He was a great addition to our party, if at the same time a great drain on our purse. His keen, materialistic French mind was very eager, logical, well-informed, and critical in a destructive sense, an iconoclast if ever there was one. All forms of belief were idols it was his great delight to destroy; faith was superstition; cosmogonies were inventions of men whose natural feebleness forced them to seek something bigger and more wonderful than themselves; creeds, from primitive animism to Buddhism and Christianity, were, similarly, man-made, with a dose of pretentious ethics thrown in; while soul, spirit, survival after death, were creations of human vanity and egoism, and had not a single atom of evidence to support them from the beginning of the world to date. Naturally, he disbelieved everything that I believed, and, naturally, too, our arguments left us both precisely where we started. But they helped the evenings, often hungry evenings, to pass without monotony; and when, as sometimes though but rarely happened, Louis had come by a drop of absinthe, monotony was entirely forgotten. He would sit crossed-legged on his mattress, his brown eyes sparkling in the round little face, his thick curly black hair looking like stiff wire, his podgy hands gesticulating, his language voluble in French and English mixed, his infectious laughter ringing and bubbling out from time to time--and the evening would pass like magic. He was charged with poetry and music too. On absinthe evenings, indeed, it was difficult to get any sleep at all ... and the first thing in the morning he would be hunting for “snipe” on all fours, cursing life and fate, in a black depression which made him think of suicide, and looking like a yellow Chinese God of Luck that had come to life.