hat was covered with lichen, like
a granite rock, and with the other he held out the classic hat with
a broad brim, filthy and battered, into which, however, there fell
abundant alms. His legs were swathed in rags and bandages, and his feet
shuffled along in miserable overshoes of woven mat-weed, inside of which
he had fastened excellent cork soles. He washed his face with certain
compounds, which gave it an appearance of forms of illness, and he
played the senility of a centenarian to the life. He reckoned himself a
hundred years old in 1830, at which time his actual age was eighty; he
was the head of the paupers of Saint-Sulpice, the master of the place,
and all those who came to beg under the arcades of the church, safe from
the persecutions of the police and beneath the protection of the beadle
and the giver of holy water, were forced to pay him a sort of tithe.

When a new heir, a bridegroom, or some godfather left the church,
saying, "Here, this is for all of you; don't torment any of my party,"
Toupillier, appointed by the beadle to receive these alms, pocketed
three-fourths, and distributed only the remaining quarter among his
henchmen, whose tribute amounted to a sou a day. Money and wine were his
last two passions; but he regulated the latter and gave himself up to
the former, with neglecting his personal comfort. He drank at night
only, after his dinner, and for twenty years he slept in the arms of
drunkenness, his last mistress.

In the early morning he was at his post with all his faculties. From
then until his dinner, which he took at Pere Lathuile's (made famous by
Charlet), he gnawed crusts of bread by way of nourishment; and he gnawed
them artistically, with an air of resignation which earned him abundant
alms. The beadle and the giver of holy water, with whom he may have had
some private understanding, would say of him:--

"He is one of the worthy poor of the church; he used to know the rector
Languet, who built Saint-Sulpice; he was for twenty years beadle of the
church before the Revolution, and he is now over a hundred years old."

This little biography, well known to all the pious attendants of the
church, was, of course, the best of his advertisements, and no hat was
so well lined as his. He bought his house in 1826, and began to invest
his money in the Funds in 1830. From the value of the two investments he
must have made something like six thousand francs a year, and probably
turned them over