e had shown the white feather in battle; a
fourth, that he had cheated at cards. Bibi would neither admit nor
deny any of these imputations, nor would he manifest the faintest
resentment when they were discussed in his presence. He would parry
them, smiling complaisantly: and (if it be considered that they were
all, as it turned out, abominably false) that seems to show better
than anything else to what abysmal depths the man had sunk. Perhaps it
shows also, incidentally, how very heartless and unimaginative young
people in the Latin Quarter used to be. I have seen Bibi swagger; I
have seen him sullen, insolent, sarcastic; I have seen him angry, I
have heard him swear; but anything like honestly indignant I never saw
him.

I remember one night in the Cafe de la Source, when Fil de Fer had
been treating him to brandy and trying to get him to tell his story; I
remember his suddenly turning his one eye in the direction of us men,
and launching himself upon a long flight of rhetoric. I can see him
still--his unwashed red hand toying with the stem of his
liqueur-glass, or rising from time to time to push his hair from his
forehead, over which it dangled in soggy wisps, while, in a
dinner-table tone of voice, he uttered these somewhat surprising
sentiments.

'You would be horrified, you others, lads of twenty, with your careers
before you,--you would be horrified if you thought it possible that
you might end your days like Bibi, would you not? You wish to walk a
clean path, to prosper, to be respectable, to wear sweet linen, to die
honoured, regretted. And yet, believe me, we poor devils who fail, who
fall, who sink to the bottom, we have our compensation. We see vastly
more of the realities of life than those do who succeed and rise to
the top. We have an experience that is more essential, more
significant. We get the real flavour of life. We sweat in the mire; we
drink the lees. But the truth is in the mire; the real flavour is in
the lees. Oh, we have our compensation. We wear rags, we eat scraps
fit for dogs, we sleep under the arches of bridges. We lie in gaols,
we are hustled by the police, we are despised by all men. If you offer
us drink, and stop to gossip with us for a moment, you only do so to
please yourselves with the spectacle of our infamy, our infirmity, our
incongruity. We have lost all hope, all self-respect. We are ships
that have come to grief, that are foundering, that will presently go
down. Yet we ar