uld be
a real kindness to read the papers to me.... But there you are, there's
no chance, she simply doesn't want to.... If my daughter was still at
home, she would; but since I became blind, I've sent her to the
Notre-Dame-des-Arts, so there'd be one less mouth to feed....

"Now there's another one sent to test me! She's only had nine years on
earth and already she's had every imaginable illness... And miserable!
And ugly! Uglier than I am, if that's possible ... a real monster!...
What do you expect? I have never known how to face up to my
responsibilities....

"Well, what good company I turned out to be, boring you with my family
business. And what's it all got to do with you?... Come on, give me a
bit more brandy. I'd better be off. When I leave here, I am off to the
public information service and the ushers are not famed for their sense
of humour. They're all retired teachers."

I poured him some brandy. He sipped it and then seemed moved by
something.... Suddenly, on a whim, I think, he got up, glass in hand,
and briefly moved his blind, viper-like head around, with the amiable
smile of someone about to speak, and then speaking in a strident voice,
as if holding forth to a banquet for two hundred,

"To the arts! To literature! To the press!"

And there he stood, spouting a toast for fully ten minutes. It was the
most wild, the most marvellous improvisation which his clown's brain
could devise.

"Imagine a year's-end revue entitled _Collection of Letters of 186*_;
about our literati, our gossip, our quarrels, all the idiocies of an
eccentric world, a cesspool of ink, hell in miniature, where you cut
your own throat, disembowel yourself, rob yourself, and outtalk the
bourgeoisie about interest rates and money. Where they let you starve
to death better than anywhere else; all our cowardice and woes; old
baron T... of la Tombola going away with a _tut-tut_ to the Tuileries
with his begging bowl and his flowery clothes. Then there's the year's
deaths, the burial announcements, the never changing funeral oration of
the delegate: the _Dearly missed! Poor dear!_ over some unlucky soul
who was refused the means to bury himself; the suicides; and those gone
insane. Imagine all that, told, itemised, and gesticulated by an orator
of genius, and you will then have some idea of what Bixiou's
improvisation was about."

* * * * *

The toast over, his glass empty, he asked me what the time was, and