Page:The Bohemians of the Latin Quarter.djvu/316

It may, perhaps, be remembered how the painter Marcel sold the Jew Medicis his famous picture of “The Passage of the Red Sea,” which was destined to serve as the sign of a provision dealer’s. On the morrow of this sale, which had been followed by a luxurious dinner stood by the Jew to the Bohemians as a clincher to the bargain, Marcel, Schaunard, Colline and Rodolphe woke up very late. Still bewildered by the fumes of their intoxication of the day before, at first they no longer remembered what had taken place, and as noon rung out from a neighboring steeple, they all looked at one another with a melancholy smile.

“There goes the bell that piously summons humanity to refresh itself,” said Marcel.

“In point of fact,” replied Rodolphe, “it is the solemn hour when honest folk enter their dining-room.”

“We must try and become honest folk,” murmured Colline, whose patron Saint was Saint Appetite.

“Ah! milk-jug of my nursery!—ah! four square meals of my childhood, what has become of you?” said Schaunard. “What has become of you?” he repeated, to a soft and melancholy tune.

“To think that at this hour there are in Paris more than a hundred thousand chops on the gridiron,” said Marcel.

“And as many steaks,” added Rodolphe.

By an ironical contrast, whilst the four friends were putting to one another the terrible daily problem of how to