[53] 
 
 
 
 
 
CAPITULUM VII 
 
 
Only for one short period, resumed the 
Archbishop, no whit exhausted by his previous ef-
forts, did I turn from the clerical career which the 
Q...n’s kindness opened to me.  But the restric-
tions of the training were at first as irksome to me 
as they were to Fra Lippo Lippi in Browning’s im-
mortal poem, and Art seemed a halfway house.  
Suiting the action to the thought, I soon found my-
self in Paris, and rooms in a dirty little basement in 
the Montparnasse Quarter.  My next-door neighbours 
were photographers, one, by name L..s, calling 
himself an artist, and his partner H...s, pluming 
himself upon his business capacity.  L..s was the 
son of a charlatan parson once well known in Eng-
land as a mountebank, while his mother, disgusted 
that he was a boy, brought him up as a girl, as far 
as she possibly could.  He even slept with her till 
he was eighteen :  and we may guess the result. 
H...s was a snivelling shit.  L..s wore long hair, 
never washed and rarely shaved.  His pictures were 
beneath criticism, and his manners — Mean little 
skunks, the slimy pair of them ! 
Now in an attic in the same building lived S...y 
B.....s, the common road of the quarter :  an illustra-
tion of Euclid’s position that the Hole is greater 
than its Quarter.  This was a dirty split-arse me-
chanic with nigger blood peeping through her low-
caste white parentage.  She smoked an inordinate 
number of cigarettes per diem, and her teeth and 
breath told the tale.  She opened her skinny legs to 
anything in the shape of a tent-peg that she could