He was one of the institutions of the Latin Quarter, one of the least
admirable. He haunted the Boulevard St. Michel, hung round the cafés,
begged of the passing stranger, picked up cigarette-ends, and would,
at a pinch, run errands, or do odd jobs.
With his sallow, wrinkled skin, his jungle of grey beard, his thick
grey hair, matted and shiny, covering his ears and falling about his
shoulders, he was scarcely an attractive-looking person. Besides, he
had lost an eye; and its empty socket irresistibly drew your gaze--an
abhorrent vacuum. His clothes would be the odds and ends of students'
offcasts, in the last stages of disintegration. He had a chronic
stoop; always aimed his surviving eye obliquely at you, from a bent
head; and walked with a sort of hang-dog shuffle that seemed a general
self-denunciation.
Where he slept, whether under a roof or on the pavement, and when,
were among his secrets. No matter how late or how early you were
abroad, you would be sure to encounter Bibi, wide-awake, somewhere in
the Boul' Miche, between the Luxembourg and the Rue des Ecoles. That
was his beat. Perhaps one of the benches was his home.
He lived in a state of approximate intoxication. I never drew near to
him without getting a whiff of alcohol, yet I never saw him radically
drunk. His absorbent capacity must have been tremendous. It is certain
he spent all the sous he could collect for liquids (he never wasted
money upon food; he knew where to go for crusts of bread and broken
meat; the back doors of restaurants have their pensioners), and if
invited to drink as the guest of another, he would drain tumbler after
tumbler continuously, until his entertainer stopped him, and would
appear no further over-seas at the end than at the outset. There was
something pathetic in his comparative sobriety, like an unfulfilled
aspiration.
He was one of the institutions of the Quarter, one of the
notabilities. It was a matter of pride (I can't think why) to be on
terms of hail-fellowship with him, on terms to thee-and-thou him, and
call him by his nick-name, Bibi, Bibi Ragoût: a sobriquet that he had
come by long before my time, and whose origin I never heard explained.
It seemed sufficiently disrespectful, but he accepted it cheerfully,
and would often, indeed, employ it in place of the personal pronoun in
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
jests; yet--what made it fascinating and tragical--it was unmistakably
the conversation of an educated man. His voice was soft, his accent
cultivated, his sentences were nicely chiselled. He knew the _mot
juste_, the happy figure, the pat allusion. His touch was light; his
address could be almost courtly, so that, on suddenly looking up, you
would feel a vague surprise to behold in the speaker, not a polished
man of the world in his dress-suit, but this beery old one-eyed
vagabond in tatters. It was strange to witness his transitions. At one
moment he would be holding high discourse of Goethe, and translating
illustrative passages into classic French; at the next, whining about
_la dèche_, and begging for a _petite saleté de vingt sous_, in the
cant of the Paris gutters. Or, from an analysis of the character of
some conspicuous personage he had known, he would break into an
indecent song, or pass to an interchange of mildewed chaff with
Gigolette.
Yes, he was a gentleman. This disreputable old man, whose grey hairs,
far from making him venerable, but emphasised his sodden degradation;
this tipsy, filthy, obscene old man; this gaol-bird, this doer of
dirty work, this pandar, beggar, outcast, who bore without offence
such a title of contempt as Bibi Ragoût, was a fallen gentleman, the
wreck of something that had once been noble.
More than the fragmentary outline of his history we did not know. We
knew that he was a Russian; that his name was Kasghine; that he had
started in life as an officer in the Russian army; that many years
ago, for crimes conjectural, he had fled his country; and that long
before our day he had already gravitated to where we found him, the
mud of the Boulevard St. Michel.
For crimes conjectural. Some of us believed them to have been
political, and fancied that we had in Bibi a specimen of the decayed
Nihilist. In view of the fact that he often proclaimed himself a
socialist, this seemed to bear some colour of probability; but against
it argued the circumstance that of the members of that little clan of
Russian refugees which inhabits the southern borderland of the Latin
Quarter, not one would have aught to say to Bibi. They gave him the
widest of wide berths, and when questioned as to their motives, would
only shrug their shoulders, and answer that he was a disgraceful old
person, a drunken reprobate, whom, the wonder was not that they
avoided, but that any decent people could tolerate. This sounded
plausible; still we felt that if his crimes had been political, they
might have regarded him with more indulgence.
Of Bibi himself it was equally futile to inquire. There was one
subject on which he would never touch--his previous condition--his
past, before he came to be what we saw. 'Yes, I am a gentleman. I am
Captain Kasghine. I am a gentleman in allotropic form'; that was as
much as I ever heard him say. He enjoyed cloaking himself in mystery,
he enjoyed the curiosity it drew upon him; but perhaps he had some
remnants of pride, some embers of remorse, some little pain and shame,
as well.
Of the other legends afloat, one ran to the effect that he had
murdered his wife; a second, that he had poisoned the husband of a
lady friend; a third, that he had shown the white feather in battle; a
fourth, that he had cheated at cards. Bibi would neither admit nor
deny any of these imputations, nor would he manifest the faintest
resentment when they were discussed in his presence. He would parry
them, smiling complaisantly: and (if it be considered that they were
all, as it turned out, abominably false) that seems to show better
than anything else to what abysmal depths the man had sunk. Perhaps it
shows also, incidentally, how very heartless and unimaginative young
people in the Latin Quarter used to be. I have seen Bibi swagger; I
have seen him sullen, insolent, sarcastic; I have seen him angry, I
have heard him swear; but anything like honestly indignant I never saw
him.
I remember one night in the Café de la Source, when Fil de Fer had
been treating him to brandy and trying to get him to tell his story; I
remember his suddenly turning his one eye in the direction of us men,
and launching himself upon a long flight of rhetoric. I can see him
still--his unwashed red hand toying with the stem of his
liqueur-glass, or rising from time to time to push his hair from his
forehead, over which it dangled in soggy wisps, while, in a
dinner-table tone of voice, he uttered these somewhat surprising
sentiments.
'You would be horrified, you others, lads of twenty, with your careers
before you,--you would be horrified if you thought it possible that
you might end your days like Bibi, would you not? You wish to walk a
clean path, to prosper, to be respectable, to wear sweet linen, to die
honoured, regretted. And yet, believe me, we poor devils who fail, who
fall, who sink to the bottom, we have our compensation. We see vastly
more of the realities of life than those do who succeed and rise to
the top. We have an experience that is more essential, more
significant. We get the real flavour of life. We sweat in the mire; we
drink the lees. But the truth is in the mire; the real flavour is in
the lees. Oh, we have our compensation. We wear rags, we eat scraps
fit for dogs, we sleep under the arches of bridges. We lie in gaols,
we are hustled by the police, we are despised by all men. If you offer
us drink, and stop to gossip with us for a moment, you only do so to
please yourselves with the spectacle of our infamy, our infirmity, our
incongruity. We have lost all hope, all self-respect. We are ships
that have come to grief, that are foundering, that will presently go
down. Yet we are not altogether to be pitied: we know life. To the
respectable man, the prosperous, life shows herself only in the world,
decently attired: we know her at home in her nudity. For him she has
manners, a good behaviour, a society smile; with us she is frankly
herself--brutal, if you please, corrupt with disease and vice, sordid,
profane, lascivious, but genuine. She is kind to him, but
hypocritical, affecting scruples, modesties, pieties, a heart and
conscience, attitudinising, blushing false blushes, weeping crocodile
tears; she is cruel to us, but sincere. She is at her ease with
us--unashamed. She shows us her thousand moods. She doesn't trouble to
keep her secrets from us. She throws off the cloak that hid her
foulness, the boot that constrained her cloven hoof. She gives free
play to her appetites. We know her.
'Here is the fruit of the tree of life,' he went on, extending his
open hand. 'The respectable man but smells its rind; I eat deep, taste
the core. The smell is sweet, perhaps; the taste is deathly bitter.
But even so? He that eats of the fruit of the tree of life shares the
vision of the gods. He gazes upon the naked face of truth. I don't
pretend that the face of truth is beautiful. It is hideous beyond
imagination. All hate, all savagery, all evil, glare from it, and all
uncleanness is upon it. But it is the face of truth; the sight of it
gives an ultimate, a supreme satisfaction.
'Say what you will, at the end of life the important thing is to have
lived. Well, when all is over, and the prosperous man and I lie equal
in the article of death, our fortunes, conditions, outlooks at last
for once the same, our results the same, I shall have lived, I shall
have seen, I shall have understood, a thousandfold more than he. I
shall have known life in her intimacy; he will have had but a polite
acquaintance with her.'
The hour for Bibi to put this philosophy to the test was nearer than
he suspected. He used to describe himself as 'thoroughly cured and
seasoned,' and to predict that he would 'last a good while yet.' But,
one day in December, a subject of remark in the Boul' Miche was Bibi's
absence; and before nightfall the news went abroad that he had been
found on the turf, under a tree, in the Avenue de l'Observatoire, dead
from a _coup de sang_, and that he was now lying exposed to the gaze
of the curious in the little brick house behind Notre Dame.
A meeting of students was called, at which it was resolved to give
Bibi a decent funeral; and in order that his friends who had crossed
the river might have an opportunity of assisting at it, a _lettre de
faire part_ was published in the newspapers. The Committee who had
these matters in charge made an attempt to get a Pope from the Russian
Church to officiate; but the holy men were scandalised by the request,
and refused it with contumely. So a civil funeral was the best that
could be achieved.
On a drizzling, dismal December morning, then, we formed ourselves in
a procession of two abreast, and starting from the Place St. Michel,
followed Bibi up his familiar Boulevard to the Cemetery of
Montparnasse; and men who would have spurned him yesterday, bared
their heads as he passed, and women crossed themselves and muttered
prayers. We must have been about a hundred strong, and quite a quarter
of our numbers came from beyond the bridges, responsive to our _lettre
de faire part_. A student was told off to march with each visitor; and
this arrangement proved the means of my being able to supply the
missing chapter of Bibi's story.
The person to whom I found myself assigned was an elderly,
military-looking man, with the red rosette in his buttonhole;
extremely well-dressed and groomed; erect, ruddy, bright-eyed; with
close-cropped white hair, and a drooping white moustache: the picture
of a distinguished, contented, fine old French gentleman: whom I
marvelled a good deal to see in this conjunction.
On our way to the graveyard we spoke but little. Our business there
over, however, he offered me a seat in his carriage, a brougham that
had sauntered after us, for the return. And no sooner was the carriage
door closed upon us than he began--
'I am an old man. I want to talk. Will you listen?
'This death, this funeral, have stirred me deeply. I knew Kasghine
years ago in Russia, when we were both young men, he an officer in the
Russian army, I an attaché to the French Embassy.
'His career has been a very sad one. It illustrates many sad truths.
'Sometimes--it is trite to say so--an act of baseness, a crime of some
sort, may be the beginning, the first cause, of a man's salvation. It
pulls him up, wakes his conscience. Aghast at what he has done, he
reflects, repents, reforms. That is a comforting circumstance, a token
of God's goodness.
'But what shall we say when the exact opposite happens? When it is an
act of nobility, of splendid heroism, of magnificent self-devotion,
that brings to pass a man's moral downfall? It is horrible to admit
such a thing as possible, is it not? And yet, the same man who may be
capable of one sudden immense act of heroism, may be quite incapable
of keeping up the prolonged, daily, yearly struggle with adversity
which that act may entail upon him.
'It was so with Kasghine. It was a very noble action which drove him,
an exile, from his country. Thrown upon the streets of Paris, without
friends, without money, he had not the stuff in him to stand up
against the forces that were in operation to drag him down. Which of
us can be sure that he would have that stuff? From begging for work
whereby to earn money, Kasghine fell to begging for money itself. His
pride receiving a thousand wounds, instead of being strengthened by
them, was killed. Cleanliness is a luxury, a labour; he began to
neglect his person; and, in the case of a gentleman, neglect of the
person is generally the first step towards neglect of the spirit.
Little by little he lost his civilised character, and reverted to the
primitive beast. He was feral.
'But thirty, thirty-five years ago, there were few young men in St.
Petersburg with better positions, brighter prospects, than Kasghine's.
He belonged to an excellent family; he was intelligent, good-looking,
popular; he was a Captain in a good regiment. One of his uncles had
been minister of war, and stood high in the favour of the Tsar.
'In the spring of 1847, Kasghine's regiment was ordered to Warsaw, and
garrisoned in the fortress there. Twenty Polish patriots were confined
in the casemates, awaiting execution; men of education, honourable
men, men with wives and children, condemned to be hanged because they
had conspired together--a foolish, ineffectual conspiracy--against
what they regarded as the tyranny of Russia, for the liberty of their
country. They had struck no blow, but they had written and talked; and
they were to be hanged.
'The fate of these men seemed to Kasghine very unjust, very inhuman.
It preyed upon his mind. He took it into his head to rescue them, to
contrive their escape. I do not say that this was wise or right; but
it was certainly generous. No doubt he had a period of hesitation. On
the one hand was his _consigne_ as a Russian soldier; on the other,
what he conceived to be his duty as a man. He knew that the act he
contemplated spelt ruin for himself, that it spelt death; and he had
every reason to hold life sweet.
'However, he opened communications with the prisoners in the
casemates, and with their friends in the town. And one night he got
them all safely out,--by daybreak they were secure in hiding. Kasghine
himself remained behind. Some one would have to be punished. If the
guilty man fled, an innocent man would be punished.
'Well, he was tried by Court Martial, and sentenced to be shot. But
the Emperor, out of consideration for Kasghine's family, commuted the
sentence to one of hard labour for life in the mines of Kara,--a cruel
kindness. After eight years in the mines, with blunted faculties,
broken health, disfigured by the loss of an eye, and already no doubt
in some measure demoralised by the hardships he had suffered, he was
pardoned,--another cruel kindness. He was pardoned on condition that
he would leave Russian territory, and never enter it again. There are
periodic wholesale pardonings, you know, at Kara, to clear the prisons
and make room for fresh convicts.
'Kasghine's private fortune had been confiscated. His family had
ceased all relations with him, and would do nothing for him. He came
to Paris, and had to engage in the struggle for existence, a struggle
with which he was totally unfamiliar, for which he was totally
unequipped. The only profession he knew was soldiering. He tried to
obtain a commission in the French army. International considerations,
if no others, put that out of the question. He tried to get
work,--teaching, translating. He was not a good teacher; his
translations did not please his employers. Remember, his health was
enfeebled, he was disfigured by the loss of an eye; he had spent eight
years in the mines at Kara. He began to sink. Let those blame him who
know how hard it is to swim. From borrowing, from begging, he sank to
I dare not guess what. I am afraid there can be no doubt that for a
while he served the Russian secret police as a spy; but he proved an
unremunerative spy; they turned him off. He took to drink, he sank
lower and lower, he became whatever is lowest. I had not seen him or
heard of him for years, when, yesterday, I read the announcement of
his death in the _Figaro_.'
The old man set me down at the corner of the Rue Racine. I have never
met him again; I have never learned who he was.
The other day, being in Paris, I made a pilgrimage to the Cemetery of
Montparnasse, to look at Bibi's grave. The wooden cross we had erected
over it was pied with weather-stains, the inscription more than half
obliterated--