g, I go home to bed, because the place closes
up; that annoys me more than anything. In the last ten years I have
passed fully six years on this bench, in my corner; and the other four in
my bed, nowhere else. I sometimes chat with the regular customers."

"But when you came to Paris what did you do at first?"

"I paid my devoirs to the Cafe de Medicis."

"What next?"

"Next I crossed the water and came here."

"Why did you take that trouble?"

"What do you mean? One cannot remain all one's life in the Latin Quarter.
The students make too much noise. Now I shall not move again. Waiter, a
'bock.'"

I began to think that he was making fun of me, and I continued:

"Come now, be frank. You have been the victim of some great sorrow; some
disappointment in love, no doubt! It is easy to see that you are a man
who has had some trouble. What age are you?"

"I am thirty, but I look forty-five, at least."

I looked him straight in the face. His wrinkled, ill-shaven face gave one
the impression that he was an old man. On the top of his head a few long
hairs waved over a skin of doubtful cleanliness. He had enormous
eyelashes, a heavy mustache, and a thick beard. Suddenly I had a kind of
vision, I know not why, of a basin filled with dirty water in which all
that hair had been washed. I said to him:

"You certainly look older than your age. You surely must have experienced
some great sorrow."

He replied:

"I tell you that I have not. I am old because I never go out into the
air. Nothing makes a man deteriorate more than the life of a cafe."

I still could not believe him.

"You must surely also have been married? One could not get as bald-headed
as you are without having been in love."

He shook his head, shaking dandruff down on his coat as he did so.

"No, I have always been virtuous."

And, raising his eyes toward the chandelier which heated our heads, he
said:

"If I am bald, it is the fault of the gas. It destroys the hair. Waiter,
a 'bock.' Are you not thirsty?"

"No, thank you. But you really interest me. Since when have you been so
morbid? Your life is not normal, it is not natural. There is something
beneath it all."

"Yes, and it dates from my infancy. I received a great shock when I was
very young, and that turned my life into darkness which will last to the
end."

"What was it?"

"You wish to know about it? Well, then, listen. You recall, of course,
the castle in which I was brought up, fo