ssible; 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.
He had peasant parents whom he had contrived to imbue with respect for their son.
He said of them:
"They are peasants and not bourgeois; that is the reason they are intelligent."
Bahorel, a man of caprice, was scattered over numerous cafes; the others had habits, he had none.
He sauntered.