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Page 17
'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.'
THE REWARD OF VIRTUE
He was one of the institutions of the Latin Quarter, one of the least
admirable. He haunted the Boulevard St. Michel, hung round the caf�s,
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 Rago�t: 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 Rago�t?' 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 _�tudiante'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 caf� 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 d�che_, and begging for a _petite salet� 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.
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