Thanks to this incident, the conversation was definitely established. Schaunard, not willing to be behindhand in courtesy, called for an extra quart of wine. The hero of the books called for a third. Schaunard treated to salad, the other to dessert. At eight o'clock there were six empty bottles on the table. As they talked, their natural frankness, assisted by their libations, had urged them to interchange biographies, and they knew each other as well as if they had always lived together. He of the books, after hearing the confidential disclosures of Schaunard, had informed him that his name was Gustave Colline; he was a philosopher by profession, and got his living by giving lessons in rhetoric, mathematics and several other ics.
What little money he picked up by his profession was spent in buying books. His hazel-coloured coat was known to all the stall keepers on the quay from the Pont de la Concorde to the Pont Saint Michel. What he did with these books, so numerous that no man's lifetime would have been long enough to read them, nobody knew, least of all, himself. But this hobby of his amounted to monomania: when he came home at night without bringing a musty quarto with him, he would repeat the saying of Titus, "I have lost a day." His enticing manners, his language, which was a mosaic of every possible style, and the fearful puns which embellished his conversation, completely won Schaunard, who demanded on the spot permission of Colline to add his name to those on the famous list already mentioned.
They left Mother Cadet's at nine o'clock at night, both fairly primed, and with the gait of men who have been engaged in close conversation with sundry bottles.
Colline offered to stand coffee, and Schaunard accepted on condition that he should be allowed to pay for the accompanying nips of liquor. They turned into a cafe in the Rue Saint Germain l'Auxerrois, and bearing on its sign the name of Momus, god of play and pleasure.
At the moment they entered a lively argument broke out between two of the frequenters of the place. One of them was a young fellow whose face was hidden by a dense thicket of beard of several distinct shades. By way of a balance to this wealth of hair on his chin, a precocious baldness had despoiled his forehead, which was as bare as a billiard ball. He vainly strove to conceal the nakedness of the land by brushing forward a tuft of hairs so scanty that they could almost be counted. He wore a black coat worn at the elbows, and revealing whenever he raised his arms too high a ventilator under the armpits. His trousers might have once been black, but his boots, which had never been new, seemed to have already gone round the world two or three times on the feet of the Wandering Jew.
Schaunard noticed that his new friend Colline and the young fellow with the big beard nodded to one another.
"You know the gentleman?" said he to the philosopher.
"Not exactly," replied the latter, "but I meet him sometimes at the National Library. I believe that he is a literary man."
"He wears the garb of one, at any rate," said Schaunard.
The individual with whom this young fellow was arguing was a man of forty, foredoomed, by a big head wedged between his shoulders without any break in the shape of a neck, to the thunderstroke of apoplexy. Idiocy was written in capital letters on his low forehead, surmounted by a little black skull-cap. His name was Monsieur Mouton, and he was a clerk at the town hall of the 4th Arrondissement, where he acted as registrar of deaths.