“Behold!” replied the Marquis, “my business is to distribute in the streets these advertisements of a local poisoner, and thereby to earn a place at the assassin’s table to spread the fame of which I labour.  Camoens held out his hand for charity in the streets of Lisbon.  Tudesco stretches forth his in the byways of the modern Babylon, but it is to give and not to receive—­lunches at 1 fr. 25, dinners at 1 fr. 75,” and he offered one of his bills to a passer-by, who strode on, hands in pockets, without taking it.

Thereupon the Marquis Tudesco heaved a sigh and exclaimed: 

“And yet I have translated the Gerusalemme Liberata, the masterpiece of the immortal Torquato Tasso!  But the brutal-minded booksellers scorn the fruit of my vigils, and in the empyrean the Muse veils her face so as not to witness the humiliation inflicted on her nursling.”

“And what has become of you all the time since we last saw you?” asked the young man frankly.

“God only knows, and ’pon my word!  I think He has forgotten.”

Such was the Marquis Tudesco’s oracular answer.

He tied up his bundle of papers in a cloth, and taking his pupil by the arm, urged him in the direction of the Rue Saint-Jacques.

“See, my young friend,” he said, “the dome of the Pantheon is half hidden by the fog.  The School of Salerno teaches that the damp air of evening is inimical to the human stomach.  There is near by a decent establishment where we can converse as two philosophers should, and I feel sure your unavowed desire is to conduct your old instructor thither, the master who initiated you in the Latin rudiments.”

They entered a drinking-shop perfumed with so strong a reek of kirsch and absinthe as took Servien’s breath away.  The room was long and narrow, while against the walls varnished barrels with copper taps were ranged in a long-drawn perspective that was lost in the thick haze of tobacco-smoke hanging in the air under the gas-jets.  At little tables of painted deal a number of men were drinking; dressed in black and wearing tall silk hats, broken-brimmed and shiny from exposure to the rain, they sat and smoked in silence.  Before the door of the stove several pairs of thin legs were extended to catch the heat, and a thread of steam curled up from the toes of the owners’ boots.  A heavy torpor seemed to weigh upon all this assemblage of pallid, impassive faces.

While Monsieur Tudesco was distributing hand-shakes to sundry old acquaintances, Jean caught scraps of the conversation of those about him that filled him with a despairing melancholy—­school ushers railing at the cookery of cheap eating-houses, tipplers maundering contentedly to one another, enchanted at the profundity of their own wisdom, schemers planning to make a fortune, politicians arguing, amateurs of the fair sex telling highly-spiced anecdotes of love and women—­and amongst it all this sentence: