“What, poet!” cried he, with a laugh, “thy wreath is awry.” He clapped it on the back of the old man’s head. “What, thou sleepest on the very steps of the altar of Fame! Thy brains are drowsy with the fumes of the incense in the very temple of Wit; so Genius, hiccupping with wine, misses his footing at the very threshold of Immortality!... Tsha!” He turned on his heels and continued his walk, striding down the room again. “Sleep if thou must--thou canst read during to-morrow, twenty-four hours late, and at thy leisure on the boulevards with the pot-bellied trader, the world’s news that will be stale here with the snuffing of to-night’s candles; and thou wilt get thy news, too, devoid of wit, without colour, stale and dull and flat as long-drawn small-beer, and twisted and distorted and debauched to the uses of each journal.” But the vague eyes of the little old mad poet had closed, and he was nodding over his glass. André Joyeux laughed: “Our old singer of tuneless songs comes from the Latin Quarter, across the river, comrades,” said he--“he has the drowsy habits of the academies--it is always so over there--on the flats across the river, with their vaunted universities and isms and ologies. The professors with dandruff on collar, and the students with talk of new ideas and of the new generation, what do they know of life?” He flung out his arm as he strode to and fro: “Tush! they have books down there, ridiculous printed things to _tell_ them of life! to tell them what other people think of life!... They have museums, dry holes where bits of the dead past are stored in glass cases. They have talk of architecture that is dead and useless architecture--schools are endowed to teach it--nay, schools are endowed to tell of what it used to be.... They hang up armour, and write books about it--about armour!” He laughed loud and long. “They might as well write about cooking-pots and discarded tin cans with holes in them.... They will.... They talk of relics of the past--nay, they worship them--build churches to them. They collect things--coins, postage-stamps, what-not. They will collect spittoons next. They form societies--learned societies to pester each other with things that do not matter. They peer at old pictures that have lost their vital significance, completed their function--build public galleries for them, each room a nightmare of incongruous warring canvases, lost to their original intention over a church’s altar or what not, wrangling together, inadequate, foreign, out of place. As though by the looking upon Cromwell’s bones or Napoleon’s breeches they would learn to rule the world! Students pay to see these things--spend the precious years of youth poring over them, even copying them! The delirious years of youth!... They call it culture. Gods! culture!... To the Latin Quarter, to the professors, dandruff-collared, to the gaping student, life is this dusty dull study of what is dusty and dull and stupid and dead....