As soon as I had seated myself beside him, this individual said to me in a quiet tone of voice: 

“How goes it?”

I turned sharply round and closely scanned his features, whereupon he continued: 

“I see you do not recognize me.”

“No, I do not.”

“Des Barrets.”

I was stupefied.  It was Count Jean des Barrets, my old college chum.

I seized him by the hand, and was so dumbfounded that I could find nothing to say.  At length I managed to stammer out: 

“And you, how goes it with you?”

He responded placidly: 

“I get along as I can.”

“What are you doing now?” I asked.

“You see what I am doing,” he answered quit resignedly.

I felt my face getting red.  I insisted: 

“But every day?”

“Every day it is the same thing,” was his reply, accompanied with a thick puff of tobacco smoke.

He then tapped with a sou on the top of the marble table, to attract the attention of the waiter, and called out: 

“Waiter, two ‘bocks.’”

A voice in the distance repeated: 

“Two bocks for the fourth table.”

Another voice, more distant still, shouted out: 

“Here they are!”

Immediately a man with a white apron appeared, carrying two “bocks,” which he set down, foaming, on the table, spilling some of the yellow liquid on the sandy floor in his haste.

Des Barrets emptied his glass at a single draught and replaced it on the table, while he sucked in the foam that had been left on his mustache.  He next asked: 

“What is there new?”

I really had nothing new to tell him.  I stammered: 

“Nothing, old man.  I am a business man.”

In his monotonous tone of voice he said: 

“Indeed, does it amuse you?”

“No, but what can I do?  One must do something!”

“Why should one?”

“So as to have occupation.”

“What’s the use of an occupation?  For my part, I do nothing at all, as you see, never anything.  When one has not a sou I can understand why one should work.  But when one has enough to live on, what’s the use?  What is the good of working?  Do you work for yourself, or for others?  If you work for yourself, you do it for your own amusement, which is all right; if you work for others, you are a fool.”

Then, laying his pipe on the marble table, he called out anew: 

“Waiter, a ‘bock.’” And continued:  “It makes me thirsty to keep calling so.  I am not accustomed to that sort of thing.  Yes, yes, I do nothing.  I let things slide, and I am growing old.  In dying I shall have nothing to regret.  My only remembrance will be this beer hall.  No wife, no children, no cares, no sorrows, nothing.  That is best.”

He then emptied the glass which had been brought him, passed his tongue over his lips, and resumed his pipe.