aunard accepted on condition
that he should be allowed to pay for the accompanying nips of liquor.
They turned into a cafe in the Rue Saint Germain l'Auxerrois, and
bearing on its sign the name of Momus, god of play and pleasure.

At the moment they entered a lively argument broke out between two of
the frequenters of the place. One of them was a young fellow whose face
was hidden by a dense thicket of beard of several distinct shades. By
way of a balance to this wealth of hair on his chin, a precocious
baldness had despoiled his forehead, which was as bare as a billiard
ball. He vainly strove to conceal the nakedness of the land by brushing
forward a tuft of hairs so scanty that they could almost be counted. He
wore a black coat worn at the elbows, and revealing whenever he raised
his arms too high a ventilator under the armpits. His trousers might
have once been black, but his boots, which had never been new, seemed to
have already gone round the world two or three times on the feet of the
Wandering Jew.

Schaunard noticed that his new friend Colline and the young fellow with
the big beard nodded to one another.

"You know the gentleman?" said he to the philosopher.

"Not exactly," replied the latter, "but I meet him sometimes at the
National Library. I believe that he is a literary man."

"He wears the garb of one, at any rate," said Schaunard.

The individual with whom this young fellow was arguing was a man of
forty, foredoomed, by a big head wedged between his shoulders without
any break in the shape of a neck, to the thunderstroke of apoplexy.
Idiocy was written in capital letters on his low forehead, surmounted by
a little black skull-cap. His name was Monsieur Mouton, and he was a
clerk at the town hall of the 4th Arrondissement, where he acted as
registrar of deaths.

"Monsieur Rodolphe," exclaimed he, in the squeaky tones of a eunuch,
shaking the young fellow by a button of his coat which he had laid hold
of. "Do you want to know my opinion? Well, all your newspapers are of no
use whatsoever. Come now, let us put a supposititious case. I am the
father of a family, am I not? Good. I go to the cafe for a game at
dominoes? Follow my argument now."

"Go on," said Rodolphe.

"Well," continued Daddy Mouton, punctuating each of his sentences by a
blow with his fist which made the jugs and glasses on the table rattle
again. "Well, I come across the papers. What do I see? One which says
black when the other