uviot's in the Halles where we can meet some real
men and women."

We went, and the Cafe Delphine knew Paragot no more.

* * * * *

After this he took to frequenting indiscriminately the various cafes of
the neighbourhood, wandering from one to the other like a lost soul
seeking a habitation. Now and again he hit upon fragments of the old
band, who had migrated from the Cafe Delphine when it became the home of
the symbolic poets. He tried in vain to collect the fragments together
in a new hostelry. But the cohesive force had gone. These queer circles
of the Latin Quarter are organisms of spontaneous growth. You cannot
create them artificially or re-create them when once they are
disintegrated. The twos and threes of students received him kindly and
listened to his talk; but his authority was gone. Once or twice when I
accompanied him I fancied that he had lost also the peculiar magic of
his vehement utterances. Cazalet also noticed a change.

"What is the matter with Paragot? He no longer talks. He preaches. _Ca
ennuie a la fin._"

Paragot a bore! It was unimaginable.

Was he paying the penalty of his past respectability? Had Melford
repressed his noble rage and frozen the genial current of his soul? It
is not unlikely. He often found himself condemned to solitary toping
over a stained newspaper, one of the most ungleeful joys known to man.
Sometimes he played dominoes with Felicien Garbure, now icily received
by the symbolists on account of an unpaid score. Whether desperation
drove him occasionally to Bubu le Vainqueur and his friends I do not
know. He was not really proud of his acquaintance with Bubu. Once he
whimsically remarked that as he was half way between Gaston de Nerac and
Berzelius Paragot, and therefore neither fish nor fowl, he could not
find an appropriate hole in Paris. But when his hair and his beard and
his finger nails had attained their old luxuriance of growth, and he
was in every way Paragot again, the desired haven remained still
unfindable. There were taverns without number and drink in oceans, and
the life of Paris surged up and down the Boulevards as stimulating as
ever: but the heart of Paragot cried out for something different. He
took the old violin from its dirty case and spent hours in the Rue des
Saladiers trying to fiddle the divine despair out of his system.
Sometimes he would call upon Blanquette to accompany him on her almost
forgotten zither.