Page:Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne.djvu/260

246

cut from 'Manchester Examiner' of March 16, 1867:—

"—A celebrated character has disappeared from the Palais Royal. Réné Lartique was a Swiss, and a man of about sixty. He actually spent the last fifteen years in the Palais Royal—that is to say, he spent the third of his life at dinner. Every morning at ten o'clock he was to be seen going into a restaurant (usually Tissat's), and in a few moments was installed in a corner, which he only quitted about three o'clock in the afternoon, after having drunk at least six or seven bottles of different kinds of wine. He then walked up and down the garden till the clock struck five, w1ien he made his appearance again at the same restaurant, and always at the same place. His second meal, at which he drank quite as much as at the first, invariably lasted till half-past nine. Therefore, he devoted nine hours a day to eating and drinking. His dress was most wretched—his shoes broken, his trousers torn, his paletôt without any lining and patched, his waistcoat without buttons, his hat a rusty red from old age, and the whole surmounted by a dirty white beard. One day he went up to