He was one of the institutions of the Latin Quarter, one of the least admirable. He haunted the Boulevard St. Michel, hung round the cafés, begged of the passing stranger, picked up cigarette-ends, and would, at a pinch, run errands, or do odd jobs.

With his sallow, wrinkled skin, his jungle of grey beard, his thick grey hair, matted and shiny, covering his ears and falling about his shoulders, he was scarcely an attractive-looking person. Besides, he had lost an eye; and its empty socket irresistibly drew your gaze—an abhorrent vacuum. His clothes would be the odds and ends of students' offcasts, in the last stages of disintegration. He had a chronic stoop; always aimed his surviving eye obliquely at you, from a bent head; and walked with a sort of hang-dog shuffle that seemed a general self-denunciation.

Where he slept, whether under a roof or on the pavement, and when, were among his secrets. No matter how late or how early you were abroad, you would be sure to encounter Bibi, wide-awake, somewhere in the Boul' Miche, between the Luxembourg and the Rue des Ecoles. That was his beat. Perhaps one of the benches was his home.

He lived in a state of approximate intoxication. I never drew near to him without getting a whiff of alcohol, yet I never saw him radically drunk. His absorbent capacity must have been tremendous. It is certain he spent all the sous he could collect for liquids (he never wasted money upon food; he knew where to go for crusts of bread and broken meat; the back doors of restaurants have their pensioners), and if invited to drink as the guest of another, he would drain tumbler after tumbler continuously, until his entertainer stopped him, and would appear no further over-seas at the end than at the outset. There was something pathetic in his comparative sobriety, like an unfulfilled aspiration.

He was one of the institutions of the Quarter, one of the notabilities. It was a matter of pride (I can't think why) to be on terms of hail-fellowship with him, on terms to thee-and-thou him, and call him by his nick-name, Bibi, Bibi Ragoût: a sobriquet that he had come by long before my time, and whose origin I never heard explained. It seemed sufficiently disrespectful, but he accepted it cheerfully, and would often, indeed, employ it in place of the personal pronoun in referring to himself. 'You're not going to forget Bibi—you'll not forget poor old Bibi Ragoût?' would be his greeting on the jour de l'an , for instance.

I have said that he would run errands or do odd jobs. The business with which people charged him was not commonly of a nature to throw lustre upon either agent or principal. He would do a student's dirty work, even an étudiante's , in a part of Paris where work to be accounted dirty must needs be very dirty work indeed. The least ignominious service one used to require of him was to act as intermediary with the pawn-shop, the clou ; a service that he performed to the great satisfaction of his clients, for, what with unbounded impudence and a practice of many years, he knew (as the French slang goes) how to make the nail bleed. We trusted him with our valuables and our money though it was of record that he had once 'done time' for theft. But his victim had been a bourgeois from across the river; we were confident he would deal honourably by a fellow Quarternion—he had the esprit de corps .

It was Bibi in his social aspect, however, not in his professional, who especially interested us. It was very much the fashion to ask him to join the company at a café table, to offer him libations, and to 'draw' him—make him talk. He would talk of any subject: of art, literature, politics; of life and morals; of the news of the day. He would regale us with anecdotes of persons, places, events; he had outlasted many generations of students, and had hob-and-nobbed in their grub-period with men who had since become celebrities, as he was now hob-and-nobbing with us. He was quite shameless, quite without reverence for himself or others; his conversation was apt to be highly-flavoured, scandalous, slanderous, and redundant with ambiguous jests; yet—what made it fascinating and tragical—it was unmistakably the conversation of an educated man. His voice was soft, his accent cultivated, his sentences were nicely chiselled. He knew the mot juste , the happy figure, the pat allusion. His touch was light; his address could be almost courtly, so that, on suddenly looking up, you would feel a vague surprise to behold in the speaker, not a polished man of the world in his dress-suit, but this beery old one-eyed vagabond in tatters. It was strange to witness his transitions. At one moment he would be holding high discourse of Goethe, and translating illustrative passages into classic French; at the next, whining about la dèche , and begging for a petite saleté de vingt sous , in the cant of the Paris gutters. Or, from an analysis of the character of some conspicuous personage he had known, he would break into an indecent song, or pass to an interchange of mildewed chaff with Gigolette.

Yes, he was a gentleman. This disreputable old man, whose grey hairs, far from making him venerable, but emphasised his sodden degradation; this tipsy, filthy, obscene old man; this gaol-bird, this doer of dirty work, this pandar, beggar, outcast, who bore without offence such a title of contempt as Bibi Ragoût, was a fallen gentleman, the wreck of something that had once been noble.

More than the fragmentary outline of his history we did not know. We knew that he was a Russian; that his name was Kasghine; that he had started in life as an officer in the Russian army; that many years ago, for crimes conjectural, he had fled his country; and that long before our day he had already gravitated to where we found him, the mud of the Boulevard St. Michel.

For crimes conjectural. Some of us believed them to have been political, and fancied that we had in Bibi a specimen of the decayed Nihilist. In view of the fact that he often proclaimed himself a socialist, this seemed to bear some colour of probability; but against it argued the circumstance that of the members of that little clan of Russian refugees which inhabits the southern borderland of the Latin Quarter, not one would have aught to say to Bibi. They gave him the widest of wide berths, and when questioned as to their motives, would only shrug their shoulders, and answer that he was a disgraceful old person, a drunken reprobate, whom, the wonder was not that they avoided, but that any decent people could tolerate. This sounded plausible; still we felt that if his crimes had been political, they might have regarded him with more indulgence.

Of Bibi himself it was equally futile to inquire. There was one subject on which he would never touch—his previous condition—his past, before he came to be what we saw. 'Yes, I am a gentleman. I am Captain Kasghine. I am a gentleman in allotropic form'; that was as much as I ever heard him say. He enjoyed cloaking himself in mystery, he enjoyed the curiosity it drew upon him; but perhaps he had some remnants of pride, some embers of remorse, some little pain and shame, as well.

Of the other legends afloat, one ran to the effect that he had murdered his wife; a second, that he had poisoned the husband of a lady friend; a third, that he had shown the white feather in battle; a fourth, that he had cheated at cards. Bibi would neither admit nor deny any of these imputations, nor would he manifest the faintest resentment when they were discussed in his presence. He would parry them, smiling complaisantly: and (if it be considered that they were all, as it turned out, abominably false) that seems to show better than anything else to what abysmal depths the man had sunk. Perhaps it shows also, incidentally, how very heartless and unimaginative young people in the Latin Quarter used to be. I have seen Bibi swagger; I have seen him sullen, insolent, sarcastic; I have seen him angry, I have heard him swear; but anything like honestly indignant I never saw him.

I remember one night in the Café de la Source, when Fil de Fer had been treating him to brandy and trying to get him to tell his story; I remember his suddenly turning his one eye in the direction of us men, and launching himself upon a long flight of rhetoric. I can see him still—his unwashed red hand toying with the stem of his liqueur-glass, or rising from time to time to push his hair from his forehead, over which it dangled in soggy wisps, while, in a dinner-table tone of voice, he uttered these somewhat surprising sentiments.

'You would be horrified, you others, lads of twenty, with your careers before you,—you would be horrified if you thought it possible that you might end your days like Bibi, would you not? You wish to walk a clean path, to prosper, to be respectable, to wear sweet linen, to die honoured, regretted. And yet, believe me, we poor devils who fail, who fall, who sink to the bottom, we have our compensation. We see vastly more of the realities of life than those do who succeed and rise to the top. We have an experience that is more essential, more significant. We get the real flavour of life. We sweat in the mire; we drink the lees. But the truth is in the mire; the real flavour is in the lees. Oh, we have our compensation. We wear rags, we eat scraps fit for dogs, we sleep under the arches of bridges. We lie in gaols, we are hustled by the police, we are despised by all men. If you offer us drink, and stop to gossip with us for a moment, you only do so to please yourselves with the spectacle of our infamy, our infirmity, our incongruity. We have lost all hope, all self-respect. We are ships that have come to grief, that are foundering, that will presently go down. Yet we are not altogether to be pitied: we know life. To the respectable man, the prosperous, life shows herself only in the world, decently attired: we know her at home in her nudity. For him she has manners, a good behaviour, a society smile; with us she is frankly herself—brutal, if you please, corrupt with disease and vice, sordid, profane, lascivious, but genuine. She is kind to him, but hypocritical, affecting scruples, modesties, pieties, a heart and conscience, attitudinising, blushing false blushes, weeping crocodile tears; she is cruel to us, but sincere. She is at her ease with us—unashamed. She shows us her thousand moods. She doesn't trouble to keep her secrets from us. She throws off the cloak that hid her foulness, the boot that constrained her cloven hoof. She gives free play to her appetites. We know her.

'Here is the fruit of the tree of life,' he went on, extending his open hand. 'The respectable man but smells its rind; I eat deep, taste the core. The smell is sweet, perhaps; the taste is deathly bitter. But even so? He that eats of the fruit of the tree of life shares the vision of the gods. He gazes upon the naked face of truth. I don't pretend that the face of truth is beautiful. It is hideous beyond imagination. All hate, all savagery, all evil, glare from it, and all uncleanness is upon it. But it is the face of truth; the sight of it gives an ultimate, a supreme satisfaction.

'Say what you will, at the end of life the important thing is to have lived. Well, when all is over, and the prosperous man and I lie equal in the article of death, our fortunes, conditions, outlooks at last for once the same, our results the same, I shall have lived, I shall have seen, I shall have understood, a thousandfold more than he. I shall have known life in her intimacy; he will have had but a polite acquaintance with her.'

The hour for Bibi to put this philosophy to the test was nearer than he suspected. He used to describe himself as 'thoroughly cured and seasoned,' and to predict that he would 'last a good while yet.' But, one day in December, a subject of remark in the Boul' Miche was Bibi's absence; and before nightfall the news went abroad that he had been found on the turf, under a tree, in the Avenue de l'Observatoire, dead from a coup de sang , and that he was now lying exposed to the gaze of the curious in the little brick house behind Notre Dame.

A meeting of students was called, at which it was resolved to give Bibi a decent funeral; and in order that his friends who had crossed the river might have an opportunity of assisting at it, a lettre de faire part was published in the newspapers. The Committee who had these matters in charge made an attempt to get a Pope from the Russian Church to officiate; but the holy men were scandalised by the request, and refused it with contumely. So a civil funeral was the best that could be achieved.

On a drizzling, dismal December morning, then, we formed ourselves in a procession of two abreast, and starting from the Place St. Michel, followed Bibi up his familiar Boulevard to the Cemetery of Montparnasse; and men who would have spurned him yesterday, bared their heads as he passed, and women crossed themselves and muttered prayers. We must have been about a hundred strong, and quite a quarter of our numbers came from beyond the bridges, responsive to our lettre de faire part . A student was told off to march with each visitor; and this arrangement proved the means of my being able to supply the missing chapter of Bibi's story.

The person to whom I found myself assigned was an elderly, military-looking man, with the red rosette in his buttonhole; extremely well-dressed and groomed; erect, ruddy, bright-eyed; with close-cropped white hair, and a drooping white moustache: the picture of a distinguished, contented, fine old French gentleman: whom I marvelled a good deal to see in this conjunction.

On our way to the graveyard we spoke but little. Our business there over, however, he offered me a seat in his carriage, a brougham that had sauntered after us, for the return. And no sooner was the carriage door closed upon us than he began—

'I am an old man. I want to talk. Will you listen?

'This death, this funeral, have stirred me deeply. I knew Kasghine years ago in Russia, when we were both young men, he an officer in the Russian army, I an attaché to the French Embassy.

'His career has been a very sad one. It illustrates many sad truths.

'Sometimes—it is trite to say so—an act of baseness, a crime of some sort, may be the beginning, the first cause, of a man's salvation. It pulls him up, wakes his conscience. Aghast at what he has done, he reflects, repents, reforms. That is a comforting circumstance, a token of God's goodness.

'But what shall we say when the exact opposite happens? When it is an act of nobility, of splendid heroism, of magnificent self-devotion, that brings to pass a man's moral downfall? It is horrible to admit such a thing as possible, is it not? And yet, the same man who may be capable of one sudden immense act of heroism, may be quite incapable of keeping up the prolonged, daily, yearly struggle with adversity which that act may entail upon him.

'It was so with Kasghine. It was a very noble action which drove him, an exile, from his country. Thrown upon the streets of Paris, without friends, without money, he had not the stuff in him to stand up against the forces that were in operation to drag him down. Which of us can be sure that he would have that stuff? From begging for work whereby to earn money, Kasghine fell to begging for money itself. His pride receiving a thousand wounds, instead of being strengthened by them, was killed. Cleanliness is a luxury, a labour; he began to neglect his person; and, in the case of a gentleman, neglect of the person is generally the first step towards neglect of the spirit. Little by little he lost his civilised character, and reverted to the primitive beast. He was feral.

'But thirty, thirty-five years ago, there were few young men in St. Petersburg with better positions, brighter prospects, than Kasghine's. He belonged to an excellent family; he was intelligent, good-looking, popular; he was a Captain in a good regiment. One of his uncles had been minister of war, and stood high in the favour of the Tsar.

'In the spring of 1847, Kasghine's regiment was ordered to Warsaw, and garrisoned in the fortress there. Twenty Polish patriots were confined in the casemates, awaiting execution; men of education, honourable men, men with wives and children, condemned to be hanged because they had conspired together—a foolish, ineffectual conspiracy—against what they regarded as the tyranny of Russia, for the liberty of their country. They had struck no blow, but they had written and talked; and they were to be hanged.

'The fate of these men seemed to Kasghine very unjust, very inhuman. It preyed upon his mind. He took it into his head to rescue them, to contrive their escape. I do not say that this was wise or right; but it was certainly generous. No doubt he had a period of hesitation. On the one hand was his consigne as a Russian soldier; on the other, what he conceived to be his duty as a man. He knew that the act he contemplated spelt ruin for himself, that it spelt death; and he had every reason to hold life sweet.

'However, he opened communications with the prisoners in the casemates, and with their friends in the town. And one night he got them all safely out,—by daybreak they were secure in hiding. Kasghine himself remained behind. Some one would have to be punished. If the guilty man fled, an innocent man would be punished.

'Well, he was tried by Court Martial, and sentenced to be shot. But the Emperor, out of consideration for Kasghine's family, commuted the sentence to one of hard labour for life in the mines of Kara,—a cruel kindness. After eight years in the mines, with blunted faculties, broken health, disfigured by the loss of an eye, and already no doubt in some measure demoralised by the hardships he had suffered, he was pardoned,—another cruel kindness. He was pardoned on condition that he would leave Russian territory, and never enter it again. There are periodic wholesale pardonings, you know, at Kara, to clear the prisons and make room for fresh convicts.

'Kasghine's private fortune had been confiscated. His family had ceased all relations with him, and would do nothing for him. He came to Paris, and had to engage in the struggle for existence, a struggle with which he was totally unfamiliar, for which he was totally unequipped. The only profession he knew was soldiering. He tried to obtain a commission in the French army. International considerations, if no others, put that out of the question. He tried to get work,—teaching, translating. He was not a good teacher; his translations did not please his employers. Remember, his health was enfeebled, he was disfigured by the loss of an eye; he had spent eight years in the mines at Kara. He began to sink. Let those blame him who know how hard it is to swim. From borrowing, from begging, he sank to I dare not guess what. I am afraid there can be no doubt that for a while he served the Russian secret police as a spy; but he proved an unremunerative spy; they turned him off. He took to drink, he sank lower and lower, he became whatever is lowest. I had not seen him or heard of him for years, when, yesterday, I read the announcement of his death in the Figaro .'

The old man set me down at the corner of the Rue Racine. I have never met him again; I have never learned who he was.

The other day, being in Paris, I made a pilgrimage to the Cemetery of Montparnasse, to look at Bibi's grave. The wooden cross we had erected over it was pied with weather-stains, the inscription more than half obliterated—

ALEXIS DIMITRIEVITCH KASGHINE

Né à MOSCOU, le 20 JANVIER, 1823,

MORT à PARIS, le 20 DÉCEMBRE, 1884.

Priez pour lui .

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