He was a splendid creature to look at, tall, stalwart, full-blooded, with a ruddy open-air complexion; a fine bold brow and nose; brown eyes, humorous, intelligent, kindly, that always brightened flatteringly when they met you; and a vast quantity of bluish-grey hair and beard.  In his dress he affected (very wisely, for they became him excellently) velvet jackets, flannel shirts, loosely-knotted ties, and wide-brimmed soft felt hats.  Marching down the Boulevard St. Michel, his broad shoulders well thrown back, his head erect, chin high in air, his whole person radiating health, power, contentment, and the pride of them:  he was a sight worth seeing, spirited, picturesque, prepossessing.  You could not have passed him without noticing him—­without wondering who he was, confident he was somebody—­without admiring him, and feeling that there went a man it would be interesting to know.

He was, indeed, charming to know; he was the hero, the idol, of a little sect of worshippers, young fellows who loved nothing better than to sit at his feet.  On the Rive Gauche, to be sure, we are, for the most part, birds of passage; a student arrives, tarries a little, then departs.  So, with the exits and entrances of seniors and nouveaux, the personnel of old Childe’s following varied from season to season; but numerically it remained pretty much the same.  He had a studio, with a few living-rooms attached, somewhere up in the fastnesses of Montparnasse, though it was seldom thither that one went to seek him.  He received at his cafe, the Cafe Bleu—­the Cafe Bleu which has since blown into the monster cafe of the Quarter, the noisiest, the rowdiest, the most flamboyant.  But I am writing (alas) of twelve, thirteen, fifteen years ago; in those days the Cafe Bleu consisted of a single oblong room—­with a sanded floor, a dozen tables, and two waiters, Eugene and Hippolyte—­where Madame Chanve, the patronne, in lofty insulation behind her counter, reigned, if you please, but where Childe, her principal client, governed.  The bottom of the shop, at any rate, was reserved exclusively to his use.  There he dined, wrote his letters, dispensed his hospitalities; he had his own piano there, if you can believe me, his foils and boxing-gloves; from the absinthe hour till bed-time there was his habitat, his den.  And woe to the passing stranger who, mistaking the Cafe Bleu for an ordinary house of call, ventured, during that consecrated period, to drop in.  Nothing would be said, nothing done; we would not even trouble to stare at the intruder.  Yet he would seldom stop to finish his consommation, or he would bolt it.  He would feel something in the air; he would know he was out of place.  He would fidget a little, frown a little, and get up meekly, and slink into the street.  Human magnetism is such a subtle force.  And Madame Chanve didn’t mind in the least; she preferred a bird in the hand to a brace in the bush.  From half a dozen to a score of us dined at her long table every evening; as many more drank her appetisers in the afternoon, and came again at night for grog or coffee.  You see, it was a sort of club, a club of which Childe was at once the chairman and the object.  If we had had a written constitution, it must have begun:  ’The purpose of this association is the enjoyment of the society of Alfred Childe.’