with sundry bottles.

Colline offered to stand coffee, and Schaunard accepted on condition
that he should be allowed to pay for the accompanying nips of liquor.
They turned into a cafe in the Rue Saint Germain l'Auxerrois, and
bearing on its sign the name of Momus, god of play and pleasure.

At the moment they entered a lively argument broke out between two of
the frequenters of the place. One of them was a young fellow whose face
was hidden by a dense thicket of beard of several distinct shades. By
way of a balance to this wealth of hair on his chin, a precocious
baldness had despoiled his forehead, which was as bare as a billiard
ball. He vainly strove to conceal the nakedness of the land by brushing
forward a tuft of hairs so scanty that they could almost be counted. He
wore a black coat worn at the elbows, and revealing whenever he raised
his arms too high a ventilator under the armpits. His trousers might
have once been black, but his boots, which had never been new, seemed to
have already gone round the world two or three times on the feet of the
Wandering Jew.

Schaunard noticed that his new friend Colline and the young fellow with
the big beard nodded to one another.

"You know the gentleman?" said he to the philosopher.

"Not exactly," replied the latter, "but I meet him sometimes at the
National Library. I believe that he is a literary man."

"He wears the garb of one, at any rate," said Schaunard.