Looking Ahead

'The life of a drinker in four pictures'


Omitted by this admittedly charming bit of teetotaler propaganda are the high times undoubtedly enjoyed by this dissipated roué on the way to his premature grave, evenings begun with apéritifs and two bottles of Château Lafite at Les Ambassadeurs, our hero in full raconteur form, sending out sallies of wit at the expense of Dupuy and the Dreyfusards, quoting de Vigny from memory*, the voice firm at first but starting to go slushy once he's tossed down his second digestif, off to wend his way across the Place de la Concorde (almost knocked over by an omnibus), to stain his lips with gritty plonk at a piss-reeking assommoir, followed by clumsy coupling in a gray room in Pigalle with a menopausal Hungarian péripatéticienne who squats over a basin of greasy water and scrubs her exhausted loins with a gray rag that might have swaddled a newborn Christ, while the buveur finishes the last drops of cordial from his flask with a dyspeptic belch, leaving to be hit by an atavistic stab of guilt after his vague, instinctive genuflection when passing Sainte-Trinité, discreetly retching in the rotunda in front of the Parc Monceau...

There's more to life than organs, ya know???




*- Aimons ce que jamais on ne verra deux fois.
Ah! qui verra deux fois ta grace et ta tendresse.
(Let us love what we shall never see twice.
Ah! Who will twice see your grace and tenderness!)