referring to himself. 'You're not going to forget Bibi--you'll not
forget poor old Bibi Ragoût?' would be his greeting on the _jour de
l'an_, for instance.

I have said that he would run errands or do odd jobs. The business
with which people charged him was not commonly of a nature to throw
lustre upon either agent or principal. He would do a student's dirty
work, even an _étudiante's_, in a part of Paris where work to be
accounted dirty must needs be very dirty work indeed. The least
ignominious service one used to require of him was to act as
intermediary with the pawn-shop, the _clou_; a service that he
performed to the great satisfaction of his clients, for, what with
unbounded impudence and a practice of many years, he knew (as the
French slang goes) how to make the nail bleed. We trusted him with
our valuables and our money though it was of record that he had once
'done time' for theft. But his victim had been a bourgeois from across
the river; we were confident he would deal honourably by a fellow
Quarternion--he had the _esprit de corps_.

It was Bibi in his social aspect, however, not in his professional,
who especially interested us. It was very much the fashion to ask him
to join the company at a café table, to offer him libations, and to
'draw' him--make him talk. He would talk of any subject: of art,
literature, politics; of life and morals; of the news of the day. He
would regale us with anecdotes of persons, places, events; he had
outlasted many generations of students, and had hob-and-nobbed in
their grub-period with men who had since become celebrities, as he was
now hob-and-nobbing with us. He was quite shameless, quite without
reverence for himself or others; his conversation was apt to be
highly-flavoured, scandalous, slanderous, and redundant with ambiguous