In the expensive and elegant restaurants certain sharpers of the better class of society surrounded him--gamblers, couplet singers, jugglers, actors, and property-holders who were ruined by leading depraved lives.

At first these people treated him with a patronizing air, and boasted before him of their refined tastes, of their knowledge of the merits of wine and food, and then they courted favours of him, fawned upon him, borrowed of him money which he scattered about without counting, drawing it from the banks, and already borrowing it on promissory notes.

In the cheap taverns hair-dressers, markers, clerks, functionaries and choristers surrounded him like vultures; and among these people he always felt better--freer.

In these he saw plain people, not so monstrously deformed and distorted as that "clean society" of the elegant restaurants; these were less depraved, cleverer, better understood by him.

At times they evinced wholesome, strong emotions, and there was always something more human in them.
But, like the "clean society," these were also eager for money, and shamelessly fleeced him, and he saw it and rudely mocked them.
To be sure, there were women.