The couple leaned upon one of the tin tables in the moderately clear space by the inn, the elder, grey, with thick hair, square of forehead, square bearded, yet with a face showing curiously long and oval in spite of this quadrature; in the eyes a sort of friendly, companionable melancholy, now intent, now with a certain blankness, like that of a child cruelly interrupted, or of an old man, surprised and self-conscious in some act too young for his years, the head from the neck to the crown in almost brutal contrast with the girth and great belly: the head of Don Quixote, and the corpus of Sancho Panza, animality mounting into the lines of the throat and lending energy to the intellect. His companion obviously an American student. Student: I came here in hopes of this meeting yet, since you are here at all, you must have changed many opinions. The Elder: Some. Which do you mean? Student: Since you are here, personal and persisting? Rabelais: All that I believed or believe you will find in _De Senectute_: “... that being so active, so swift in thought; that treasures up in memory such multitudes and varieties of things past, and comes likewise upon new things ... can be of no mortal nature.” Student: And yet I do not quite understand. Your outline is not always distinct. Your voice however is deep, clear and not squeaky. Rabelais: I was more interested in words than in my exterior aspect, I am therefore vocal rather than spatial. Student: I came here in hopes of this meeting, yet I confess I can scarcely read you. I admire and close the book, as not infrequently happens with “classics.” Rabelais: I am the last person to censure you, and your admiration is perhaps due to a fault in your taste. I should have paid more heed to DeBellay, young Joachim. Student: You do not find him a prig? Rabelais: I find no man a prig who takes serious thought for the language. Student: And your own? Even Voltaire called it an amassment of ordure. Rabelais: And later changed his opinion. Student: Others have blamed your age, saying you had to half-bury your wisdom in filth to make it acceptable. Rabelais: And you would put this blame on my age? And take the full blame for your writing? Student: My writing? Rabelais: Yes, a quatrain, without which I should scarcely have come here. Sweet C.... in h... spew up some.... (pardon me for intruding my own name at this point, but even Dante has done the like, with a remark that he found it unfitting)—to proceed then: ......some Rabelais To ..... and ..... and to define today In fitting fashion, and her monument Heap up to her in fadeless ex ..... Student: My license in those lines is exceptional.