Men and women, oh the strength of the living faces! conversation, oh the magic of it!  It is a fabulous river of gold where the precious metal is washed up without stint for all to take, to take as much as he can carry.  Two old ladies discussing the peerage?  Much may be learned, it is gold; poets and wits, then it is fountains whose spray solidifies into jewels, and every herb and plant is begemmed with the sparkle of the diamond and the glow of the ruby.

I did not go to either Oxford or Cambridge, but I went to the “Nouvelle Athenes.”  What is the “Nouvelle Athenes”?  He who would know anything of my life must know something of the academy of the fine arts.  Not the official stupidity you read of in the daily papers, but the real French academy, the cafe.  The “Nouvelle Athenes” is a cafe on the Place Pigale.  Ah! the morning idlenesses and the long evenings when life was but a summer illusion, the grey moonlights on the Place where we used to stand on the pavements, the shutters clanging up behind us, loath to separate, thinking of what we had left said, and how much better we might have enforced our arguments.  Dead and scattered are all those who used to assemble there, and those years and our home, for it was our home, live only in a few pictures and a few pages of prose.  The same old story, the vanquished only are victorious; and though unacknowledged, though unknown, the influence of the “Nouvelle Athenes” is inveterate in the artistic thought of the nineteenth century.

How magnetic, intense, and vivid are these memories of youth.  With what strange, almost unnatural clearness do I see and hear,—­see the white face of that cafe, the white nose of that block of houses, stretching up to the Place, between two streets.  I can see down the incline of those two streets, and I know what shops are there; I can hear the glass-door of the cafe grate on the sand as I open it.  I can recall the smell of every hour.  In the morning that of eggs frizzling in butter, the pungent cigarette, coffee and bad cognac; at five o’clock the fragrant odour of absinthe; and soon after the steaming soup ascends from the kitchen; and as the evening advances, the mingled smells of cigarettes, coffee, and weak beer.  A partition, rising a few feet or more over the hats, separates the glass front from the main body of the cafe.  The usual marble tables are there, and it is there we sat and aestheticised till two o’clock in the morning.  But who is that man? he whose prominent eyes flash with excitement.  That is Villiers de l’Isle-Adam.  The last or the supposed last of the great family.  He is telling that girl a story—­that fair girl with heavy eyelids, stupid and sensual.  She is, however, genuinely astonished and interested, and he is striving to play upon her ignorance.  Listen to him.  “Spain—­the night is fragrant with the sea and the perfume of the orange trees, you know—­a midnight of stars and dreams.  Now and then the