I looked at him in astonishment, and said: 

“But you have not always been like that?”

“Pardon me; ever since I left college.”

“That is not a proper life to lead, my dear fellow; it is simply horrible.  Come, you must have something to do, you must love something, you must have friends.”

“No, I get up at noon, I come here, I have my breakfast, I drink my beer, I remain until the evening, I have my dinner, I drink beer.  Then about half-past one in the morning, I go home to bed, because the place closes up; that annoys me more than anything.  In the last ten years I have passed fully six years on this bench, in my corner; and the other four in my bed, nowhere else.  I sometimes chat with the regular customers.”

“But when you came to Paris what did you do at first?”

“I paid my devoirs to the Cafe de Medicis.”

“What next?”

“Next I crossed the water and came here.”

“Why did you take that trouble?”

“What do you mean?  One cannot remain all one’s life in the Latin Quarter.  The students make too much noise.  Now I shall not move again.  Waiter, a ‘bock.’”

I began to think that he was making fun of me, and I continued: 

“Come now, be frank.  You have been the victim of some great sorrow; some disappointment in love, no doubt!  It is easy to see that you are a man who has had some trouble.  What age are you?”

“I am thirty, but I look forty-five, at least.”

I looked him straight in the face.  His wrinkled, ill-shaven face gave one the impression that he was an old man.  On the top of his head a few long hairs waved over a skin of doubtful cleanliness.  He had enormous eyelashes, a heavy mustache, and a thick beard.  Suddenly I had a kind of vision, I know not why, of a basin filled with dirty water in which all that hair had been washed.  I said to him: 

“You certainly look older than your age.  You surely must have experienced some great sorrow.”

He replied: 

“I tell you that I have not.  I am old because I never go out into the air.  Nothing makes a man deteriorate more than the life of a cafe.”

I still could not believe him.

“You must surely also have been married?  One could not get as bald-headed as you are without having been in love.”

He shook his head, shaking dandruff down on his coat as he did so.

“No, I have always been virtuous.”

And, raising his eyes toward the chandelier which heated our heads, he said: 

“If I am bald, it is the fault of the gas.  It destroys the hair.  Waiter, a ‘bock.’  Are you not thirsty?”

“No, thank you.  But you really interest me.  Since when have you been so morbid?  Your life is not normal, it is not natural.  There is something beneath it all.”

“Yes, and it dates from my infancy.  I received a great shock when I was very young, and that turned my life into darkness which will last to the end.”