wait
for me, I can offer you a seat in my carriage." How willingly would I
accept, but I have no overcoat. What would Ricord think of a
Wallachian prince without furs, and shivering in his dress coat? Let
me escape quickly, and hurry home on foot, through the snow and fog,
sooner than allow my poverty to be seen. Always half-blind and more
confused than ever, I reach the door and slip out, not, however,
without getting somehow entangled in the tapestries. "Won't monsieur
take his coat?" a footman calls after me.

There I was, at two o'clock in the morning, far from my home, alone in
the streets, hungry and frozen, with the devil's own self, a badly
lined purse in my pocket. But hunger inspired me with a brilliant
idea: "Suppose I go to the markets." I had often heard of the markets,
and a certain Gaidras, whose establishment remained open all night,
and where for the sum of three sous they provided a plateful of
succulent cabbage soup. By Jove, yes, to the markets I would go. I
would sit down at those tables like the veriest prowling vagabond. All
my pride had vanished. The wind is icy cold; hunger makes me
desperate. "My kingdom for a horse," said another prince, and I say to
myself as I trot along: "My principality, my Wallachian principality,
for a basin of good soup in a warm corner."

Gaidras' establishment looks a mere filthy hovel, all slimy and badly
lighted, thrust back beneath the colonnades of the old market-place.
Often and often since then, when noctambulism was the fashion, have
we, future great men, spent whole nights there, elbows on table,
amidst tobacco smoke and literary talk. But at the first I must own,
notwithstanding my hunger, I almost drew back at the sight of those
blackened dingy walls, that dense smoke, those late sitters, snoring
with their backs against the wall or lapping their soup like dogs; the
amazing caps of the Don Juans of the gutter, the enormous drab felt
hats of the market porters, and the healthy rough blouse of the market
gardener side by side with the greasy tatters of the prowler of the
night. Nevertheless I entered, and I may at once add that my black
coat found its fellows. Black coats that own no great coat are not
rare in Paris after midnight in the winter, and they are hungry enough
to eat three sous' worth of cabbage soup. The cabbage soup was,
however, exquisite; full of perfume as a garden, and smoking like a
crater. I had two helpings, altho a custom peculiar to th