Page:The Bohemians of the Latin Quarter.djvu/88

line to add his name to those on the famous list already mentioned.

They left Mother Cadet’s at nine o’clock at night, both fairly primed, and with the gait of men who have been engaged in close conversation with sundry bottles.

Colline offered to stand coffee, and Schaunard accepted on condition that he should be allowed to pay for the accompanying nips of liquor. They turned into a café in the Rue Saint Germain l’Auxerrois, and bearing on its sign the name of Momus, god of play and pleasure.

At the moment they entered a lively argument broke out between two of the frequenters of the place. One of them was a young fellow whose face was hidden by a dense thicket of beard of several distinct shades. By way of a balance to this wealth of hair on his chin, a precocious baldness had despoiled his forehead, which was as bare as a billiard-ball. He vainly strove to conceal the nakedness of the land by brushing forward a tuft of hairs so scanty that they could almost be counted. He wore a black coat worn at the elbows, and revealing whenever he raised his arm too high a ventilator under the armpits. His trousers might have once been black, but his boots, which had never been new, seemed to have already gone round the world two or three times on the feet of the Wandering Jew.

Schaunard noticed that his new friend Colline and the young fellow with the big beard nodded to one another.

“You know the gentleman? ” said he to the philosopher.

“Not exactly,” replied the latter, “but I meet him sometimes at the National Library. I believe that he is a literary man.”

“ He wears the garb of one, at any rate,” said Schaunard.

The individual with whom this young fellow was arguing was a man of forty, foredoomed, by a big head wedged between his shoulders without any break in the shape of a