Keats had a weakness for doing the gallant but his meanness in money matters often detracted from the largeness of a hospitable gesture. On one occasion he did the stage-door johnny and invited a chorus girl home to his rooms for ‘a bite of supper’ (which in those days was taken to mean a cold fowl and champagne). The lady consented. She was not very pleased, however, when she discovered that the poet was doing things on the cheap and had laid in merely a quantity of cooked ham and a dozen Bass. She picked diffidently at the ham and did her sulky best with one bottle of the beer. The poet opened his own bottle, whipped off one of the lady’s dainty little shoes, filled it till there were beaded bubbles winking at the brim, and then with a gallant ‘Santé!’ began to drink.
He drank bottle after bottle in this fashion while the lady produced a private flask of drugged cognac and began to get herself well and truly plastered. The evening wore on (curiously enough). The poet’s diminutive stomach rebelled after a time and he had the greatest difficulty in swallowing bottle number ten. By this time the lady was practically asleep. The hiccupping poet filled her shoe with the eleventh bottle but suddenly realizing that the last tram was due and that he would be stuck for a taxi if the lady missed it, he put the brimming shoe on the floor, rammed her foot into it, and started to drag her hastily down the stairs and out into the street. She staggered along gamely on his arm and who should the pair encounter only Chapman making his way home. Chapman was alarmed at the girl’s appearance.
‘What’s wrong with your friend?’ he asked, ‘She is lame.’
‘She has an ale in her shoe,’ Keats said.