n the _jour de
l'an_, for instance.

I have said that he would run errands or do odd jobs. The business
with which people charged him was not commonly of a nature to throw
lustre upon either agent or principal. He would do a student's dirty
work, even an _etudiante's_, in a part of Paris where work to be
accounted dirty must needs be very dirty work indeed. The least
ignominious service one used to require of him was to act as
intermediary with the pawn-shop, the _clou_; a service that he
performed to the great satisfaction of his clients, for, what with
unbounded impudence and a practice of many years, he knew (as the
French slang goes) how to make the nail bleed. We trusted him with
our valuables and our money though it was of record that he had once
'done time' for theft. But his victim had been a bourgeois from across
the river; we were confident he would deal honourably by a fellow
Quarternion--he had the _esprit de corps_.

It was Bibi in his social aspect, however, not in his professional,
who especially interested us. It was very much the fashion to ask him
to join the company at a cafe table, to offer him libations, and to
'draw' him--make him talk. He would talk of any subject: of art,
literature, politics; of life and morals; of the news of the day. He
would regale us with anecdotes of persons, places, events; he had
outlasted many generations of students, and had hob-and-nobbed in
their grub-period with men who had since become celebrities, as he was
now hob-and-nobbing with us. He was quite shameless, quite without
reverence for himself or others; his conversation was apt to be
highly-flavoured, scandalous, slanderous, and redundant with ambiguous
jests; yet--what made it fascinating and tragical--it was unmistakably
the conversation of an educated man. His voice was soft, his accent
cultivated, his sentences were nicely chiselled. He knew the _mot
juste_, the happy figure, the pat allusion. His touch was light; his
address could be almost courtly, so that, on suddenly looking up, you
would feel a vague surprise to behold in the speaker, not a polished
man of the world in his dress-suit, but this beery old one-eyed
vagabond in tatters. It was strange to witness his transitions. At one
moment he would be holding high discourse of Goethe, and translating
illustrative passages into classic French; at the next, whining about
_la deche_, and begging for a _petite salete de vingt sous_, in the
cant of the Pari