repeated, to a soft and melancholy tune.

"To think that at this hour there are in Paris more than a hundred
thousand chops on the gridiron," said Marcel.

"And as many steaks," added Rodolphe.

By an ironical contrast, while the four friends were putting to one
another the terrible daily problem of how to get their breakfast, the
waiters of a restaurant on the lower floor of the house kept shouting
out the customers' orders.

"Will those scoundrels never be quiet?" said Marcel. "Every word is like
the stroke of a pick, hollowing out my stomach."

"The wind is in the north," said Colline, gravely, pointing to a
weathercock on a neighboring roof. "We shall not breakfast today, the
elements are opposed to it."

"How so?" inquired Marcel.

"It is an atmospheric phenomenon I have noted," said the philosopher. "A
wind from the north almost always means abstinence, as one from the
south usually means pleasure and good cheer. It is what philosophy calls
a warning from above."

Gustave Colline's fasting jokes were savage ones.

At that moment Schaunard, who had plunged one of his hands into the
abyss that served him as a pocket, withdrew it with a yell of pain.

"Help, there is something in my coat!" he cried, trying to free his
hand, nipped fast in the claws of a live lobster.

To the cry he had uttered, another one replied. It came from Marcel,
who, mechanically putting his hand into his pocket, had there discovered
a silver mine that he had forgotten--that is to say, the hundred and
fifty francs which Medici had given him the day before in payment for
"The Passage of the Red Sea."

Memory returned at the same moment to the Bohemians.

"Bow down, gentlemen," said Marcel, spreading out on the table a pile of
five-franc pieces, amongst which glittered some new louis.

"One would think they were alive," said Colline.

"Sweet sounds!" said Schaunard, chinking the gold pieces together.

"How pretty these medals are!" said Rodolphe. "One would take them for
fragments of sunshine. If I were a king I would have no other small
change, and would have them stamped with my mistress's portrait."

"To think that there is a country where there are mere pebbles," said
Schaunard. "The Americans used to give four of them for two sous. I had
an ancestor who went to America. He was interred by the savages in their
stomachs. It was a misfortune for the family."

"Ah, but where does this animal come from?" inquired Marcel, loo