“Rodolph Salis knew life,” he said hoarsely. There was silence whilst he drank; and again he got to his restless pacing: “There was one man in all this wide world,” said he, “who was glad when the sign of _The Black Cat_ was taken down--that man was Rodolph’s brother, Gabriel Salis. They had been estranged from the time of Gabriel’s setting up this tavern of _The Scarlet Jackass_, hating each other’s successes, jealous that the same mother had endowed them with equal wit, resentful of each other’s magnificence....” He strode up and down several times in silence. “And Rodolph being dead,” said he--“Gabriel reigned in his stead.... Here within these walls his wit flashed.” He swept his arm proudly round the room and strode off again: “And--because his hand shook--and--his tongue wagged feverishly, speaking the fantastic thinkings of that teeming imagination, they cried out that he, too, would go mad; and he, raising his glass as Rodolph had done in trembling fingers, would laugh boisterously.... But--Gabriel, too, heard the whisper--he feared to die the death that Rodolph died--and the tavern of _The Scarlet Jackass_ passed to André Joyeux.” He laughed, wheeled round, and swept his hand towards the flaring poster at the end of the room: “There have I drawn Gabriel on his scarlet jackass, bags of gold about him, trotting away to the fresh air of the fields to the country house he had bought----” He moved down the room again, moodily: “But he, too, took to his bed--he had lived his life--he missed his glass, his fellows, the rousing chorus, the jovial good fellowship. He was bored. He took to his bed----” André Joyeux paced in moody silence a couple of turns up and down the room, went to his place, raised a glass and drained it to the dregs: “And now the wits feast with me.... Steinlen, and thou, Toulouse Lautrec! ye drink in Joyeux’s tavern. And thou, Willette! though thou didst draw that red ass there in likeness of Rodolph Salis, because thou hadst thy quarrel with him--thou at least quarrelled with a man.... God! I have drunk wine here with Paul Verlaine, first lyric poet of France. Ay,” said he--“why poor Rodolph? why poor Gabriel? why poor St. Pierre?” And he added hoarsely: “I tell you these men were not afraid to live. They were men. They were not--afraid--to--live....” In the smoky twilight that goes before the dawn, as the purple night moved westward over the city, sweeping the world with dusky train, the door-keeper in fantastic livery, his cocked hat on the back of his head, yawned, as beadles yawn at sermon-time, and unlocked the door of the tavern that is called _The Scarlet Jackass_, to let the revellers pass out into the street, Noll and the young students along with them. They stood on the pavement in the chill air to make an end of their last gossip before parting on their separate ways.