Every afternoon at five his Gargantuan figure came thrashing through the crowds of the boulevard, as an omnibus on its way scatters the fragile fiacres.  He arrived, radiating electricity, tirades on his tongue, to his chair among the table-pounders of the Cafe des Lilacs, and his first words were like the fanfare of trumpets.  He had been christened, in the felicitous language of the Quarter, Don Furioso Barebones Rantoul, and for cause.  He shared a garret with his chum, Britt Herkimer, in the Rue de l’Ombre, a sort of manhole lit by the stars,—­when there were any stars, and he never failed to come springing up the six rickety flights with a song on his lips.

An old woman who kept a fruit store gave him implicit credit; a much younger member of the sex at the corner creamery trusted him for eggs and fresh milk, and leaned toward him over the counter, laughing into his eyes as he exclaimed: 

“Ma belle, when I am famous, I will buy you a silk gown, and a pair of earrings that will reach to your shoulders, and it won’t be long.  You’ll see.”

He adored being poor.  When his canvas gave out, he painted his ankles to caricature the violent creations that were the pride of Chatterton, who was a nabob.  When his credit at one restaurant expired, he strode confidently up to another proprietor, and announced with the air of one bestowing a favor: 

“I am Rantoul, the portrait-painter.  In five years my portraits will sell for five thousand francs, in ten for twenty thousand.  I will eat one meal a day at your distinguished establishment, and paint your portrait to make your walls famous.  At the end of the month I will immortalize your wife; on the same terms, your sister, your father, your mother, and all the little children.  Besides, every Saturday night I will bring here a band of my comrades who pay in good hard silver.  Remember that if you had bought a Corot for twenty francs in 1870, you could have sold it for five thousand francs in 1880, fifty thousand in 1890.  Does the idea appeal to you?”

But as most keepers of restaurants are practical and unimaginative, and withal close bargainers, at the end of a week Rantoul generally was forced to seek a new sitter.

“What a privilege it is to be poor!” he would then exclaim enthusiastically to Herkimer.  “It awakens all the perceptions; hunger makes the eye keener.  I can see colors to-day that I never saw before.  And to think that if Sherman had never gotten it in his head to march to the sea I should never have experienced this inspiration!  But, old fellow, we have so short a time to be poor.  We must exhibit nothing yet.  We are lucky.  We are poor.  We can feel.”

On the subject of traditions he was at his best.