ill-considered. My fable, credible enough at
first, and so long as my clothes were in good order, must have seemed
worse than doubtful after my coat became frayed about the edges, and
my boots began to squelch and pipe along the restaurant floors. The
allowance of one meal a day besides, though suitable enough to the state
of my finances, agreed poorly with my stomach. The restaurant was a
place I had often visited experimentally, to taste the life of students
then more unfortunate than myself; and I had never in those days entered
it without disgust, or left it without nausea. It was strange to find
myself sitting down with avidity, rising up with satisfaction, and
counting the hours that divided me from my return to such a table. But
hunger is a great magician; and so soon as I had spent my ready cash,
and could no longer fill up on bowls of chocolate or hunks of bread,
I must depend entirely on that cabman's eating-house, and upon certain
rare, long-expected, long-remembered windfalls. Dijon (for instance)
might get paid for some of his pot-boiling work, or else an old friend
would pass through Paris; and then I would be entertained to a meal
after my own soul, and contract a Latin Quarter loan, which would keep
me in tobacco and my morning coffee for a fortnight. It might be thought
the latter would appear the more important. It might be supposed that a
life, led so near the confines of actual famine, should have dulled the
nicety of my palate. On the contrary, the poorer a man's diet, the more
sharply is he set on dainties. The last of my ready cash, about thirty
francs, was deliberately squandered on a single dinner; and a great part
of my time when I was alone was passed upon the details of imaginary
feasts.

One gleam of hope visited me--an order for a bust from a rich
Southerner. He was free-handed, jolly of speech, merry of countenance;
kept me in good humour through the sittings, and when they were over,
carried me off with him to dinner and the sights of Paris. I ate well;
I laid on flesh; by all accounts, I made a favourable likeness of the
being, and I confess I thought my future was assured. But when the bust
was done, and I had despatched it across the Atlantic, I could never
so much as learn of its arrival. The blow felled me; I should have
lain down and tried no stroke to right myself, had not the honour of
my country been involved. For Dijon improved the opportunity in the
European style; informing m