Four old actors, and two old actresses, at one table, with their heads together.
“The curtain rises in a hovel,” says one of the old actors, and proceeds to narrate the plot of The Terror of the Fortifications.
VII
THE LATIN QUARTER
1. Mère Casimir
“Il était une fois.”
After weeks of summer idleness the students of the Latin Quarter return in October to the Boul’ Mich’ more exhilarated, more extravagant, more garrulous than ever. They are delighted to be back; they are impatient to conspuer certain professors; to parade the streets with lanterns and guys; to disturb the sleep of the bourgeois; to run into debt with their landlords, to embrace the policemen—to commit a hundred other follies. Clad in new corduroys, covered with astonishing hats, they call for big bocks—then question the waiter. But ere he can give a recital of what has taken place on the Rive Gauche during the holidays, the waiter—ce sacré François—has to hear how Paul (of the Faculty of Medicine) has been bathing, Pierre (of the Law) bicycling, Gaston (of the Fine Arts) gardening; and how all three of them wore “le boating” costume (whatever that may signify), with white shoes, pale blue waistbands and green umbrellas; and how their food was of the simplest, and their drink, pure, babylike milk.
Adventures? Romances?