“It is caused by the hard times, my dear Violette,” responded the editor of ‘La Guepe’ as he unfolded his napkin. “There is no longer a ‘Maecenas’ or ‘Lawrence the Magnificent.’ The last patron of literature and art is Pere Lebufle. This wretched cook, who has perhaps never read a book or seen a picture, has a fancy for painters and poets, and allows them to cultivate that plant, Debt, which, contrary to other vegetables, grows all the more, the less it is watered with instalments. We must pardon the good man,” said he, lowering his voice, “his little sin--a sort of vanity. He wishes to be treated like a comrade and friend by the artists. Those who have several accounts brought forward upon his ledger, arrive at the point of calling him ‘thou,’ and I, alas! am of that number. Thanks to that, I am going to make you drink something a little less purgative than the so-called wine which is turning blue in that carafe, and of which I advise you to be suspicious. I say, Lebuffle, my friend here, Monsieur Amedee Violette, will be, sooner or later, a celebrated poet. Treat him accordingly, my good fellow, and go and get us a bottle of Moulins-Vent.” The conversation meanwhile became general between the bearded and long-haired men. Is it necessary to say that they were all animated, both politicians and ‘litterateurs’, with the most revolutionary sentiments? At the very beginning, with the sardines, which evidently had been pickled in lamp-oil, a terribly hairy man, the darkest of them all, with a beard that grew up into its owner’s eyes and then sprung out again in tufts from his nose and ears, presented some elegiac regrets to the memory of Jean-Paul Marat, and declared that at the next revolution it would be necessary to realize the programme of that delightful friend of the people, and make one hundred thousand heads fall. “By thunder, Flambard, you have a heavy hand!” exclaimed one of the least important of beards, one of those that degenerate into side-whiskers as they become conservative. “One hundred thousand heads!” “It is the minimum,” replied the sanguinary beard. Now, it had just been revealed to Amedee that under this ferocious beard was concealed a photographer, well known for his failures, and the young man could not help thinking that if the one hundred thousand heads in question had posed before the said Flambard’s camera, he would not show such impatience to see them fall under the guillotine.