Explore "The Parisians, Book XII" by Edward Bulwer-lytton on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Scarcely had De Mauleon quitted Lemercier before the latter was joined by two loungers scarcely less famished than himself -- Savarin and De Breze. Like himself, too, both had been sufferers from illness, though not of a nature to be consigned to an hospital. All manner of diseases then had combined to form the pestilence which filled the streets with unregarded hearses -- bronchitis, pneumonia, smallpox, a strange sort of spurious dysentery much more speedily fatal than the genuine. The three men, a year before so sleek, looked like ghosts under the withering sky; yet all three retained embers of the native Parisian humour, which their very breath on meeting sufficed to kindle up into jubilant sparks or rapid flashes.
"There are two consolations," said Savarin, as the friends strolled or rather crawled towards the Boulevards -- "two consolations for the gourmet and for the proprietor in these days of trial for the gourmand, because the price of truffles is come down."