table were small pitchers of beer and glasses; within reach was an old
stone jar from Beauvais, full of tobacco. The beer was good, the tobacco
dry, and the glasses were never empty.

And it was not silly subjects that were discussed here, worldly
babblings, or gossiping about absent friends, but the great questions
that ruled humanity: philosophy, politics, society, and religion.

Formed at first of friends, or, at least, of comrades who had worked and
suffered together, these reunions had enlarged gradually, until one day
the rooms at the Hotel des Medicis became a 'parlotte' where preachers of
ideas and of new religions, thinkers, reformers, apostles, politicians,
aesthetes, and even babblers in search of ears more or less complaisant
that would listen to them, met together. Any one might come who wished,
and if one did not enter there exactly as one would enter an ordinary
hotel, it was sufficient to be brought by an habitue in order to have the
right to a pipe, some beer, and to speak.

One of the habitues, Brigard, was a species of apostle, who had acquired
celebrity by practising in his daily life the ideas that he professed and
preached. Comte de Brigard by birth, he began by renouncing his title,
which made him a vassal of the respect of men and of social conventions;
an instructor of law, he could easily have made a thousand or twelve
hundred francs a month, but he arranged the number and the price of his
lessons so that each day brought him only ten francs in order that he
might not be a slave to money; living with a woman whom he loved, he had
always insisted, although he had two daughters, on living with her 'en
union libre', and in not acknowledging his children legally, because the
law debased the ties which attached him to them and lessened his duties;
it was conscience that sanctioned these duties; and nature, like