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 Ragout:  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 Ragout?’ 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 etudiante’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 cafe 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,