chair, his bad leg swaddled in many bandages. He asked me, speaking in English, if I knew Paris well, and added, pointing to his leg, that it had scorched his leg for he knew it "well, too well" and "lived in it like a fly in a pot of marmalade." He took up an English dictionary, one of the few books in the room, and began searching for the name of his disease, selecting after a long search, and with, as I understood, only comparative accuracy "Erysipelas." Meanwhile his homely, middle-aged mistress made the coffee and found the cigarettes; it was obviously she who had given the room its character; her canaries in several cages hanging in the window, and her sentimental lithographs nailed here and there among the nude drawings and newspaper caricatures of her lover as various kinds of monkey, which he had pinned upon the wall. A slovenly, ragged man came in, his trousers belted with a piece of rope and an opera-hat upon his head. She drew a box over to the fire, and he sat down now holding the opera-hat upon his knees, and I think he must have acquired it very lately for he kept constantly closing and opening it. Verlaine introduced him by saying "He is a poor man, but a good fellow, and is so like Louis XI to look at that we call him Louis the Eleventh." I remember that Verlaine talked of Victor Hugo who was "a supreme poet, but a volcano of mud as well as of flame" and of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam who was "exalté" and wrote excellent French; and of In Memoriam which he had tried to translate and could not. "Tennyson is too noble, too anglais; when he should have been broken-hearted, he had many reminiscences."
At Verlaine's burial but a few months after, his mistress quarrelled with a publisher at the grave-side as to who owned the sheet by which the body had been covered, and Louis XI stole fourteen umbrellas that he found leaning against a tree in the Cemetery.
XLII
I am certain of one date, for I have gone to much trouble to get it right. I met John Synge for the first time in the autumn of 1896 when I was one and thirty, and he four and twenty. I was at the Hotel Corneille instead of my usual lodging, and why I cannot remember for I thought it expensive. Synge's biographer says that you boarded there for a pound a week, but I was accustomed to cook my own breakfast and dine at an anarchist restaurant in the
