"In the verses I have just quoted, you remember, he says that the fourth was chaste as an image, her hair was pale brown, she had scarcely any bosom, and prayed to God sometimes. He always hated piety when it interfered with his pleasure, and in the next verse he says, 'The devil take those sacred signs of the Cross!'" "But do you know any of these women?" "Oh, yes; we all know the terrible Sara. She beats him." The _commerçante's_ wife asked if she were here. "He wanted to bring her here, in fact he did bring her once, only she was so drunk that she could not get beyond the threshold, and Ninon's lover, the painter you saw painting the steam engines, was charged to explain to the poet that Sara's intemperance rendered her impossible in respectable society. 'I know Sara has her faults,' he murmured in reply to all argument, and it was impossible to make him see that others did not see Sara with his eyes. 'I know she has her faults,' he repeated, 'and so have others. We all have our faults.' And it was a long time before he could be induced to come back: hunger has brought him." "And who is that hollow-chested man? How pathetic he looks with his goat-like beard." "That is the celebrated Cabaner. He will tell you, if you speak to him, that his father was a man like Napoleon, only more so. He is the author of many aphorisms; 'that three military bands would be necessary to give the impression of silence in music' is one. He comes every night to the Nouvelle Athènes, and is a sort of rallying-point; he will tell you that his ballad of 'The Salt Herring' is written in a way that perhaps Wagner would not, but which Liszt certainly would understand." "Is his music ever played? Does it sell? How does he live? Not by his music, I suppose?" "Yes, by his music, by playing waltzes and polkas in the Avenue de la Motte Piquet. His earnings are five francs a day, and for thirty-five francs a month he has a room where many of the disinherited ones of art, many of those you see here, sleep. His room is furnished--ah, you should see it! If Cabaner wants a chest of drawers he buys a fountain, and he broke off the head of the Vénus de Milo, saying that now she no longer reminded him of the people he met in the streets; he could henceforth admire her without being troubled by any sordid recollection. I could talk to you for hours about his unselfishness, his love of art, his strange music, and his stranger poems, for his music accompanies his own verses." "Is he too clever for the public, or not clever enough?" "Now you're asking me the question we've been asking ourselves for the last ten years.... The man fumbling at his shirt collar over yonder is the celebrated Villiers de L'Isle Adam." And I remember how it pleased me to tell this simple-minded woman all I knew about Villiers. "He has no talent whatever, only genius, and that is why he is a raté," I said.