After paying for the refreshments, Sillery gave his arm to Amedee, and, followed by the three Merovingians, they left the cafe.  Forcing a way through the crowd which obstructed the sidewalk of the Faubourg Montmartre he conducted his guests to Pere Lebuffle’s table d’hote, which was situated on the third floor of a dingy old house in the Rue Lamartine, where a sickening odor of burnt meat greeted them as soon as they reached the top of the stairs.  They found there, seated before a tablecloth remarkable for the number of its wine-stains, two or three wild-looking heads of hair, and four or five shaggy beards, to whom Pere Lebuffle was serving soup, aided by a tired-looking servant.  The name under which Sillery had designated the proprietor of the table d’hote might have been a nickname, for this stout person in his shirt-sleeves recommended himself to one’s attentions by his bovine face and his gloomy, wandering eyes.  To Amedee’s amazement, Pere Lebuffle called the greater part of his clients “thou,” and as soon as the newcomers were seated at table, Amedee asked Sillery, in a low voice, the cause of this familiarity.

“It is caused by the hard times, my dear Violette,” responded the editor of ‘La Guepe’ as he unfolded his napkin.  “There is no longer a ‘Maecenas’ or ‘Lawrence the Magnificent.’  The last patron of literature and art is Pere Lebufle.  This wretched cook, who has perhaps never read a book or seen a picture, has a fancy for painters and poets, and allows them to cultivate that plant, Debt, which, contrary to other vegetables, grows all the more, the less it is watered with instalments.  We must pardon the good man,” said he, lowering his voice, “his little sin—­a sort of vanity.  He wishes to be treated like a comrade and friend by the artists.  Those who have several accounts brought forward upon his ledger, arrive at the point of calling him ‘thou,’ and I, alas! am of that number.  Thanks to that, I am going to make you drink something a little less purgative than the so-called wine which is turning blue in that carafe, and of which I advise you to be suspicious.  I say, Lebuffle, my friend here, Monsieur Amedee Violette, will be, sooner or later, a celebrated poet.  Treat him accordingly, my good fellow, and go and get us a bottle of Moulins-Vent.”

The conversation meanwhile became general between the bearded and long-haired men.  Is it necessary to say that they were all animated, both politicians and ‘litterateurs’, with the most revolutionary sentiments?  At the very beginning, with the sardines, which evidently had been pickled in lamp-oil, a terribly hairy man, the darkest of them all, with a beard that grew up into its owner’s eyes and then sprung out again in tufts from his nose and ears, presented some elegiac regrets to the memory of Jean-Paul Marat, and declared that at the next revolution it would be necessary to realize the programme of that delightful friend of the people, and make one hundred thousand heads fall.