Schaunard in the book is specially distinguished among his acquaintances for having raised borrowing to the level of a fine art. By dint of many careful observations and delicate experiments he has discovered the days when each one of his friends is accustomed to receive money, and thus, following the periodic ebb and flow of the financial tide, spares himself the trouble and annoyance of appealing to the generosity of those who, at the given moment, are likely to be in as low water as himself. Having, furthermore, “learned the way to borrow five francs in all the languages of the globe,” the painter-musician is able, as a rule, to keep pretty firmly on his feet. By a critical friend he was once described as “passing one half of his time in looking for money to pay his creditors, and the other half in eluding his creditors when the money has been found.”[26] But it should be remembered that this calls for some discount as a friend’s judgment, and likely, therefore, to be a trifle over-colored; and it is but doing justice to Schaunard to say that, towards the immediate companions who had come to his rescue from time to time, he behaved upon a more honorable plan. To facilitate, and at the same time to equalize so far as possible, the “taxes” which he levied, he “had drawn up, in order of districts and streets, an alphabetical list containing the names of all his friends and acquaintances. Opposite each name was inscribed the maximum sum which, having regard to their state of fortune, he might borrow from them, the times when they were in funds, their dinner-hour, and the ordinary bill of fare of the house. Beside this list, Schaunard kept in perfect order a little ledger, in which he entered the amounts lent to him, down to the minutest fractions; for he would never go beyond a certain figure, which was within the fortune of a Norman uncle whose heir he was.[27] As soon as he owed twenty francs to an individual, he closed the account, and liquidated it at a single payment, even if for the purpose he had to borrow from others to whom he owed less. In this way he always kept up a certain credit, which he called his floating debt, and as people knew that he was accustomed to pay when his personal resources permitted, they willingly obliged him when they could.”