In the Cafe Neant ("Nothingness"), Montmartre, Paris, a soul-sick traveler of life's rugged highway reclined beside a black coffin, gulped beer from a human skull. Amid their falsetto shrieks and groans, other travelers, pleasure-spent, raised skull-mugs to their fleshy lips, thwacked the coffin-lid, toyed with human bones—the femur, the tibia, the humerus. Waiters in the greasy black of undertakers made long faces, scurried about the skeleton hall, doing waiters' work. Maudlin antiquaries dilated upon the history of the ghoul-crooked relics.
The soul-sick one called for...
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