med; "c'est absolument son portrait crache!"
"Do you know the original?" I asked. "Mais, sans doute, je le connais,
c'est un ami de mon fils, du reste, toute le monde connait Bouginier."
"But I do not know him," I protested, feeling very much ashamed of my
ignorance. "Ah, you! that's quite a different thing; you do not live in
the Quartier-Latin, but everybody there knows him." From that moment I
knew no rest until I had made the acquaintance of Bouginier, which was
not very difficult; and through him I became a frequent visitor to "La
Childebert," which deserves a detailed description, because, though it
was a familiar haunt to many Parisians of my time with a taste for
Bohemian society, I doubt whether many Englishmen, save (the late) Mr.
Blanchard Jerrold and one of the Mayhews, ever set foot there, and even
they could not have seen it in its prime.

But before I deal with "La Childebert," I must say a few words about
Bouginier, who, contrary to my expectations, owed his fame solely to his
_proboscis_. He utterly disappeared from the artistic horizon in a few
years, but his features still live in the memory of those who knew him
through a statuette in _terra cotta_ modelled by Dantan the younger.
During the reign of Louis-Philippe, Dantan took to that branch of art as
a relaxation from his more serious work; he finally abandoned it after
he had made Madame Malibran burst into tears, instead of making her
laugh, as he intended, at her own caricature. Those curious in such
matters may see Bouginier's presentment in a medallion on the
frontispiece of the Passage du Caire, amidst the Egyptian divinities and
sphinxes. As a matter of course, the spectator asks himself why this
modern countenance should find itself in such incongruous company, and
he comes almost naturally to the conclusion that Bouginier was the
owner, or perhaps the architect, of this arcade, almost exclusively
tenanted--until very recently--by lithographers, printers, etc. The
conclusion, however, would be an erroneous one. Bouginier, as far as is
known, never had any property in Paris or elsewhere; least of all was he
vain enough to perpetuate his own features in that manner, even if he
had had an opportunity, but he had not; seeing that he was not an
architect, but simply a painter, of no great talents certainly, but,
withal, modest and sensible, and as such opposed to, or at any rate not
sharing, the crazes of mediaevalism, romanticism, and other _isms