his homely, middle-aged mistress made the coffee
and found the cigarettes; it was obviously she who had given the room its
character; her canaries in several cages hanging in the window, and her
sentimental lithographs nailed here and there among the nude drawings and
newspaper caricatures of her lover as various kinds of monkey, which he
had pinned upon the wall. A slovenly, ragged man came in, his trousers
belted with a piece of rope and an opera hat upon his head. She drew a box
over to the fire, and he sat down, now holding the opera hat upon his
knees, and I think he must have acquired it very lately for he kept
constantly closing and opening it. Verlaine introduced him by saying, "He
is a poor man, but a good fellow, and is so like Louis XI to look at that
we call him Louis the XIth." I remember that Verlaine talked of Victor
Hugo who was "a supreme poet, but a volcano of mud as well as of flame,"
and of Villiers de L'Isle Adam who was "exalte" and wrote excellent
French; and of _In Memoriam_, which he had tried to translate and could
not. "Tennyson is too noble, too Anglais; when he should have been
brokenhearted, he had many reminiscences."

At Verlaine's burial, but a few months after, his mistress quarrelled with
a publisher at the graveside as to who owned the sheet by which the body
had been covered, and Louis XI stole fourteen umbrellas that he found
leaning against a tree in the Cemetery.

XIX

I am certain of one date, for I have gone to much trouble to get it right.
I met John Synge for the first time in the Autumn of 1896, when I was one
and thirty, and he four and twenty. I was at the Hotel Corneille instead
of my usual lodging, and why I cannot remember for I thought it expensive.
Synge's biographer says that you boarded there for a pound a week, but I
was accustomed to cook my own breakfast, and dine at an anarchist
restaurant in the Boulevard S. Jacques for little over a shilling. Some
one, whose name I forget, told me there was a poor Irishman at the top of
the house, and presently introduced us. Synge had come lately from Italy,
and had played his fiddle to peasants in the Black Forest; six months of
travel upon fifty pounds; and was now reading French literature and
writing morbid and melancholy verse. He told me that he had learned Irish
at Trinity College, so I urged him to go to the Aran Islands and find a
life that had never been expressed in literature, instead of a life where
all had b