In the Days of My Youth Part 47

It was a large, old-fashioned, Louis Quatorze piece of furniture, the top of which, formed from a single slab of some kind of gray and yellow marble, was stained all over with the coffee, wine, and ink-splashes of many generations of customers. It looked as old--nay, older--than the house itself.

The young men who were playing at dominoes looked up and nodded, as three or four others had done in the outer room when we pa.s.sed through.

"_Bonjour, l'ami_," said the one who seemed to be winning. "Hast thou chanced to see anything of Martial, coming along!"

"I observed a nose defiling round the corner of the Rue de Bussy,"

replied Muller, "and it looked as if Martial might be somewhere in the far distance, but I didn't wait to see. Are you expecting him?"

"Confound him--yes! We've been waiting more than half an hour."

"If you have invited him to breakfast," said Muller, "he is sure to come."

"On the contrary, he has invited us to breakfast."

"Ah, that alters the case," said Muller, philosophically. "Then he is sure _not_ to come." "Garcon!"

A bullet-headed, short-jacketed, long-ap.r.o.ned waiter, who looked as if he had not been to bed since his early youth, answered the summons,

"M'sieur!"

"What have you that you can especially recommend this morning?"

The waiter, with that nasal volubility peculiar to his race, rapidly ran over the whole vegetable and animal creation.

Muller listened with polite incredulity.

"Nothing else?" said he, when the other stopped, apparently from want of breath.

"_Mais oui, M'sieur_!" and, thus stimulated, the waiter, having "exhausted worlds and then imagined new," launched forth into a second and still more impossible catalogue.

Muller turned to me.

"The resources of this establishment, you observe," he said, very gravely, "are inexhaustible. One might have a Roc's egg a la Sindbad for the asking."

The waiter looked puzzled, shuffled his slippered feet, and murmured something about "_oeufs sur le plat_."

"Unfortunately, however," continued Muller, "we are but men--not fortresses provisioning for a siege. Antoine, _mon enfant_, we know thee to be a fellow of incontestible veracity, and thy list is magnificent; but we will be content with a _vol-au-vent_ of fish, a _bifteck aux pommes frites_, an _omelette sucree_, and a bottle of thy 1840 Bordeaux with the yellow seal. Now vanish!"

The waiter, wearing an expression of intense relief, vanished accordingly.

Meanwhile more students had come in, and more kept coming. Hats and caps cropped up rapidly wherever there were pegs to hang them on, and the talking became fast and furious.

I soon found that everybody knew everybody at the Cafe Procope, and that the specialty of the establishment was dominoes--just as the specialty of the Cafe de la Regence is chess. There were games going on before long at almost every table, and groups of lookers-on gathered about those who enjoyed the reputation of being skilful players.

Gradually breakfast after breakfast emerged from some mysterious nether world known only to the waiters, and the war of dominoes languished.

"These are all students, of course," I said presently, "and yet, though I meet a couple of hundred fellows at our hospital lectures, I don't see a face I know."

"You would find some by this time, I dare say, in the other room,"

replied Muller. "I brought you in here that you might sit at Voltaire's table, and eat your steak under the shadow of Voltaire's bust; but this salon is chiefly frequented by law-students--the other by medical and art students. Your place, _mon cher_, as well as mine, is in the outer sanctuary."

"That infernal Martial!" groaned one of the domino-players at the other end of the table. "So ends the seventh game, and here we are still.

_Parbleu!_ Horace, hasn't that absinthe given you an inconvenient amount of appet.i.te?"

"Alas! my friend--don't mention it. And when the absinthe is paid for, I haven't a sou."

"My own case precisely. What's to be done?"

"Done!" echoed Horace, pathetically. "Shade of Apicius! inspire me...but, no--he's not listening."

"Hold! I have it. We'll make our wills in one another's favor, and die."

"I should prefer to die when the wind is due East, and the moon at the full," said Horace, contemplatively.

"True--besides, there is still _la mere_ Gaudissart. Her cutlets are tough, but her heart is tender. She would not surely refuse to add one more breakfast to the score!"

Horace shook his head with an air of great despondency.

"There was but one Job," said he, "and he has been dead some time. The patience of _la mere_ Gaudissart has long since been entirely exhausted."

"I am not so sure of that. One might appeal to her feelings, you know--have a presentiment of early death--wipe away a tear... Bah! it is worth the effort, anyhow."

"It is a forlorn hope, my dear fellow, but, as you say, it is worth the effort. _Allons donc!_ to the storming of _la mere_ Gaudissart!"

And with this they pushed aside the dominoes, took down their hats, nodded to Muller, and went out.

"There go two of the brightest fellows and most improvident scamps in the whole Quartier," said my companion. "They are both studying for the bar; both under age; both younger sons of good families; and both destined, if I am not much mistaken, to rise to eminence by-and-by.

Horace writes for _Figaro_ and the _Pet.i.t Journal pour Rire_--Theophile does _feuilleton_ work--romances, chit-chat, and political squibs--rubbish, of course; but clever rubbish, and wonderful when one considers what boys they both are, and what dissipated lives they lead.

The amount of impecuniosity those fellows get through in the course of a term is something inconceivable. They have often only one decent suit between them--and sometimes not that. To-day, you see, they are at their wits' end for a breakfast. They have run their credit dry at Procope and everywhere else, and are gone now to a miserable little den in the Rue du Paon, kept by a fat good-natured old soul called _la mere_ Gaudissart. She will perhaps take compa.s.sion on their youth and inexperience, and let them have six sous worth of horsebeef soup, stale bread, and the day before yesterday's vegetables. Nay, don't look so pitiful! We poor devils of the Student Quartier hug our Bohemian life, and exalt it above every other. When we have money, we cannot find windows enough out of which to fling it--when we have none, we start upon _la cha.s.se au diner_, and enjoy the pleasures of the chase. We revel in the extremes of fasting and feasting, and scarcely know which we prefer."

"I think your friends Horace and Theophile are tolerably clear as to which _they_ prefer," I remarked, with a smile.

"Bah! they would die of _ennui_ if they had always enough to eat! Think how it sharpens a man's wits if--given the time, the place, and the appet.i.te--he has every day to find the credit for his dinners! Show me a mathematical problem to compare with it as a popular educator of youth!"

"But for young men of genius, like Horace and Theophile..."

"Make yourself quite easy, _mon cher_. A little privation will do them no kind of harm. They belong to that cla.s.s of whom it has been said that 'they would borrow money from Harpagon, and find truffles on the raft of the Medusa.' But hold! we are at the end of our breakfast. What say you?

Shall we take our _demi-ta.s.se_ in the next room, among our fellow-students of physic and the fine arts?"

CHAPTER x.x.x.

A MAN WITH A HISTORY.

The society of the outer salon differed essentially from the society of the inner salon at the Cafe Procope. It was noisier--it was shabbier--it was smokier. The conversation in the inner salon was of a general character on the whole, and, as one caught sentences of it here and there, seemed for the most part to relate to the literature and news of the day--to the last important paper in the Revue des Deux Mondes, to the new drama at the Odeon, or to the article on foreign politics in the _Journal des Debats_. But in the outer salon the talk was to the last degree shoppy, and overflowed with the argot of the studios. Some few medical students were cl.u.s.tered, it is true, in a corner near the door; but they were so outnumbered by the artists at the upper end of the room, that these latter seemed to hold complete possession, and behaved more like the members of a recognised club than the casual customers of a cafe. They talked from table to table. They called the waiters by their Christian names. They swaggered up and down the middle of the room with their hats on their heads, their hands in their pockets, and their pipes in their mouths, as coolly as if it were the broad walk of the Luxembourg gardens.

And the appearance of these gentlemen was not less remarkable than their deportment. Their hair, their beards, their clothes, were of the wildest devising. They seemed one and all to have started from a central idea, that central idea being to look as unlike their fellow-men as possible; and thence to have diverged into a variety that was nothing short of infinite. Each man had evidently modelled himself upon his own ideal, and no two ideals were alike. Some were picturesque, some were grotesque; and some, it must be admitted, were rather dirty ideals, into the realization of which no such paltry considerations as those of soap, water, or brushes were permitted to enter.