“One artichoke, four; one half-cup, four; and bread, one sou. Nine sous altogether.”
“Here it is,” returned the vocalist, and out she went, humming, “Cet amour que Dieu me donne.”
“I say! She can take the la!” remarked a mysterious individual sitting at Schaunard’s table behind a rampart of old books.
“Take it!” ejaculated Schaunard. “I rather think she takes it and keeps it to herself. Besides,” he added, pointing to the plate on which Lucia di Lammermoor had just partaken of her artichoke, “nobody has any idea what it is to steep your headnotes in vinegar.”
“It is a powerful acid, and that is a fact,” admitted the other. “The city of Orleans produces a brand which justly enjoys a great reputation.”
Schaunard took a closer look at this person, who angled thus for conversation. The fixed gaze of the man’s big blue eyes, which always seemed to be looking out for something, gave to his face that expression of smug serenity which you may remark in the visages of seminarists. His complexion was of the colour of old ivory, except for a dab of opaque brick-red upon the cheeks; his mouth might have been drawn by a student of the first principles of design (if somebody had given a jog to the draughtsman’s elbow). The lips turned up a little, negro-fashion, disclosing a set of dog’s teeth; the double chin below reposed on the folds of a white cravat tied so that one end menaced the firmament while the other pointed to earth. The hair of this personage flowed in a yellow torrent from under the prodigious brim of a tawny-brown felt hat. He wore a long, nut-brown overcoat with a cape, a threadbare garment, rough as a nutmeg-grater. A mass of papers and pamphlets protruded from its yawning pockets. He sat with a book propped up before him on the table, careless of Schaunard’s scrutiny, eating his choucroûte garnie with evident relish, for sounds of unqualified satisfaction escaped him at frequent intervals; and now again, taking a pencil from behind his ear, he jotted down a note in the margin of the work which he was perusing.
Schaunard all at once struck his knife against a glass. “How about my stewed rabbit, eh?” he called.
The waitress came up with a plate in her hand.
“Monsieur,” she said, “stewed rabbit is off the bill. Here is the last portion, and this gentleman ordered it,” she added, setting it down in front of the man of books.
“Sacrebleu!” cried Schaunard. And in that “Sacrebleu” there was such a depth of melancholy disappointment that it went to the heart of the man of books. He effected a breach in the rampart of volumes, and pushed the plate through the gap, saying in his most dulcet tones—
“May I venture, monsieur, to entreat you to share this dish with me?”
“I cannot think of depriving you of it, monsieur.”
“Then would you deprive me of the pleasure of obliging you, monsieur?”
“Since you put it so, monsieur——” And Schaunard held out his plate.
“With your permission,” observed the stranger, “I will not offer you the head.”
“Oh, monsieur,” exclaimed Schaunard, “I shall not be the loser.”
But drawing back his plate he perceived that the stranger had helped him to the very morsel which he particularly desired (so he said) to keep for himself.
“Well, well,” Schaunard growled inwardly, “what was he after, with his politeness?”
“If the head is the noblest part of man,” continued the other, “it is the most disagreeable member of the rabbit. So a great many persons cannot endure it. With me it is different; I am extremely fond of it.”
“In that case I feel the liveliest regret that you should have deprived yourself on my account.”
“What? Pardon me,” said the man of books, “I kept the head for myself. I even had the honour to observe to you that——”
“Allow me,” said Schaunard, pushing his plate across for inspection. “What is this morsel?”
“Just heaven! What do I see? Ye gods! What, another head! ’Tis a bicephalous rabbit!”
“Bi——?”
“—cephalous. From the Greek. Indeed M. de Buffon (he who always wrote in full dress) cites examples of this natural curiosity. Well, upon my word! I am not sorry to have partaken of the phenomenon.”
Thanks to this incident, conversation did not languish. Schaunard, not to be behindhand in civility, called for an extra bottle. The bookman ordered another. Schaunard contributed a salad to the feast; the bookman, dessert. By eight o’clock there were six empty bottles on the table. Communicativeness, watered by libations of thin liquor, had brought them both insensibly to the point of autobiography, and they were as well acquainted as if they had been brought up together. The bookman having listened to Schaunard’s confidences, informed him in return that his name was Gustave Colline, that he exercised the profession of philosopher, and made a living by giving instruction in mathematics, pedagogy, botany and numerous other sciences which end in y.
What little money Colline made by giving lessons at pupils’ residences, he spent upon old books. His long, nut-brown overcoat was known to every bookstall on the quays from the Pont de la Concorde to the Pont Saint Michel, where his purchases were so numerous that it would have taken a lifetime and more to read them through. Nobody, he himself least of all, could tell what he did with his books. But the hobby had grown to the dimensions of a passion, so that if he chanced to go home at night without a new acquisition, he would adopt the saying of the Emperor Titus, and cry, “I have lost the day!” Schaunard was so fascinated by his engaging manners, by his talk (a mosaic of every known style), and by the atrocious puns which enlivened his conversation, that he asked leave on the spot to add Colline’s name to the famous list mentioned above. And when they left La Mère Cadet, towards nine o’clock, they had, to every appearance, carried on a dialogue with the bottle, and were passably disguised in liquor.
Colline proposed a cup of coffee, Schaunard agreed on condition that he should provide liqueurs. They turned accordingly into a café, at the sign of “Momus,” god of Sports and Laughter,* in the Rue Saint Germain l’Auxerrois.
A lively discussion was going on, as they entered, between two frequenters of that public establishment. One of these was a young man whose face was completely lost to sight in the depths of an enormous bushy beard of various shades of colour. By way of contrast, however, to this prodigious growth on cheek and chin, premature baldness, setting in above, had left his forehead as bare as a knee, save for a few straggling hairs (so few that you might count them), which strove in vain to hide its nakedness. A black coat, tonsured at the elbows, gave glimpses of other openings for ventilation at the armholes, whenever the wearer raised his arms; his trousers might possibly have been black, once; but his boots had never been new, the Wandering Jew might have tramped two or three times round the world in them already.
Schaunard noticed that his friend Colline exchanged a greeting with this person.
“Do you know that gentleman?” he asked the philosopher.
“Not exactly,” returned the other, “only I come across him sometimes at the Library. I believe he is a literary man.”
“His coat looks like it, at all events.”
The individual engaged in argument with the owner of the beard was a man of forty or so, marked out by nature, as it would seem, for an apoplectic seizure, to judge from the big head which reposed between his shoulders, without a neck between. “Idiocy” might be read in capital letters on the flattened forehead under his skull cap. M. Mouton—for that was his name—was registrar of deaths at the mayor’s office, in the Fourth Arrondissement.
“M. Rodolphe!” he was exclaiming in a falsetto voice, while