He then turned two large, white, sightless eyes towards me: "I've gone blind, my dear, blind for life…. That's what comes from writing with vitriol. I have burned out the candle of my eyes out doing the damned job … to the stub!" he added showing me his desiccated eyelids with no trace of an eyelash.
I was so overcome, I couldn't find anything to say. My silence troubled him:
"Are you working?"
—No, Bixiou, I'm having lunch. Would you like to join me?"
He didn't reply, but I could see clearly from his quivering nostrils that he was dying to say yes. I took his hand and sat him down beside me.
While I served him, the poor devil sniffed at the food and chuckled:
"Oh, it smells good, this. I'm really going to enjoy it; and it will be an age before I eat again! A sou's worth of bread every morning, as I traipse through the ministries, is all I get…. I tell you, I'm really badgering the ministries now—it's the only work I do—I am trying to get permission to run a tobacconist's shop…. What else can I do; I've got to eat. I can't draw; I can't write… Dictation?… But dictate what?… I haven't a clue, me; I can't think of a thing to write. My trade was to look at the lunacies of Paris and hold a mirror up to them; but I haven't got what it takes now…. Then I thought about a tobacconist's shop; not in the boulevards of course, I can't expect those kind of favours, being neither a show girl's mother, nor a field officer's widow. No. I'm just looking for a small shop in the provinces, somewhere far away, say a spot in the Vosges. I will sell a hell of a clay pipe, and console myself by wrapping tobacco in my contemporaries' writings.
"That's all I want. Not too much to ask, is it? But, do you know what, its hell on earth to get it… Yet, I shouldn't be short of patronage. I have soared high in my time. I used to dine with the Marshal, the prince, and ministers, all those people wanted me then because I amused them—or frightened them. Now, no one does. Oh, my eyes! my poor, poor eyes! I'm not welcome anywhere, now. It's unbearable being blind at meal times…. Do pass me the bread, please…. Oh, those thieves! They will make me pay through the nose for this damned tobacconist's shop. I've been wandering through all the ministries clutching my petition, for the last six months. I go in the morning at the time they light the stoves and take His Excellence's horse around the sanded courtyard, and I don't leave until night when they bring in the big lights and the kitchens begin to smell really good….
"All my life is spent sitting on the wooden chests in the antechambers. The ushers know who I am, as well—enough said. Inside the court they call me That kind man! So, to get them on my side, to amuse them, I practise my wit, or, in a corner of their blotters, I draw rough caricatures without taking the pen off the page…. See what I've come to after twenty years of outstanding success; look at just what an artist's life amounts to!… And to think there are forty thousand rascals in France who slobber over our work! To think that throughout Paris, every day, locomotives make steam to bring us loads of idiots thirsting for waffle and printed gossip!… Oh, what a world of fantasists. If only Bixiou's suffering could teach them a lesson."
With that, and without another word, he pushed his face towards the plate and began to scoff the food…. It was pitiful to look at. He was losing his bread, and his fork, and groping for his glass all the time…. Poor soul! He just hadn't had the time to get used to it all yet.