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 deche_, and begging for a _petite salete 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 Ragout, was a fallen gentleman, the
wreck of something that had once been noble.
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