He was all dressed up, just like one of the pictures in his magazine, The Scarf of Iris. Gloved, polished, freshly shaven, hair curled, mustache tips twisted, a slender walking stick in hand, a monocle in one eye, young again, in full bloom and very handsome: this is how our friend Rodolphe, the poet, appeared one evening in the month of November, pausing on the boulevard as he waited for a carriage to take him home.

What's this? Rodolphe was waiting for a carriage? Some cataclysm must suddenly have transformed his life.

At that very moment, as our friend Rodolphe, a poet and a new man, was twirling his mustache, holding a large cigar between his teeth, and drawing admiring glances from beautiful women, one of his closest friends passed by on the same boulevard. It was Gustave Colline, the philosopher. Rodolphe saw him approaching and recognized him immediately—but then, anyone who’d ever met him even once would recognize him. As always, Colline was loaded down with a dozen books. He was wearing his immortal nut-brown coat, so sturdy it looked like the Romans had built it, and he was crowned with his famous broad-brimmed hat with the beaver dome, a hat that had been referred to as the Mambrino's helmet of modern philosophy, and beneath it a swarm of hyperphysical dreams was buzzing. Colline walked at a slow pace and ruminated quietly about the preface to a book that, in his imagination at least, had been in print for three months. For a moment, as he neared the spot where Rodolphe was standing, Colline thought he recognized him, but the poet's astonishing display of elegance threw him into doubt and uncertainty.

“Rodolphe wearing gloves? Carrying a walking stick? Chimera! Utopia! What an aberration! Rodolphe with curls? A man who has less hair than Occasio. No! What was I thinking? Besides, at this time of day my unlucky friend is occupied with his lamentations and writing melancholy poems concerning the departure of young Mademoiselle Mimi, who betrayed him, or so I’ve heard.