witnesses the most carefully
calculated moves; there one hears the most vulgar conversation; for
since it is possible to be at once a man of intellect and a great
chess-player, like Legal, so also one may be at once a great
chess-player and a very silly person, like Foubert or Mayot.

One afternoon I was there, observing much, speaking rarely, and
hearing as little as possible, when one of the most singular
personages came up to me that ever was produced by this land of ours,
where surely God has never caused a dearth of singular characters.
He is a combination of high-mindedness and baseness, of sound
understanding and folly; in his head the conceptions of honor and
dishonor must be strangely tangled, for the good qualities with which
nature has endowed him he displays without boastfulness, and the bad
qualities without shame. For the rest, he is firmly built, has an
extraordinary power of imagination, and possesses an uncommonly strong
pair of lungs. Should you ever meet him and succeed in escaping from
the charm of his originality, it must be by stopping both ears with
your fingers or by precipitate flight. Heavens, what terrible lungs!

And nothing is less like him than he himself. Sometimes he is thin and
wasted, like a man in the last stages of consumption; you could count
his teeth through his cheeks; you would think he had not tasted food
for several days, or had come from La Trappe.

A month later he is fattened and filled out as if he had never left
the banquets of the rich or had been fed among the Bernardines.
To-day, with soiled linen, torn trousers, clad in rags, and almost
barefoot, he passes with bowed head, avoids those whom he meets, till
one is tempted to call him and bestow upon him an alms. To-morrow,
powdered, well groomed, well dressed, and well shod, he carries his
head high, lets himself be seen, and you would take him almost for a
respectable man.

So he lives from day to day, sad or merry, according to the
circumstances. His first care, when he rises in the morning, is to
take thought where he is to dine. After dinner he bethinks himself of
some opportunity to procure supper, and with the night come new cares.
Sometimes he goes on foot to his little attic, which is his home if
the landlady, impatient at long arrears of rent, has not taken the key
away from him. Sometimes he goes to one of the taverns in the suburbs,
and there, between a bit of bread and a mug of beer, awaits the day.
If