Lebuffle, my friend
here, Monsieur Amedee Violette, will be, sooner or later, a celebrated
poet. Treat him accordingly, my good fellow, and go and get us a bottle
of Moulins-Vent."

The conversation meanwhile became general between the bearded and
long-haired men. Is it necessary to say that they were all animated, both
politicians and 'litterateurs', with the most revolutionary sentiments?
At the very beginning, with the sardines, which evidently had been
pickled in lamp-oil, a terribly hairy man, the darkest of them all, with
a beard that grew up into its owner's eyes and then sprung out again in
tufts from his nose and ears, presented some elegiac regrets to the
memory of Jean-Paul Marat, and declared that at the next revolution it
would be necessary to realize the programme of that delightful friend of
the people, and make one hundred thousand heads fall.

"By thunder, Flambard, you have a heavy hand!" exclaimed one of the least
important of beards, one of those that degenerate into side-whiskers as
they become conservative. "One hundred thousand heads!"

"It is the minimum," replied the sanguinary beard.

Now, it had just been revealed to Amedee that under this ferocious beard
was concealed a photographer, well known for his failures, and the young
man could not help thinking that if the one hundred thousand heads in
question had posed before the said Flambard's camera, he would not show
such impatience to see them fall under the guillotine.

The conversation of the men with the luxuriant hair was none the less
anarchical when the roast appeared, which sprung from the legendary
animal called 'vache enragee'. The possessor of the longest and thickest
of all the shock heads, which spread over the shoulders of a young story
writer--between us, be it said, he made a mistake in not combing it
oftener--imparted to his brothers the subject for his new novel, which
should have made the hair of the others bristle with terror; for the
principal episode in this agreeable fiction was the desecration of a dead
body in a cemetery by moonlight. There was a sort of hesitation in the
audience, a slight movement of recoil, and Sillery, with a dash of
raillery in his glance, asked the novelist:

"Why the devil do you write such a story?"

The novelist replied, in a thundering tone:

"To astonish the bourgeoisie!"

And nobody made the slightest objection.

To "astonish the bourgeoisie" was the dearest hope and most ardent