On his twenty-fifth birthday two of his friends in the repairing-shop where he worked proposed to stand him a dinner. He was immensely touched by this attention.

‘I was a steady man,’ he remarked, ‘but I am not less sociable than any other body.’

The entertainment came off in a little café on the Boulevard de la Chapelle. At dinner they drank some special wine. It was excellent. Everything was excellent. And the world—in his own words—seemed a very good place to live in. He had good prospects, some little money laid by, and the affection of two excellent friends. He proposed to pay for all the drinks after dinner, which was only proper on his part.

They drank more wine; they drank liqueurs, cognac, beer, then more liqueurs and more cognac. Two strangers sitting at the next table looked at him, he said, so sympathetically that he invited them to join the party.

He had never drunk so much in his life. His elation was extreme, and so pleasurable that whenever it flagged he hastened to order more drinks.

‘It seemed to me,’ he said, in his quiet tone and looking on the ground in the gloomy shed full of shadows, ‘that I was on the point of just attaining a great and wonderful felicity. Another drink, I felt, would do it. The others were holding out well with me, glass for glass.’

But an extraordinary thing happened. He seemed to be slipping back. Gloomy ideas—des idées noires—rushed into his head. All the world outside the café appeared to him as a dismal evil place where a multitude of poor wretches had to work and slave to the sole end that a few individuals should ride in carriages and live riotously in palaces. The pity of mankind’s cruel lot oppressed his heart. In a voice choked with sorrow he tried to express these sentiments. He thinks he wept.

The two new acquaintances hastened to console him by their sympathetic assent. Yes. Such injustice was indeed scandalous. There was only one way of dealing with the rotten state of society. Demolish the whole sacrée boutique.^*

Their heads hovered over the table as they whispered to him eloquently. I don’t think they quite expected the result. He was extremely drunk. Mad drunk. With a howl of rage he leaped suddenly upon the table. Kicking over bottles and glasses, he yelled: ‘Vive l’anarchie!^* Death to the capitalists!’ He yelled this again and again. All round him broken glass was falling, chairs were swung high in the air, people were taking each other by the throat. The police dashed in. He hit, bit, scratched and struggled, till something crashed upon his head.

He came to himself in a cell, locked up on a charge of assault, seditious cries, and anarchist propaganda.

He looked at me fixedly with his liquid, shining eyes, that seemed very big in the dim light.

‘That was bad. But even then I might have got off somehow, perhaps,’ he said, slowly.

I doubt it. But whatever chance he had was done away with by a young socialist lawyer who undertook his defence. In vain he assured him that he was no anarchist; that he was a quiet, respectable mechanic, only too anxious to work ten hours per day. He was presented at the trial as the victim of society. His cry of revolt was the expression of infinite suffering. The young lawyer had his way to make, and this was his start. The speech for the defence was pronounced magnificent.

He paused, swallowed, and brought out the statement,

‘I got the maximum penalty applicable to a first offence.’

I made a sympathetic murmur. He hung his head and folded his arms.