I now began to think that he was making fun of me, and I continued:
"Come now, be frank. You have been the victim of some great sorrow; despair in love, no doubt! It is easy to see that you are a man whom misfortune has hit hard. What age are you?"
"I am thirty years of age, but I look to be forty-five at least."
I regarded him straight in the face. His shrunken figure, so badly cared for, gave one the impression that he was an old man. On the summit of his cranium, a few long hairs shot straight up from the skin of doubtful cleanness. He had enormous eyelashes, a large moustache, and a thick beard. Suddenly, I had a kind of vision. I know not why; the vision of a basin filled with noisome water, the water which should have been applied to that poll. I said to him:
"Verily, you look to be more than that age. Of a certainty you must have experienced some great disappointment."
He replied:
"I tell you that I have not. I am old because I never take air. There is nothing that vitiates the life of a man more than the atmosphere of a café."
I could not believe him.
"You must surely have been married as well? One could not get as bald-headed as you are without having been much in love."
He shook his head, sending down his back little white things which fell from the end of his locks: