We went, and the Café Delphine knew Paragot no more.
After this he took to frequenting indiscriminately the various cafés of the neighbourhood, wandering from one to the other like a lost soul seeking a habitation. Now and again he hit upon fragments of the old band, who had migrated from the Café Delphine when it became the home of the symbolic poets. He tried in vain to collect the fragments together in a new hostelry. But the cohesive force had gone. These queer circles of the Latin Quarter are organisms of spontaneous growth. You cannot create them artificially or re-create them when once they are disintegrated. The twos and threes of students received him kindly and listened to his talk; but his authority was gone. Once or twice when I accompanied him I fancied that he had lost also the peculiar magic of his vehement utterances. Cazalet also noticed a change.
"What is the matter with Paragot? He no longer talks. He preaches. Ça ennuie à la fin."
Paragot a bore! It was unimaginable.
Was he paying the penalty of his past respectability? Had Melford repressed his noble rage and frozen the genial current of his soul? It is not unlikely. He often found himself condemned to solitary toping over a stained newspaper, one of the most ungleeful joys known to man. Sometimes he played dominoes with Félicien Garbure, now icily received by the symbolists on account of an unpaid score. Whether desperation drove him occasionally to Bubu le Vainqueur and his friends I do not know. He was not really proud of his acquaintance with Bubu. Once he whimsically remarked that as he was half way between Gaston de Nérac and Berzélius Paragot, and therefore neither fish nor fowl, he could not find an appropriate hole in Paris. But when his hair and his beard and his finger nails had attained their old luxuriance of growth, and he was in every way Paragot again, the desired haven remained still unfindable. There were taverns without number and drink in oceans, and the life of Paris surged up and down the Boulevards as stimulating as ever: but the heart of Paragot cried out for something different. He took the old violin from its dirty case and spent hours in the Rue des Saladiers trying to fiddle the divine despair out of his system. Sometimes he would call upon Blanquette to accompany him on her almost forgotten zither.
One day he was with me at the Café opposite Janot's, when two or three of the studio came in and sat at our table. There was the usual eager talk. The subject, the new impressionism.
"But to understand it, you must be in the movement," cried Fougère, not dreaming of discourtesy.
But Paragot took the saying to heart.
"I see it now," said he afterwards. "I am no longer in the movement. You young men have passed me by. I am left stranded. You may ask why I don't seek the company of my own contemporaries? Who are they that know me, save worthless rags like Félicien Garbure? Stranded, my son. I have had my day."