial pet, and called her by the name of my dea certè.

All of my mice by this time had become quite tame. They had plenty to eat and drink, and a comfortable home, and not a care in the world; and familiarity with their master had bred assurance; and so they had become quite tame, and shamefully, abominably lazy. Luxury, we are taught, was ever the mother of sloth. I could put my hand in amongst them, and not one would bestir himself the littlest bit to escape me. Mercedes and I were inseparable. I used to take her to school with me every day; she could be more conveniently and privately transported than a lamb. Each lycéen had a desk in front of his form, and she would spend the school-hours in mine, I leaving the lid raised a little, that she might have light and air. One day, the usher having left the room for a moment, I put her down on the floor, thereby creating a great excitement amongst my fellow-pupils, who got up from their places and formed an eager circle round her. Then suddenly the usher came back, and we all hurried to our seats, while he, catching sight of Mercedes, cried out, 'A mouse! A white mouse! Who dares to bring a white mouse to the class?' And he made a dash for her. But she was too quick, too 'cute, for 'the likes of' Monsieur le Pion. She gave a jump, and in the twinkling of an eye had disappeared up my leg, under my trousers. The usher searched high and low for her, but she prudently remained in her hiding-place; and thus her life was saved, for, when he had abandoned his ineffectual chase, he announced, 'I should have wrung her neck.' I turned pale to imagine the doom she had escaped as by a hair's-breadth. 'It is useless to ask which of you brought her here,' he continued. 'But mark my words: if ever I find a mouse again in the class I will wring her neck!' And yet, in private life, this bloodthirsty pion was a quite gentle, kindly, underfed, underpaid, shabby, struggling fellow, with literary aspirations, who would not have hurt a fly.

The secrets of a schoolboy's pocket! I once saw a boy surreptitiously angling in Kensington Gardens, with a string and a bent pin. Presently he landed a fish, a fish no bigger than your thumb perhaps, but still a fish. Alive and wet and flopping as it was, he slipped it into his pocket. I used to carry Mercedes about in mine. One evening, when I put in my hand to take her out, I discovered to my bewilderment that she was not alone. There were four little pink mites of infant mice clinging to her.

I had enjoyed my visit to the theatre so much that at the jour de l'an my father included a toy-theatre among my presents. It had a real curtain of green baize, that would roll up and down, and beautiful coloured scenery that you could shift, and footlights, and a trap-door in the middle of the stage; and indeed it would have been altogether perfect, except for the Company. I have since learned that this is not infrequently the case with theatres. My company consisted of pasteboard men and women who, as artists, struck me as eminently unsatisfactory. They couldn't move their arms or legs, and they had such stolid, uninteresting faces. I don't know how it first occurred to me to turn them all off, and fill their places with my mice. Mercedes, of course, was leading lady; Monsieur and Madame Denis were the heavy parents; and a gentlemanlike young mouse named Leander was jeune premier. Then, in my leisure, they used to act the most tremendous plays. I was stage-manager, prompter, playwright, chorus, and audience, placing the theatre before a looking-glass, so that, though my duties kept me behind, I could peer round the edge, and watch the spectacle as from the front. I would invent the lines and deliver them, but, that my illusion might be the more complete, I would change my voice for each personage. The lines tried hard to be verses; no doubt they were vers libres. At any rate, they were mouth-filling and sonorous. The first play we attempted, I need hardly say, was Le Comte de Monte Cristo, such version of it as I could reconstruct from memory. That had rather a long run. Then I dramatised Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp, Paul et Virginie, Quentin Durward, and La Dame de Monsoreau. Mercedes made a charming Diane, Leander a brilliant and dashing Bussy; Monsieur Denis was cast for the rôle of Frère Gorenflot; and a long, thin, cadaverous-looking mouse, Don Quichotte by name, somewhat inadequately represented Chicot. We began, as you see, with melodrama; presently we descended to light comedy, playing Les Mémoires d'un Ane, Jean qui rit, and other works of the immortal Madame de Ségur. And then at last we turned a new leaf, and became naturalistic. We had never heard of the naturalist school, though Monsieur Zola had already published some volumes of the Rougon-Macquart; but ideas are in the air; and we, for ourselves, discovered the possibilities of naturalism simultaneously, as it were, with the acknowledged apostle of that form of art. We would impersonate the characters of our own world—our schoolfellows and masters, our parents, servants, friends—and carry them through experiences and situations derived from our impressions of real life. Perhaps we rather led them a dance; and I daresay those we didn't like came in for a good deal of retributive justice. It was a little universe, of which we were the arch-arbiters, our will the final law.

I don't know whether all children lack humour; but I'm sure no grown-up author-manager can take his business more seriously than I took mine. Oh, I enjoyed it hugely; the hours I spent at it were enraptured hours; but it was grim, grim earnest. After a while I began to long for a less subjective public, a more various audience. I would summon the servants, range them in chairs at one end of the room, conceal myself behind the theatre, and spout the play with fervid solemnity. And they would giggle, and make flippant commentaries, and at my most impassioned climaxes burst into guffaws. My mice, as has been said, were overfed and lazy, and I used to have to poke them through their parts with sticks from the wings; but this was a detail which a superior imagination should have accepted as one of the conventions of the art. It made the servants laugh, however; and when I would step to the front in person, and, with tears in my eyes, beseech them to be sober, they would but laugh the louder. 'Bless you, sir, they're only mice—ce ne sont que des souris,' the cook called out on one such occasion. She meant it as an apology and a consolation, but it was the unkindest cut of all. Only mice, indeed! To me they had been a young gentleman and lady lost in the Desert of Sahara, near to die for the want of water, and about to be attacked, captured, and sold into slavery by a band of Bedouin Arabs. Ah, well, the artist must steel himself to meet with indifference or derision from the public, to be ignored, misunderstood, or jeered at; and to rely for his real, his legitimate, reward on the pleasure he finds in his work.

And now there befell a great change in my life. Our home in Paris was broken up, and we moved to St. Petersburg. It was impossible to take my mice with us; their cage would have hopelessly complicated our impedimenta. So we gave them to the children of our concierge. Mercedes, however, I was resolved I would not part with, and I carried her all the way to the Russian capital by hand. In my heart I was looking to her to found another family—she had so frequently become a mother in the past. But month succeeded month, and she for ever disappointed me, and at last I abandoned hope. In solitude and exile Mercedes degenerated sadly; got monstrously fat; too indolent to gnaw, let her teeth grow to a preposterous length; and in the end died of a surfeit of smetana.

When I returned to Paris, at the age of twenty, to faire mon droit in the Latin Quarter, I paid a visit to our old house, and discovered the same old concierge in the loge. I asked her about the mice, and she told me her children had found the care of them such a bother that at first they had neglected them, and at last allowed them to escape. 'They took to the walls, and for a long time afterwards, Monsieur, the mice of this neighbourhood were pied. To this day they are of a paler hue than elsewhere.'

He climbed the three flights of stone stairs, and put his key into the lock; but before he turned it, he stopped—to rest, to take breath. On the door his name was painted in big white letters, Mr. Richard Dane. It is always silent in the Temple at midnight; to-night the silence was dense, like a fog. It was Sunday night; and on Sunday night, even within the hushed precincts of the Temple, one is conscious of a deeper hush.

When he had lighted the lamp in his sitting-room, he let himself drop into an armchair before the empty fireplace. He was tired, he was exhausted. Yet nothing had happened to tire him. He had dined, as he always dined on Sundays, with the Rodericks, in Cheyne Walk; he had driven home in a hansom. There was no reason why he should be tired. But he was tired. A deadly lassitude penetrated his body and his spirit, like a fluid. He was too tired to go to bed.

'I suppose I am getting old,' he thought.

To a second person the matter would have appeared not one of supposition but of certainty, not of progression but of accomplishment. Getting old indeed? But he was old. It was an old man, grey and wrinkled and wasted, who sat there, limp, sunken upon himself, in his easy-chair. In years, to be sure, he was under sixty; but he looked like a man of seventy-five.

'I am getting old, I suppose I am getting old.'

And vaguely, dully, he contemplated his life, spread out behind him like a misty landscape, and thought what a failure it had been. What had it come to? What had it brought him? What had he done or won? Nothing, nothing. It had brought him nothing but old age, solitude, disappointment, and, to-night especially, a sense of fatigue and apathy that weighed upon him like a suffocating blanket. On a table, a yard or two away, stood a decanter of whisky, with some soda-water bottles and tumblers; he looked at it with heavy eyes, and he knew that there was what he needed. A little whisky would strengthen him, revive him, and make it possible for him to bestir himself and undress and go to bed. But when he thought of rising and moving to pour the whisky out, he shrank from that effort as from an Herculean labour; no—he was too tired. Then his mind went back to the friends he had left in Chelsea half an hour ago; it seemed an indefinably long time ago, years and years ago; they were like blurred phantoms, dimly remembered from a remote past.

Yes, his life had been a failure; total, miserable, abject. It had come to nothing; its harvest was a harvest of ashes. If it had been a useful life, he could have accepted its unhappiness; if it had been a happy life, he could have forgiven its uselessness; but it had been both useless and unhappy. He had done nothing for others, he had won nothing for himself. Oh, but he had tried, he had tried. When he had left Oxford people expected great things of him; he had expected great things of himself. He was admitted to be clever, to be gifted; he was ambitious, he was in earnest. He wished to make a name, he wished to justify his existence by fruitful work. And he had worked hard. He had put all his knowledge, all his talent, all his energy, into his work; he had not spared himself; he had passed laborious days and studious nights. And what remained to show for it? Three or four volumes upon Political Economy, that had been read in their day a little, discussed a little, and then quite forgotten—superseded by the books of newer men. 'Pulped, pulped,' he reflected bitterly. Except for a stray dozen of copies scattered here and there—in the British Museum, in his College library, on his own bookshelves—his published writings had by this time (he could not doubt) met with the common fate of unappreciated literature, and been 'pulped.'

'Pulped—pulped; pulped—pulped.' The hateful word beat rhythmically again and again in his tired brain; and for a little while that was all he was conscious of.

So much for the work of his life. And for the rest? The play? The living? Oh, he had nothing to recall but failure. It had sufficed that he should desire a thing, for him to miss it; that he should set his heart upon a thing, for it to be removed beyond the sphere of his possible acquisition. It had been so from the beginning; it had been so always. He sat motionless as a stone, and allowed his thoughts to drift listlessly hither and thither in the current of memory. Everywhere they encountered wreckage, derelicts; defeated aspirations, broken hopes. Languidly he envisaged these. He was too tired to resent, to rebel. He even found a certain sluggish satisfaction in recognising with what unvarying harshness destiny had treated him, in resigning himself to the unmerited.

He caught sight of his hand, lying flat and inert upon the brown leather arm of his chair. His eyes rested on it, and for the moment he forgot everything else in a sort of torpid study of it. How white it was, how thin, how withered; the nails were parched into minute corrugations; the veins stood out like dark wires; the skin hung loosely on it, and had a dry lustre: an old man's hand. He gazed at it fixedly, till his eyes closed and his head fell forward. But he was not sleepy, he was only tired and weak.

He raised his head with a start and changed his position. He felt cold; but to endure the cold was easier than to get up, and put something on, or go to bed.

How silent the world was; how empty his room. An immense feeling of solitude, of isolation, fell upon him. He was quite cut off from the rest of humanity here. If anything should happen to him, if he should need help of any sort, what could he do? Call out? But who would hear? At nine in the morning the porter's wife would come with his tea. But if anything should happen to him in the meantime? There would be nothing for it but to wait till nine o'clock.

Ah, if he had married, if he had had children, a wife, a home of his own, instead of these desolate bachelor chambers!

If he had married, indeed! It was his sorrow's crown of sorrow that he had not married, that he had not been able to marry, that the girl he had wished to marry wouldn't have him. Failure? Success? He could have accounted failure in other things a trifle, he could have laughed at what the world calls failure, if Elinor Lynd had been his wife. But that was the heart of his misfortune, she wouldn't have him.

He had met her for the first time when he was a lad of twenty, and she a girl of eighteen. He could see her palpable before him now: her slender girlish figure, her bright eyes, her laughing mouth, her warm brown hair curling round her forehead. Oh, how he had loved her. For twelve years he had waited upon her, wooed her, hoped to win her. But she had always said, 'No—I don't love you. I am very fond of you; I love you as a friend; we all love you that way—my mother, my father, my sisters. But I can't marry you.' However, she married no one else, she loved no one else: and for twelve years he was an ever-welcome guest in her father's house; and she would talk with him, play to him, pity him; and he could hope. Then she died. He called one day, and they said she was ill. After that there came a blank in his memory—a gulf, full of blackness and redness, anguish and confusion; and then a sort of dreadful sudden calm, when they told him she was dead.

He remembered standing in her room, after the funeral, with her father, her mother, her sister Elizabeth. He remembered the pale daylight that filled it, and how orderly and cold and forsaken it all looked. And there was her bed, the bed she had died in; and there her dressing-table, with her combs and brushes; and there her writing-desk, her book-case. He remembered a row of medicine bottles on the mantelpiece; he remembered the fierce anger, the hatred of them, as if they were animate, that had welled up in his heart as he looked at them, because they had failed to do their work.

'You will wish to have something that was hers, Richard,' her mother said. 'What would you like?'

On her dressing-table there was a small looking-glass, in an ivory frame. He asked if he might have that, and carried it away with him. She had looked into it a thousand times, no doubt; she had done her hair in it; it had reflected her, enclosed her, contained her. He could almost persuade himself that something of her must remain in it. To own it was like owning something of herself. He carried it home with him, hugging it to his side with a kind of passion.

He had prized it, he prized it still, as his dearest treasure; the looking-glass in which her face had been reflected a thousand times; the glass that had contained her, known her; in which something of herself, he felt, must linger. To handle it, look at it, into it, behind it, was like holding a mystic communion with her; it gave him an emotion that was infinitely sweet and bitter, a pain that was dissolved in joy.

The glass lay now, folded in its ivory case, on the chimney-shelf in front of him. That was its place; he always kept it on his chimney-shelf, so that he could see it whenever he glanced round his room. He leaned back in his chair, and looked at it; for a long time his eyes remained fixed upon it. 'If she had married me, she wouldn't have died. My love, my care, would have healed her. She could not have died.' Monotonously, automatically, the phrase repeated itself over and over again in his mind, while his eyes remained fixed on the ivory case into which her looking-glass was folded. It was an effect of his fatigue, no doubt, that his eyes, once directed upon an object, were slow to leave it for another; that a phrase once pronounced in his thought had this tendency to repeat itself over and over again.

But at last he roused himself a little, and leaning forward, put his hand out and up, to take the glass from the shelf. He wished to hold it, to touch it and look into it. As he lifted it towards him, it fell open, the mirror proper being fastened to a leather back, which was glued to the ivory, and formed a hinge. It fell open; and his grasp had been insecure; and the jerk as it opened was enough. It slipped from his fingers, and dropped with a crash upon the hearthstone.

The sound went through him like a physical pain. He sank back in his chair, and closed his eyes. His heart was beating as after a mighty physical exertion. He knew vaguely that a calamity had befallen him; he could vaguely imagine the splinters of shattered glass at his feet. But his physical prostration was so great as to obliterate, to neutralise, emotion. He felt very cold. He felt that he was being hurried along with terrible speed through darkness and cold air. There was the continuous roar of rapid motion in his ears, a faint, dizzy bewilderment in his head. He felt that he was trying to catch hold of things, to stop his progress, but his hands closed upon emptiness; that he was trying to call out for help, but he could make no sound. On—on—on, he was being whirled through some immeasurable abyss of space.

'Ah, yes, he's dead, quite dead,' the doctor said. 'He has been dead some hours. He must have passed away peacefully, sitting here in his chair.'

'Poor gentleman,' said the porter's wife. 'And a broken looking-glass beside him. Oh, it's a sure sign, a broken looking-glass.'

He was one of the institutions of the Latin Quarter, one of the least admirable. He haunted the Boulevard St. Michel, hung round the cafés, begged of the passing stranger, picked up cigarette-ends, and would, at a pinch, run errands, or do odd jobs.

With his sallow, wrinkled skin, his jungle of grey beard, his thick grey hair, matted and shiny, covering his ears and falling about his shoulders, he was scarcely an attractive-looking person. Besides, he had lost an eye; and its empty socket irresistibly drew your gaze—an abhorrent vacuum. His clothes would be the odds and ends of students' offcasts, in the last stages of disintegration. He had a chronic stoop; always aimed his surviving eye obliquely at you, from a bent head; and walked with a sort of hang-dog shuffle that seemed a general self-denunciation.

Where he slept, whether under a roof or on the pavement, and when, were among his secrets. No matter how late or how early you were abroad, you would be sure to encounter Bibi, wide-awake, somewhere in the Boul' Miche, between the Luxembourg and the Rue des Ecoles. That was his beat. Perhaps one of the benches was his home.

He lived in a state of approximate intoxication. I never drew near to him without getting a whiff of alcohol, yet I never saw him radically drunk. His absorbent capacity must have been tremendous. It is certain he spent all the sous he could collect for liquids (he never wasted money upon food; he knew where to go for crusts of bread and broken meat; the back doors of restaurants have their pensioners), and if invited to drink as the guest of another, he would drain tumbler after tumbler continuously, until his entertainer stopped him, and would appear no further over-seas at the end than at the outset. There was something pathetic in his comparative sobriety, like an unfulfilled aspiration.

He was one of the institutions of the Quarter, one of the notabilities. It was a matter of pride (I can't think why) to be on terms of hail-fellowship with him, on terms to thee-and-thou him, and call him by his nick-name, Bibi, Bibi Ragoût: a sobriquet that he had come by long before my time, and whose origin I never heard explained. It seemed sufficiently disrespectful, but he accepted it cheerfully, and would often, indeed, employ it in place of the personal pronoun in referring to himself. 'You're not going to forget Bibi—you'll not forget poor old Bibi Ragoût?' would be his greeting on the jour de l'an, for instance.

I have said that he would run errands or do odd jobs. The business with which people charged him was not commonly of a nature to throw lustre upon either agent or principal. He would do a student's dirty work, even an étudiante's, in a part of Paris where work to be accounted dirty must needs be very dirty work indeed. The least ignominious service one used to require of him was to act as intermediary with the pawn-shop, the clou; a service that he performed to the great satisfaction of his clients, for, what with unbounded impudence and a practice of many years, he knew (as the French slang goes) how to make the nail bleed. We trusted him with our valuables and our money though it was of record that he had once 'done time' for theft. But his victim had been a bourgeois from across the river; we were confident he would deal honourably by a fellow Quarternion—he had the esprit de corps.

It was Bibi in his social aspect, however, not in his professional, who especially interested us. It was very much the fashion to ask him to join the company at a café table, to offer him libations, and to 'draw' him—make him talk. He would talk of any subject: of art, literature, politics; of life and morals; of the news of the day. He would regale us with anecdotes of persons, places, events; he had outlasted many generations of students, and had hob-and-nobbed in their grub-period with men who had since become celebrities, as he was now hob-and-nobbing with us. He was quite shameless, quite without reverence for himself or others; his conversation was apt to be highly-flavoured, scandalous, slanderous, and redundant with ambiguous jests; yet—what made it fascinating and tragical—it was unmistakably the conversation of an educated man. His voice was soft, his accent cultivated, his sentences were nicely chiselled. He knew the mot juste, the happy figure, the pat allusion. His touch was light; his address could be almost courtly, so that, on suddenly looking up, you would feel a vague surprise to behold in the speaker, not a polished man of the world in his dress-suit, but this beery old one-eyed vagabond in tatters. It was strange to witness his transitions. At one moment he would be holding high discourse of Goethe, and translating illustrative passages into classic French; at the next, whining about la dèche, and begging for a petite saleté de vingt sous, in the cant of the Paris gutters. Or, from an analysis of the character of some conspicuous personage he had known, he would break into an indecent song, or pass to an interchange of mildewed chaff with Gigolette.

Yes, he was a gentleman. This disreputable old man, whose grey hairs, far from making him venerable, but emphasised his sodden degradation; this tipsy, filthy, obscene old man; this gaol-bird, this doer of dirty work, this pandar, beggar, outcast, who bore without offence such a title of contempt as Bibi Ragoût, was a fallen gentleman, the wreck of something that had once been noble.

More than the fragmentary outline of his history we did not know. We knew that he was a Russian; that his name was Kasghine; that he had started in life as an officer in the Russian army; that many years ago, for crimes conjectural, he had fled his country; and that long before our day he had already gravitated to where we found him, the mud of the Boulevard St. Michel.

For crimes conjectural. Some of us believed them to have been political, and fancied that we had in Bibi a specimen of the decayed Nihilist. In view of the fact that he often proclaimed himself a socialist, this seemed to bear some colour of probability; but against it argued the circumstance that of the members of that little clan of Russian refugees which inhabits the southern borderland of the Latin Quarter, not one would have aught to say to Bibi. They gave him the widest of wide berths, and when questioned as to their motives, would only shrug their shoulders, and answer that he was a disgraceful old person, a drunken reprobate, whom, the wonder was not that they avoided, but that any decent people could tolerate. This sounded plausible; still we felt that if his crimes had been political, they might have regarded him with more indulgence.

Of Bibi himself it was equally futile to inquire. There was one subject on which he would never touch—his previous condition—his past, before he came to be what we saw. 'Yes, I am a gentleman. I am Captain Kasghine. I am a gentleman in allotropic form'; that was as much as I ever heard him say. He enjoyed cloaking himself in mystery, he enjoyed the curiosity it drew upon him; but perhaps he had some remnants of pride, some embers of remorse, some little pain and shame, as well.

Of the other legends afloat, one ran to the effect that he had murdered his wife; a second, that he had poisoned the husband of a lady friend; a third, that he had shown the white feather in battle; a fourth, that he had cheated at cards. Bibi would neither admit nor deny any of these imputations, nor would he manifest the faintest resentment when they were discussed in his presence. He would parry them, smiling complaisantly: and (if it be considered that they were all, as it turned out, abominably false) that seems to show better than anything else to what abysmal depths the man had sunk. Perhaps it shows also, incidentally, how very heartless and unimaginative young people in the Latin Quarter used to be. I have seen Bibi swagger; I have seen him sullen, insolent, sarcastic; I have seen him angry, I have heard him swear; but anything like honestly indignant I never saw him.

I remember one night in the Café de la Source, when Fil de Fer had been treating him to brandy and trying to get him to tell his story; I remember his suddenly turning his one eye in the direction of us men, and launching himself upon a long flight of rhetoric. I can see him still—his unwashed red hand toying with the stem of his liqueur-glass, or rising from time to time to push his hair from his forehead, over which it dangled in soggy wisps, while, in a dinner-table tone of voice, he uttered these somewhat surprising sentiments.

'You would be horrified, you others, lads of twenty, with your careers before you,—you would be horrified if you thought it possible that you might end your days like Bibi, would you not? You wish to walk a clean path, to prosper, to be respectable, to wear sweet linen, to die honoured, regretted. And yet, believe me, we poor devils who fail, who fall, who sink to the bottom, we have our compensation. We see vastly more of the realities of life than those do who succeed and rise to the top. We have an experience that is more essential, more significant. We get the real flavour of life. We sweat in the mire; we drink the lees. But the truth is in the mire; the real flavour is in the lees. Oh, we have our compensation. We wear rags, we eat scraps fit for dogs, we sleep under the arches of bridges. We lie in gaols, we are hustled by the police, we are despised by all men. If you offer us drink, and stop to gossip with us for a moment, you only do so to please yourselves with the spectacle of our infamy, our infirmity, our incongruity. We have lost all hope, all self-respect. We are ships that have come to grief, that are foundering, that will presently go down. Yet we are not altogether to be pitied: we know life. To the respectable man, the prosperous, life shows herself only in the world, decently attired: we know her at home in her nudity. For him she has manners, a good behaviour, a society smile; with us she is frankly herself—brutal, if you please, corrupt with disease and vice, sordid, profane, lascivious, but genuine. She is kind to him, but hypocritical, affecting scruples, modesties, pieties, a heart and conscience, attitudinising, blushing false blushes, weeping crocodile tears; she is cruel to us, but sincere. She is at her ease with us—unashamed. She shows us her thousand moods. She doesn't trouble to keep her secrets from us. She throws off the cloak that hid her foulness, the boot that constrained her cloven hoof. She gives free play to her appetites. We know her.

'Here is the fruit of the tree of life,' he went on, extending his open hand. 'The respectable man but smells its rind; I eat deep, taste the core. The smell is sweet, perhaps; the taste is deathly bitter. But even so? He that eats of the fruit of the tree of life shares the vision of the gods. He gazes upon the naked face of truth. I don't pretend that the face of truth is beautiful. It is hideous beyond imagination. All hate, all savagery, all evil, glare from it, and all uncleanness is upon it. But it is the face of truth; the sight of it gives an ultimate, a supreme satisfaction.

'Say what you will, at the end of life the important thing is to have lived. Well, when all is over, and the prosperous man and I lie equal in the article of death, our fortunes, conditions, outlooks at last for once the same, our results the same, I shall have lived, I shall have seen, I shall have understood, a thousandfold more than he. I shall have known life in her intimacy; he will have had but a polite acquaintance with her.'

The hour for Bibi to put this philosophy to the test was nearer than he suspected. He used to describe himself as 'thoroughly cured and seasoned,' and to predict that he would 'last a good while yet.' But, one day in December, a subject of remark in the Boul' Miche was Bibi's absence; and before nightfall the news went abroad that he had been found on the turf, under a tree, in the Avenue de l'Observatoire, dead from a coup de sang, and that he was now lying exposed to the gaze of the curious in the little brick house behind Notre Dame.

A meeting of students was called, at which it was resolved to give Bibi a decent funeral; and in order that his friends who had crossed the river might have an opportunity of assisting at it, a lettre de faire part was published in the newspapers. The Committee who had these matters in charge made an attempt to get a Pope from the Russian Church to officiate; but the holy men were scandalised by the request, and refused it with contumely. So a civil funeral was the best that could be achieved.

On a drizzling, dismal December morning, then, we formed ourselves in a procession of two abreast, and starting from the Place St. Michel, followed Bibi up his familiar Boulevard to the Cemetery of Montparnasse; and men who would have spurned him yesterday, bared their heads as he passed, and women crossed themselves and muttered prayers. We must have been about a hundred strong, and quite a quarter of our numbers came from beyond the bridges, responsive to our lettre de faire part. A student was told off to march with each visitor; and this arrangement proved the means of my being able to supply the missing chapter of Bibi's story.

The person to whom I found myself assigned was an elderly, military-looking man, with the red rosette in his buttonhole; extremely well-dressed and groomed; erect, ruddy, bright-eyed; with close-cropped white hair, and a drooping white moustache: the picture of a distinguished, contented, fine old French gentleman: whom I marvelled a good deal to see in this conjunction.

On our way to the graveyard we spoke but little. Our business there over, however, he offered me a seat in his carriage, a brougham that had sauntered after us, for the return. And no sooner was the carriage door closed upon us than he began—

'I am an old man. I want to talk. Will you listen?

'This death, this funeral, have stirred me deeply. I knew Kasghine years ago in Russia, when we were both young men, he an officer in the Russian army, I an attaché to the French Embassy.

'His career has been a very sad one. It illustrates many sad truths.

'Sometimes—it is trite to say so—an act of baseness, a crime of some sort, may be the beginning, the first cause, of a man's salvation. It pulls him up, wakes his conscience. Aghast at what he has done, he reflects, repents, reforms. That is a comforting circumstance, a token of God's goodness.

'But what shall we say when the exact opposite happens? When it is an act of nobility, of splendid heroism, of magnificent self-devotion, that brings to pass a man's moral downfall? It is horrible to admit such a thing as possible, is it not? And yet, the same man who may be capable of one sudden immense act of heroism, may be quite incapable of keeping up the prolonged, daily, yearly struggle with adversity which that act may entail upon him.

'It was so with Kasghine. It was a very noble action which drove him, an exile, from his country. Thrown upon the streets of Paris, without friends, without money, he had not the stuff in him to stand up against the forces that were in operation to drag him down. Which of us can be sure that he would have that stuff? From begging for work whereby to earn money, Kasghine fell to begging for money itself. His pride receiving a thousand wounds, instead of being strengthened by them, was killed. Cleanliness is a luxury, a labour; he began to neglect his person; and, in the case of a gentleman, neglect of the person is generally the first step towards neglect of the spirit. Little by little he lost his civilised character, and reverted to the primitive beast. He was feral.

'But thirty, thirty-five years ago, there were few young men in St. Petersburg with better positions, brighter prospects, than Kasghine's. He belonged to an excellent family; he was intelligent, good-looking, popular; he was a Captain in a good regiment. One of his uncles had been minister of war, and stood high in the favour of the Tsar.

'In the spring of 1847, Kasghine's regiment was ordered to Warsaw, and garrisoned in the fortress there. Twenty Polish patriots were confined in the casemates, awaiting execution; men of education, honourable men, men with wives and children, condemned to be hanged because they had conspired together—a foolish, ineffectual conspiracy—against what they regarded as the tyranny of Russia, for the liberty of their country. They had struck no blow, but they had written and talked; and they were to be hanged.

'The fate of these men seemed to Kasghine very unjust, very inhuman. It preyed upon his mind. He took it into his head to rescue them, to contrive their escape. I do not say that this was wise or right; but it was certainly generous. No doubt he had a period of hesitation. On the one hand was his consigne as a Russian soldier; on the other, what he conceived to be his duty as a man. He knew that the act he contemplated spelt ruin for himself, that it spelt death; and he had every reason to hold life sweet.

'However, he opened communications with the prisoners in the casemates, and with their friends in the town. And one night he got them all safely out,—by daybreak they were secure in hiding. Kasghine himself remained behind. Some one would have to be punished. If the guilty man fled, an innocent man would be punished.

'Well, he was tried by Court Martial, and sentenced to be shot. But the Emperor, out of consideration for Kasghine's family, commuted the sentence to one of hard labour for life in the mines of Kara,—a cruel kindness. After eight years in the mines, with blunted faculties, broken health, disfigured by the loss of an eye, and already no doubt in some measure demoralised by the hardships he had suffered, he was pardoned,—another cruel kindness. He was pardoned on condition that he would leave Russian territory, and never enter it again. There are periodic wholesale pardonings, you know, at Kara, to clear the prisons and make room for fresh convicts.

'Kasghine's private fortune had been confiscated. His family had ceased all relations with him, and would do nothing for him. He came to Paris, and had to engage in the struggle for existence, a struggle with which he was totally unfamiliar, for which he was totally unequipped. The only profession he knew was soldiering. He tried to obtain a commission in the French army. International considerations, if no others, put that out of the question. He tried to get work,—teaching, translating. He was not a good teacher; his translations did not please his employers. Remember, his health was enfeebled, he was disfigured by the loss of an eye; he had spent eight years in the mines at Kara. He began to sink. Let those blame him who know how hard it is to swim. From borrowing, from begging, he sank to I dare not guess what. I am afraid there can be no doubt that for a while he served the Russian secret police as a spy; but he proved an unremunerative spy; they turned him off. He took to drink, he sank lower and lower, he became whatever is lowest. I had not seen him or heard of him for years, when, yesterday, I read the announcement of his death in the Figaro.'

The old man set me down at the corner of the Rue Racine. I have never met him again; I have never learned who he was.

The other day, being in Paris, I made a pilgrimage to the Cemetery of Montparnasse, to look at Bibi's grave. The wooden cross we had erected over it was pied with weather-stains, the inscription more than half obliterated—

ALEXIS DIMITRIEVITCH KASGHINE

Né à MOSCOU, le 20 JANVIER, 1823,

MORT à PARIS, le 20 DÉCEMBRE, 1884.

Priez pour lui.

We were, according to our nightly habit, in possession of the Café des Souris—dear Café des Souris, that is no more; and our assiduous patronage rumour alleges to have been the death of it—we were in possession of the Café des Souris, a score or so of us, chiefly English speakers, and all votaries of one or other of the 'quatre-z-arts,' when the door swung open, and he entered.

Now, the entrance of anybody not a member of our particular cénacle into the Café des Souris, we, who felt (I don't know why) that we had proprietary rights in the establishment, could not help deeming somewhat in the nature of an unwarranted intrusion; so we stopped our talk for an instant, and stared at him: a man of medium stature, heavily built, with hair that fell to his shoulders, escaping from beneath a broad-brimmed, soft felt hat, knee breeches like a bicyclist's, and, in lieu of overcoat, a sort of doublet, or magnified cape, of buff-coloured cloth.

He supported our examination, and the accompanying interval of silence, which ordinary flesh and blood might have found embarassing, with more than composure—with, it seemed to me, a dimly perceptible, subcutaneous smile, as of satisfaction—and seated himself at the only vacant table. This world held nothing human worthy to rivet our attention longer than thirty seconds, whence, very soon, we were hot in debate again. It was the first Sunday in May; I need hardly add that our subject-matter was the Vernissage, at which the greater number of us had assisted.

For myself, however, I could not forbid my gaze to wander back from time to time upon the stranger: an indulgence touching which I felt the less compunction, in that he had (it was a fair inference) got himself up with a deliberate view to attracting just such notice. Else why the sombrero and knickerbockers, the flowing locks and eccentric yellow cloak? Nay, I think it may have been in part this very note of undisguised vanity in the man that made it difficult to keep one's eyes off him: it tickled the sense of humour, and challenged the curiosity. What would his state of mind be, who, in the dotage of the Nineteenth Century, went laboriously out of his way to cultivate a fragmentary resemblance to—say a spurious Vandyke?

As the heat of the room began to tell upon him, he threw aside his outer garment, and hung up his hat, thereby discovering a velvet jacket and a very low-cut shirt, with unstarched rolling collar, and sailor's knot of pale green Liberty silk. His long hair, of a faded, dusty brown, was brushed straight back from his forehead, and plastered down upon his scalp, in such wise as to lend him a misleading effect of baldness. He wore a drooping brown moustache, and a lustreless brown beard, trimmed to an Elizabethan point. His skin was sallow; his eyes were big, wide apart, of an untransparent buttony brilliancy, and in colour dully blue. Taken for all in all, his face, deprived of the adventitious aids of long hair and Elizabethan beard, would have been peculiarly spiritless and insignificant, but from the complacency that shone like an unguent in every line of it, as well as from the studied picturesqueness of his costume, it was manifest that he posed as a unique and interesting character, a being mysterious and romantic, melancholy and rarely gifted—like the artist in a bad play.

Artist, indeed, of some description, I told myself, he must infallibly be reckoned. What mere professional man or merchant would have the heart to render his person thus conspicuous? And the hypothesis that might have disposed of him as a model was excluded by the freshness of his clothes. A poet, painter, sculptor, possibly an actor or musician—anyhow, something to which the generic name of artist, soiled with all ignoble use, could more or less flatteringly be applied—I made sure he was; an ornament of our own English-speaking race, moreover, proclaimed such by the light of intelligence that played upon his features as he followed our noisy conversation; and, at a guess, two or three-and-thirty years of age.

'Anybody know the duffer with the hair?'

This question, started by Charles K. Smith, of Battle Creek, Michigan, U.S.A., and commonly called in the Latin Quarter by his sobriquet of Chalks, went our rounds in an undertone; and everybody answered, 'No.'

'What is it? Can it talk? 'Pears like it can hear and catch on,' was Chalks's next remark. 'Shall we work the growler on it?'

The process termed by Chalks 'working the growler' was of ancient institution in the Café des Souris; and I believe it is not unknown in other seats of learning—a custom handed down from generation to generation of students, which, like politeness, costing little, yields generous returns. Should a casual wayfarer, happening amongst us, so far transgress the usages of good society as to volunteer a contribution to our talk, without the preliminary of an introduction, it was the rule instantly to require him to offer the company refreshments; and, I am sorry to have to add, not infrequently, being thirsty, and possessing a lively appreciation of the value of our own money, we would, by a marked affability of bearing, by smiles, nods, glances of sympathetic understanding, or what not, designedly encourage such an one to address us, and so render himself liable to our impost.

'If we don't,' continued Chalks, 'it will be to fly in the face of Providence. The man is simply bursting to fire his mouth off. He's had something to say swelling in him for the last half-hour. It will be an act of Christian mercy to let him say it. And for myself, I confess I'm rather dry.'

Chalks doubtless argued from the eager eye with which the man regarded us; from the uneasy way in which he held his seat, shifting in it, and edging in our direction; and from the tentative manner in which he occasionally coughed.

Now, persuaded by the American, we one by one fell silent, to give our victim his opportunity; whilst those nearest to him baited the trap by looking enquiringly at his face.

It was all he needed.

'I beg your pardon,' he began, with no symptom of diffidence, 'but I too was at the Vernissage to-day, and some of your comments upon it have surprised me.' He spoke with a staccato north-country accent, in a chirpy, querulous little voice; and each syllable seemed to chop the air, like a blow from a small hatchet. 'Am I to take it that you are serious when you condemn Bouguereau's great picture as a croûte? Croûte, if I mistake not, is equivalent to the English daub?'

Our one-armed waiter, Pierre, had but awaited this crisis to come forward and receive our orders. When they were delivered Chalks courteously explained the situation to the neophyte, adding that, as a further formality, he must make us acquainted with his name and occupation.

He accepted it in perfectly good part. 'I'm sure I shall feel honoured if you will drink with me,' he said, and settled the reckoning with Pierre.

'Name? Name?' a dozen of us cried in scattering chorus.

'I had thought that, among so many Englishmen and Americans, some one would have recognised me,' he replied. 'I am Davis Blake.'

He said it as one might say, 'I am Mr. Gladstone'—or Lord Salisbury—or Bismarck—with dignity, with an inflection of conscious greatness, it is true, but with neither haughtiness nor ostentation. We, however, are singularly ignorant of contemporary English literature in the Latin Quarter—our chief reading matter, indeed, being Maupassant and Le Petit Journal pour Rire—and though, as we shortly learned, here was a writer whose works were for sale at every bookstall in the United Kingdom, lavishly pirated in the United States, and distributed far and wide by Baron Tauchnitz on the Continent, his announcement left us unenlightened.

'Painter?' demanded Chalks.

A shadow crossed his face. 'You are surely familiar with my name?'

'Never heard it that I know of,' answered Chalks; then, raising his voice, 'Any gentleman present ever heard of—what did you say your name was?' he asked in an aside; and being informed, went on, 'of Mr. Davis Blake?'

No one spoke.

'Mud?' queried Chalks.

'Mud?' repeated Mr. Blake, perplexed.

'He means to enquire whether you are a sculptor,' ventured I.

'A sculptor—certainly not.' He spoke sharply, throwing back his head. 'It is impossible that no one here should have heard of me; and this pretence of ignorance is meant as a practical joke. I am a novelist—one of the best known novelists living. I am Davis Blake, the author of "Crispin Dorr," and "The Card Dealer." My portrait, with a short biographical sketch, appeared in the Illustrated Gazette not a month ago. My works have been translated into French, German, Russian, and Italian. Of "The Card Dealer," upwards of thirty thousand copies have been sold in Great Britain alone.'

'Ah, then you could well afford to stand us drinks,' was Chalks's cheerful commentary. 'We ain't much on book-learning, this side the river, Mr. Blake. We're plain blunt men, that ain't ashamed of manual labour—horny-handed sons of toil, in short. But we're proud to meet a cultivated gentleman like yourself, all the same, and can appreciate him when met.'

Blake laughed rather lamely, and responded, 'I perceive that you are a humorist. Your countrymen are great admirers of my writings; of "Crispin Dorr," I am told, there are no fewer than three rival editions in the market; and I have received complimentary letters and requests for my autograph, from all parts of the United States, I think that the quality of American humour has been over-rated: but I can forgive a jest at my own expense, provided it be not meant in malice.'

'Every novice in our order, sir,' said Chalks, 'must approve his mettle by undergoing something in the nature of an initiatory ordeal. We may now drop foolery, and converse like intelligent human beings. You were asking our opinion of Willy's daub——'

'Willy?' questioned Blake.

'Ay—Bouguereau. Isn't his front name William?' And Chalks, speaking as it were ex cathedrâ, made very short work indeed of Monsieur Bouguereau's claims to rank as a painter. Blake listened with open-eyed wonder. But we are difficult critics, we of the Paris art schools, between the ages of twenty and twenty-five; cold, cynical, suspicious as any Old Bailey judge; and rare is the man whose work can sustain our notice, and get off with lighter censure than 'croûte' or 'plat d'épinards.' We grow more lenient, however, as we advance in years. Already, at thirty, we begin to detect signs of promise in other canvases than our own. At forty, conceivably, we shall even admit a certain degree of actual merit.

By and by, Chalks having concluded his pronouncement, and drifted to another corner of the room, Blake and I fell into separate talk.

'I must count it a piece of exceptional good fortune,' he informed me, 'to have made the acquaintance of your little coterie this evening. I am on the point of writing a novel, in which it will be necessary that my hero should pass several years as a student in the Latin Quarter; and I have run over from London for the especial purpose of collecting local colour. No doubt you will be able to help me with a hint or two as to the best mode of setting about it.'

'I can think of none better than to come here and live for a while,' said I.

'I only arrived last night, and I put up at the Grand Hotel. But it was quite my intention to move across the river directly I could find suitable lodgings. Do you know of any that you could recommend?'

'If you want to see student life par excellence, you can scarcely improve upon the shop I'm in myself—the Hôtel du Saint-Esprit, in the Rue St. Jacques.'

And after he had examined me in some detail touching that house of entertainment, 'Yes,' he said, 'then, if you will bespeak a room for me there, I'll come to-morrow and stop for a week or ten days.'

'A week or ten days?' I questioned.

'I can't spare more than a fortnight. I must be back in town by the 20th.'

'But what can you hope to learn of Latin Quarter customs in a fortnight? One ought to live here for a year, at the very least, before attempting to write us up.'

'Ah,' he rejoined, shaking his head and gazing dreamily at something invisible beyond the smoky atmosphere of the café, 'a man with dramatic insight can learn as much in a fortnight as an ordinary person in half a lifetime. Intuition and inspiration take the place of the note-book and the yard-stick. The author of The Merchant of Venice had never visited Italy. In "Crispin Dorr" I have described a tempest and a shipwreck at which old sailors shudder: and my longest voyage has been from Holyhead to Kingstown. Besides,' he added, with a bow and smile, 'for the Latin Quarter, if you will take me under your protection, I shall, I am sure, benefit by the services of a capital cicerone.'

And the next afternoon he arrived. I met him at the threshold of the hotel, introduced him to our landlady, Madame Pamparagoux (who stared rather wildly, not being accustomed to see her lodgers so mediævally attired), and showed him upstairs to the room I had engaged.

There he invited me to be seated while he unpacked his portmanteau and put his things in order. These, I noticed, were un-Britishly few and simple. I could discern no vestiges of either sponge or tub. As he moved backwards and forwards between his chest of drawers and dressing-table, he would cast frequent affectionate glances at his double, now in the glass of the armoire, now in that above the chimney. He was favouring me meantime with a running monologue of an autobiographical complexion.

'I am a self-educated man. My father was a wine merchant in Leeds. At sixteen he put me to serve in the shop of a cousin, a print-seller. It was there, I think, that my literary instincts awoke. I contributed occasional art notes to a local paper. At twenty I came up to London and began my definite career, as a reporter. I was soon earning thirty shillings a week, which seemed to me magnificent. But I aspired to higher things. I felt within me the stirrings of what I could not help believing to be genius—true genius. I longed to distinguish myself, to emerge from the crowd, from the background, to make myself remarked, to do something, to be somebody, to see my name a famous one. I was fortunate enough at this epoch to attract the notice of X——, the poet. He believed in me, and encouraged me to believe in myself. It is one of the regrets of my life that he died before I had achieved my celebrity. However, I have achieved it. My name is a household word wherever the English language is read. I have written the only novels of my time that are sure to live. They will live not only by virtue of their style and matter, but because of a quality they possess which I must call universal—a quality which appeals with equal force to readers of every rank, and which will procure for them as wide a popularity five hundred years hence as they enjoy to-day. I call them novels, but they are really prose-poems. The novel,' he continued, rising for an instant to impersonal heights, 'the novel is the literary form or expression of my period, as the drama was that of Shakespeare's, the epic of Homer's. Do you follow me? Ah, here is a copy of "Crispin Dorr"—here is "The Card Dealer." Take them and read them, and return them when you have finished. Being author's copies, they possess an exceptional value. This is my autograph upon the fly-leaf. This is a photograph of my wife. She is a good woman, but has no great literary culture, and we are not so happy together as I could wish. Men of commanding parts seldom make good husbands, and I committed the imprudence of marrying very young. My wife, you see, belongs to that class of society from which I have risen. I am the son of a wine merchant, yet I dine with peers, and have been favoured with smiles from peeresses. My wife has not kept pace with me. This is my little girl—our only child—my daughter Judith. Here is the Illustrated Gazette with the portrait of myself.'

Some of us in the Latin Quarter found the man's egotism insupportable, and gave him a wide berth. Others, more numerous, among them the irrepressible Chalks, made it an object of derision, and would exhaust their ingenuity in efforts to lead him on, and entice him into more and more egregious exhibitions of it; while, if they did not laugh in his face, they took, at least, no slightest pains to conceal their jubilant interchange of winks and nudges.

'If he were only an ass,' Chalks urged, 'one might feel disposed to spare him. A merciful man is merciful to a beast. But he's such a cad, to boot—bandying his wife's name about the Latin Quarter, telling Tom, Dick, and Harry of their conjugal differences, and boasting of his successes with other women!'

A few of us, however, could not prevent an element of pity from tincturing our amusement. If his self-conceit was comical, by reason of its candour, it was surely pitiable, because of the poor, dwarfed starveling of a soul that it revealed. Here was a man, with life in his veins, and round about him the whole mystery and richness of creation—and he could seriously think of nothing save how, by his dress, by his speech, his postures, to render himself the observed of all observers!

Wherever he went, in whatever company he found himself, that was the sole thing he cared for—to be the centre of attention, to be looked at, listened to, recognised and admired as a celebrity. And if the event happened otherwise, if he had ground for the suspicion that the people near him were suffering their minds to wander to another topic, his face would darken, his attitude become distinctly one of rancour. With Chalks, familiarity bred boldness; he made the latter days of Blake's sojourn amongst us exceedingly unhappy.

'Now, Mr. Blake,' he would say, 'we are going to talk of art and love and things in general for a while, to rest our brains from the author of "Crispin Dorr." Please step into the corner there and sulk.'

And he had a bit of slang, which he set to a bar of music, and would sing, as if in absence of mind, whenever the conversation lapsed, to the infinite annoyance of Mr. Blake:—

'Git your hair cut—git your hair cut—git your hair cut—short!'

'If that is meant for me,' Blake once protested, 'I take it as discourteous in the last degree.'

'My dear sir, you were twenty thousand leagues from my thoughts. And as for getting your hair cut, I beseech you, don't. You would shear away the fabric of our joy,' Chalks answered.

Blake had a curiously exaggerated notion of his fame; and his jealousy thereof surpassed the jealousy of women. He took it for granted that everybody had heard of him, and bridled, as at a personal affront, when he met any one who hadn't. If you fell into chance talk with him, in ignorance of his identity, he could not let three minutes pass without informing you. And then, if you appeared not adequately impressed, he would wax ill-tempered. He was genuinely convinced that his person and his actions were affairs of consuming interest to all the world. To be something, to do something, perhaps he honestly aspired; but to seem something was certainly his ruling passion.

One Sunday afternoon, at his suggestion, we went together to the studio of Z——, and I introduced him to the Master. But, as we moved about the vast room, among those small, priceless canvases, the consciousness grew upon me that my companion was in some distress of mind. His eye wandered; his utterances were brief and dry. At length he got me into a corner, and remarked, 'You introduced me simply as Mr. Blake. He evidently doesn't realise who I am.'

'Oh, these Frenchmen are so indifferent to things not French, you know,' said I.

'Yes—but—still—I wish you could make an occasion to let him know. In introducing me you might have added "a distinguished English author."'

'But do you quite realise who he is?' I cried. 'He's jolly near the most distinguished living painter.'

'Never mind. He is treating me now as he might Brown, Jones, or Robinson.' As this was with a superfine consideration, it seemed unreasonable to demand a difference. Nevertheless, I seized an opportunity to whisper in the Master's ear a word or two to the desired effect. 'Tiens!' he returned composedly, and continued to treat his visitor precisely as he had done from the beginning.

Blake had announced that he wanted to gather information about the Latin Quarter; and I don't doubt that his purpose was sincere, but he employed a novel method of attaining it. We took him everywhere, we showed him everything; I could never observe that he either looked or listened. He would sit (or stand or walk), his eye craving admiration from our faces; his tongue wagging about himself; his early hardships, his first success, his habits of work, his troubles with his wife, his liaison with Lady Blank, his tastes in fruits and wines, his handwriting, his very teeth and boots. He passed his life in a sort of trance, an ecstacy of self-absorption; he had fallen in love with his own conception of himself, like a metaphysical Narcissus. This idiosyncrasy was the means of defeating various conspiracies, in which Chalks, of course, was the prime mover, calculated to impose upon his credulity, and send him back to London loaded down with misinformation.

'His cheek, by Christopher!' cried Chalks. 'Live in the Quarter for a fortnight, keep his eyes and ears shut, talk perpetually of Davis Blake, and read nothing but his own works, and then go home and write a book about it. I'll quarter him!'

But Chalks counted without his man. That Monsieur Bullier, the founder of the Closerie des Lilas, was also Professor of Moral Philosophy in the Collège de France; that the word étudiante (for Blake had only a tourist's smattering of French) should literally be translated student, and that the young ladies who bore it as a name were indeed pursuing rigorous courses of study at the Sorbonne; that it was obligatory upon a freshman (nouveau) in the Quarter to shave his head and wear wooden shoes for the first month after his matriculation—from these and kindred superstitions Blake was saved by his grand talent for never paying attention.

In the meanwhile some of us had read his books: chromo-lithographs, struck in the primary colours; pasteboard complications of passion and adventure, with the conservative entanglement of threadbare marionnettes—a hero, tall, with golden brown moustaches and blue eyes; a heroine, lissome, with 'sunny locks;' then a swarthy villain, for the most part a nobleman, and his Spanish-looking female accomplice, who had an uncomfortable habit of delivering her remarks 'from between clenched teeth,' and, generally, 'in a blood-chilling hiss'—the narrative set forth in a sustained fortissimo, and punctuated by the timely exits of the god from the machine. Never a felicity, never an impression. I fancy he had made his notes of human nature whilst observing the personages of a melodrama at a provincial theatre. He loved the obvious sentiment, the obvious and but approximate word.

But the climax of his infatuation was not disclosed till the night before he left us. Again we were in session at the Café des Souris, and the talk had turned upon metempsychosis. Blake, for a wonder, pricked up his ears and appeared to listen, at the same time watching his chance to take the floor. Half-a-dozen men had their say first, however; then he cut in.

'Metempsychosis is not a theory, it is a fact. I can testify to it from my personal experience. I know it. I can distinctly recall my former life. I can tell you who I was, who my friends were, what I did, what I felt, everything, down to the very dishes I preferred for dinner.'

Chalks scanned Blake's features for an instant with an intentness that suggested a mingling of perplexity and malice; then, all at once, I saw a light flash in his eyes, which forthwith began to twinkle in a manner that struck me as ominous.

'In my early youth,' Blake continued, 'this memory of mine was, if I may so phrase it, piecemeal and occasional. Feeling that I was no ordinary man, conscious of strange forces struggling in me, I would obtain, as it were, glimpses, fleeting and unsatisfactory, into a former state. Then they would go, not for long intervals to return. As time elapsed, however, these glimpses, to call them so, became more frequent and lasting, the intervals of oblivion shorter; and at last, one day on Hampstead Heath, I identified myself in a sudden burst of insight. I was walking on the Heath, and thinking of my work—marvelling at a certain quality I had discerned in it, which, I was convinced, would assure it everlasting life: a quality that seemed not unfamiliar to me, and yet which I could associate with none of the writers whose names passed in review before my mind; not with Byron, or Shelley, or Keats, not with Wordsworth or Coleridge, Goethe or Dante, not even with Homer. I mean the quality which I call universal—universal in its authenticity, universal in its appeal. By-and-bye, I took out a little pocket mirror that I always carry, and looked into it, studying my face. One glance sufficed. There, suddenly, on Hampstead Heath, the whole thing flashed upon me. I saw, I understood; I realised who I was, I remembered everything.'

'Stop right there, Mr. Blake,' called out Chalks in stentorian tones. 'Don't you say another word. I'm going to hail you by your right name in half-a-minute. I guess I must have recognised you the very first time I clapped eyes on your distinguished physiognomy; only I couldn't just place you, as we say over in America. But there was a je ne sais quoi in the whole cut of your jib as familiar to me as rolls and coffee. I tried and tried to think when and where I'd had the pleasure before. But now that you speak of a former state of existence—why, I'm there! It was all I needed, just a little hint like that, to jog my memory. Talk about entertaining angels unawares! The beard, eh? And the yaller cloak? And ain't there a statue of you up Boulevard Haussmann way? Shakesy, old man, shake!'

And Chalks got hold of his victim's hand and wrung it fervently. 'I'm particularly glad to meet you this way,' he added, 'because I was Queen Elizabeth myself; and I can't begin to tell you how sort of out of it I felt, alone here with all this degenerate posterity.'

Blake coldly withdrew his hand, frowning loftily at Chalks. 'You should reserve your nonsense for more appropriate occasions,' he said. 'Though you speak in a spirit of foolish levity, you have builded better than you knew. I am indeed Shakespeare re-incarnated. My books alone would prove it; they could have been dictated by no other mind. But—look at this.'

He produced from an interior pocket a case of red morocco and handed it to me. 'You,' he said, with a flattering emphasis upon the pronoun, 'you are a man who can treat a serious matter seriously. What do you think of that?'

The case contained a photograph, and the photograph represented the head and shoulders of Mr. Blake and a bust of Shakespeare, placed cheek by jowl. In the pointed beard and the wide-set eyes there were, perhaps, the rudiments of something remotely like a likeness.

'Isn't that conclusive?' he demanded. 'Doesn't that place the fact beyond the reach of question?'

'You've got more hair than you used to have,' said Chalks. 'I'm talking of the front hair—your forehead ain't as high as it was. But your back hair is all right enough.'

'You have put your finger on the one, the only, point of difference,' assented Blake,

On our way home he took my arm, and pitched his voice in the key of confidence. 'I am writing my autobiography, from my birth in Stratford down to the present day. It will be in two parts; the interim when people thought me dead, marking their separation. I was not dead; I slept a dreamless sleep. Presently I shall sleep again; as men say, die; then doubtless wake again. Life and death are but sleeping and waking on a larger scale. Our little life is rounded with a sleep. It is the swing of the pendulum, the revolution of the orb. Yes, I am writing my autobiography. So little is known of the private history of Shakespeare, conceive the boon it will be to mankind. I shall leave the manuscripts to my executors, for them to publish after I have lain down to my next long rest. Of special value will be the chapters telling how I wrote the plays, settling disputed readings, closing all controversy upon the sanity of Hamlet, and divulging the true personality of Mr. W.H.'

He came into my room for a little visit before going to bed. There, candle in hand, he gazed long and earnestly into my chimney-glass.

'Yes,' he sighed at last, 'it is solely in the quantity of my hair that the resemblance fails.'