diance.
Bahorel had figured in the bloody tumult of June, 1822, on the occasion of the burial of young Lallemand.
Bahorel was a good-natured mortal, who kept bad company, brave, a spendthrift, prodigal, and to the verge of generosity, talkative, and at times eloquent, bold to the verge of effrontery; the best fellow possible; he had daring waistcoats, and scarlet opinions; a wholesale blusterer, that is to say, loving nothing so much as a quarrel, unless it were an uprising; and nothing so much as an uprising, unless it were a revolution; always ready to smash a window-pane, then to tear up the pavement, then to demolish a government, just to see the effect of it; a student in his eleventh year. He had nosed about the law, but did not practise it.
He had taken for his device:
"Never a lawyer," and for his armorial bearings a nightstand in which was visible a square cap.
Every time that he passed the law-school, which rarely happened, he buttoned up his frock-coat,--the paletot had not yet been invented,--and took hygienic precautions.
Of the school porter he said:
"What a fine old man!" and of the dean, M. Delvincourt:
"What a monument!" In his lectures he espied subjects for ballads, and in his professors occasions for caricature.
He wasted a tolerably large allowance, something like three thousand francs a year, in doing nothing.