e porcelain bowl.

Presently Blanquette retired to bed and Paragot and I talked far into
the night. Before we separated, with a comprehensive wave of the hand he
indicated the primly set furniture and polished floor.

"Did you ever behold such exquisite discomfort?"

Poor Blanquette!

CHAPTER XI

HOW far away it all seems; Paris; the Rue des Saladiers: the _atelier_
Janot where the illustrious painter called us his children and handed us
the sacred torch of his art for us to transmit, could we but keep it
aflame, to succeeding generations; the Cafe Delphine, with Madame Boin,
fat, pink, urbane, her hair a miracle of perrukery, enthroned behind the
counter; my dear Master, Paragot, himself! How far away! It is not good
to live to a hundred and fifty. The backward vista down the years is too
frighteningly long.

I found Paragot established as the Dictator of the Cafe Delphine. No one
seemed to question his position. He ruled there autocratically, having
instituted sundry ordinances disobedience to which had exile as its
penalty. The most generous of creatures, he had nevertheless ordained
that as Dictator he should go scot-free. To have declined to pay for his
absinthe or _choucroute_ would have closed the Cafe Delphine in a
student's face. He had a prescriptive right to the table under the lee
of Madame Boin's counter, and the peg behind him was sacred to his green
hat. To the students he was a mystery. No one knew where he lived, how
he subsisted, what he had been. Various rumours filled the _Quartier_.
According to one he was a Russian Nihilist escaped from Siberia.
Another, and one nearer the mark, credited him with being a kind of Rip
van Winkle revisiting old student scenes after a twenty years' slumber.
He seemed to pass his life between the Luxembourg Gardens, the Pont
Neuf and the Cafe Delphine. "Paris," he used to say, "it is the Boul'
Mich'!" Although he would turn to the absolute stranger who had been
brought as a privilege to his table and say, using the familiar second
person singular, "Buy me an evening paper," or addressing the company at
large, "Somebody is going to offer me an absinthe," and promptly order
it, he was never known to borrow money.

This eccentricity vexed the soul of the _Quartier_, where the chief use
of money is to be borrowed. To me the idea of Paragot asking needy
youngsters for the loan of five francs was exquisitely ludicrous; I am
only setting down the impression of