"Imagine a year's-end revue entitled _Collection of Letters of 186*_; about our literati, our gossip, our quarrels, all the idiocies of an eccentric world, a cesspool of ink, hell in miniature, where you cut your own throat, disembowel yourself, rob yourself, and outtalk the bourgeoisie about interest rates and money. Where they let you starve to death better than anywhere else; all our cowardice and woes; old baron T... of la Tombola going away with a _tut-tut_ to the Tuileries with his begging bowl and his flowery clothes. Then there's the year's deaths, the burial announcements, the never changing funeral oration of the delegate: the _Dearly missed! Poor dear!_ over some unlucky soul who was refused the means to bury himself; the suicides; and those gone insane. Imagine all that, told, itemised, and gesticulated by an orator of genius, and you will then have some idea of what Bixiou's improvisation was about." * * * * * The toast over, his glass empty, he asked me what the time was, and left in a wild mood, without so much as saying goodbye.... I don't know how Monsieur Duruy's ushers were affected by his visit that morning; but I do know that after that awful blind man had left, I have never felt so sad, so bad, in the whole of my life. The very sight of ink sickened me, my pen horrified me, I wanted to distance myself from it all, to run away, to see trees, to feel something good, real.... Good God! The hatred, the venom, the unquenchable need to belittle it all, to befoul everything! Oh! That wretched man.... Then I furiously paced up and down in my room still hearing the giggling disgust he had shown for his daughter. Right then, I felt something under my feet, near where the blind man had been sitting. Bending down, I recognised his wallet, a thick, worn wallet, with split corners, which he always carried with him and laughingly called his pocket of venom. This wallet, in our world, was as famous as Monsieur de Girardin's cartoons. Rumour has it that there are some awful things in it.... I was soon to discover the truth of it. The old over-stuffed wallet had burst open as it fell and the papers inside fell onto the carpet; I had to collect them one by one.... There was a package of letters written on decorated paper, all beginning, _My dear Daddy,_ and signed, _Céline Bixiou at the Children of Mary hospital_. There were old prescriptions for childhood ailments: croup, convulsions, scarlet fever and measles.... (the poor little girl hadn't missed out on a single one of them!) Finally, there was a hidden envelope from which came a two or three curly, blond hairs, which might have come from the girl's bonnet. There was some writing on it in a large, unsteady hand; the handwriting of a blind man: _Céline's hair, cut the 13th May, the day she went to that hell_. That's all there was in Bixiou's wallet.