and the pride of them: he was a sight worth seeing, spirited,
picturesque, prepossessing. You could not have passed him without
noticing him--without wondering who he was, confident he was
somebody--without admiring him, and feeling that there went a man it
would be interesting to know.

He was, indeed, charming to know; he was the hero, the idol, of a
little sect of worshippers, young fellows who loved nothing better
than to sit at his feet. On the Rive Gauche, to be sure, we are, for
the most part, birds of passage; a student arrives, tarries a little,
then departs. So, with the exits and entrances of seniors and
_nouveaux_, the personnel of old Childe's following varied from season
to season; but numerically it remained pretty much the same. He had a
studio, with a few living-rooms attached, somewhere up in the
fastnesses of Montparnasse, though it was seldom thither that one went
to seek him. He received at his café, the Café Bleu--the Café Bleu
which has since blown into the monster café of the Quarter, the
noisiest, the rowdiest, the most flamboyant. But I am writing (alas)
of twelve, thirteen, fifteen years ago; in those days the Café Bleu
consisted of a single oblong room--with a sanded floor, a dozen
tables, and two waiters, Eugène and Hippolyte--where Madame Chanve,
the _patronne_, in lofty insulation behind her counter, reigned, if
you please, but where Childe, her principal client, governed. The
bottom of the shop, at any rate, was reserved exclusively to his use.
There he dined, wrote his letters, dispensed his hospitalities; he had
his own piano there, if you can believe me, his foils and
boxing-gloves; from the absinthe hour till bed-time there was his
habitat, his den. And woe to the passing stranger who, mistaking the
Café Bleu for an ordinary house of call, ventured, during that
consecrated period, to drop in. Nothing would be said, nothing done;