Chapter 11

THE SECOND-HAND BOOK MARKET OF THE LATIN QUARTERTHE SECOND-HAND BOOK MARKET OF THE LATIN QUARTER

THE SECOND-HAND BOOK MARKET OF THE LATIN QUARTER

“Put a man in the street with a coat that is too large on his back, pantaloons that are too short, without a collar, without a shirt, without stockings, without a sou, had he the genius of Machiavelli, of Talleyrand, he would fall into the gutter.”—Jules Vallès.

“La Gloiremarches before theVache Enragée.Follow her then, try to catch up with her: there is honour even for those who fall by the way.”

Adolphe Willette, in Le Calvaire de la Vache Enragée.

“Whatever scorn, whatever disgrace he may bring upon himself, it is none the less true that the poor and obscure artist is often worth more than the conquerors of the world; and there are nobler hearts under the mansards where only three chairs, a bed, a table, and agrisetteare to be found, than in thegémonies doréesand theabreuvoirsof domestic ambition.”

Alfred de Musset, in Preface of Comédies et Proverbes.

“Ils feront de ta corne acérée une épée,Ils feront de ton crâne une coupe sculptée,Où nous boirons ton sang avivé de levains.Ils feront de ton cuir des bottes de sept lieuesPour courir au pays des illusions bleuesOu vers l’âpre idéal des rouges lendemains.”Paul Marrot, in a poem to the Vache Enragée.

“A la Vache Enragée, à Montmartre.Mademoiselle:—All those who have not known you are like untempered metals.Accept, I pray, my best wishes.“E. Frémiet.”

“Vive la Vache Enragée!“Son ami,“Alphonse Daudet.”

THE official restoration at the Carnival of 1896 of the historic but long unobserved fête of theBœuf Gras(Fat Ox) was the signal for the creation of the fête of theVache Enragée(Famished Cow) for that year’sMi-carêmeby the denizens of Montmartre.

“Over against theBœuf Gras, father of the golden calf, emblem of the wealth and prosperity of thebourgeoisie,” said the committee of organisation in its public manifesto, “the painters, poets, andchansonniersof the Mont des Martyrs have prepared for the pleasure and edification of the Parisians a spectacle which they call the Cavalcade of theVache Enragée(or theVachalcade), intended to present the picture, sometimes poignant, of their struggles, their sufferings, their ideals, their chasings after phantoms, their unrealised dreams, their often illusory hopes.”

This brand-new cavalcade consisted of a large number of pedestrians masquerading as ducks, geese, rabbits, frogs, camels, donkeys, cats, pigs, and giraffes (the French words for all of which have well-defined metaphorical meanings), and as chimeras, Pierrots and Pierrettes; and a score or more of fantastic floats (designed by Montmartre artists of repute), the subtle and piquant symbolism of which was all Greek to the foreign tourists who chanced to see them and not too intelligible to many Parisians who fancied they knew their Paris and their French. The floats were entitled (to mention only those whose significance is fairly obvious)Pegasus Seized by the Sheriffs,The Anti-Landlord League,The Wrestlers of Thought,The Temple of the Golden Calf,La Vache Enragée through the Ages,Feeding of la Vache Enragée,Drawing the Teeth of la Vache Enragée,A la Belle Etoile,81andMa Tante.82The design for this last, by M. Grün, is given herewith.

Judges were satirically represented as side-whiskered café garçons; the victims ofla misère en habit noir, as street pavers, attired in frayed frock-coats, wind-traversed shoes, and weather-beaten “plug” hats; andLes Jeunes,83as small boys, in dunce-caps, playing on drums.

GRÜN'S DESIGN FOR FLOAT IN CAVALCADE OF LA VACHE ENRAGÉEGRÜN’S DESIGN FOR FLOAT IN CAVALCADE OF LA VACHE ENRAGÉE

GRÜN’S DESIGN FOR FLOAT IN CAVALCADE OF LA VACHE ENRAGÉE

The street parade lasted from mid-day to sunset. It was preceded by a theatrical representation for the benefit of destitute artists, which included appropriate skits by the Montmartre playwrights Xanrof and Courtéline, an address by the Montmartre socialist poet-deputy Clovis Hugues, and rapid platform drawing by the Montmartre caricaturists, Pal and Grün; and it was followed by bonfires and open-air dancing, and by a masked ball at theMoulin Rouge, in the course of which a lottery was drawn, whose principal prizes were sketches by Montmartre artists, among them Faverot, Willette, Henri Pille, Roedel, Léandre, and Puvis de Chavannes. The occasion was further signalised by the publication of a magazine,La Vache Enragée, under the editorship of Willette.

The distinctive feature of the second and last84fête of theVacheEnragée(1897) was a musical poem, entitled “Le Couronnement de la Muse de Montmartre,” by the Montmartre composer Gustave Charpentier, now thrice famous as the author ofLouise, in which Labour, figured by one Mlle. Stumpp (a working-girl, who had been elected by ballot the Montmartre Muse), was crowned by Beauty, figured by Cléo de Mérode. Charpentier interpreted his cantata as follows:—

“The Muse is the plebeian virgin, the virtuous young working-girl, the daughter of the people, administering a formidable slap in the face to thepères la pudeur,85showing these drivellers of another epoch, these dotards whose sentiments are false, unnatural, and bourgeois, that it is possible to achieve the beautiful in taking for a queen anouvrière, arosièreeven, of Montmartre, region of ideals too young for their too old ideas.”

This Montmartre fête of theVache Enragéeis unique among the fêtes of the whole world, I fancy, in that it is at once a bold apotheosis of the racking poverty of the artistic career and a defiant, masterful sneer at the smugness of commercial Philistinism.86“It is a defence ofla misèreyou are making,” said Zola in a communication to its organisers,—“a defence ofla misère; and, to my thinking, you are right in making this defence.” Cyrano, a knight of thevache enragée, who would have found himself delightfully at home in the Montmartre cavalcade, made a similar defence, according to Rostand, some centuries ago:—

“Moi, c’est moralement que j’ai mes élégances.Je ne m’attife pas ainsi qu’un freluquet,Mais je suis plus soigné si je suis moins coquet.Je ne sortirais pas avec, par négligence,Un affront pas très-bien lavé, la conscience260Jaune encore de sommeil dans le coin de son œil,Un honneur chiffoné, des scrupules en deuil.Mais je marche sans rien sur moi qui ne reluise,Empanaché d’indépendance et de franchise;Ce n’est pas une taille avantageuse, c’estMon âme que je cambre ainsi qu’en un corset,Et tout couvert d’exploits qu’en rubans je m’attache,Retroussant mon esprit ainsi qu’une moustache,Je fais en traversant les groupes et les ronds,Sonner les vérités comme des éperons.”

The device,Vache Enragée, cavalierly adopted as their catchword by the painters, sculptors, poets, and musicians of Montmartre, was taken directly from the title of a Montmartre romance by Emile Goudeau, who was named on that account honorary president of the festival; but the phrase had long been current in French conversation and literature to designate the poverty of theprolétariat artistique et littéraire. Thus, the great Daudet wrote regarding one of the characters ofJack:—

“Then commenced for him this terrible ordeal of thevache enragée, which either breaks you at once or bronzes you forever.

“He became one of the ten thousand poor devils, famished and proud, who rise in Paris every morning giddy with hunger and ambitious dreams, nibble surreptitiously a sou loaf, which they keep hidden away in the bottoms of their pockets, blacken their clothes with penfuls of ink, whiten their shirt collars with billiard chalk, and warm themselves over the registers of the libraries and churches.... Art is such a wizard! It creates a sun which shines for all, like Nature’s sun; and those who approach it, even the poor, even the ill-favoured, even the grotesque, carry away a little of its warmth and its radiance. This celestial flame, imprudently ravished, which the unsuccessful guard in the depths of their eyes, renders them redoubtable sometimes, oftenest ridiculous; but their existence gains from it a grandiose serenity, a contemptuousindifference to misfortune, and a grace in suffering that other kinds of poverty do not know.”

The MontmartreVache Enragée, you see, is the same old Latin QuarterMisèreunder another label, the “Bohemian road by which every man who enters the arts without other means of existence than art itself will be forced to travel, ... the training school of the artistic profession, the preface to the Academy, theHôtel-Dieu, or the Morgue.”87

Over the stony and thorny route of theVache Enragéea large part of the literary, artistic, and musical celebrities of France have at one time or another passed.

Millet painting signs at Cherbourg and hasty portraits for the soldiers at Havre—Vache Enragée!

Barye forced to go about as a pedler in order to vend his now priceless statuettes—Vache Enragée!

Hector Berlioz, ridiculed for wanting the courage to put a bullet through his brain, accepting newspaper work to live, failing to write a symphony the theme of which came to him in a dream, because he would not have money enough to bring it out if it were written—Vache Enragée!

Audran and Charles Lecocq (who took prizes, the one in composition, the other in fugue, at theConservatoireand the Niedermeyer School respectively) writing opéra bouffe to keep the wolf from the door—Vache Enragée!

Albert Glatigny, out on a hunt for funds to bury the dead mistress of a friend, swimming the Seine (though he was a poor swimmer and it was late autumn) because he could not pay the small bridge toll which was then exacted—Vache Enragée!

The saturnine De Nerval and the brilliant Gauthier chasing dinners, the first in back alley-ways and the second in the salon of the Princesse Mathilde—Vache Enragée!

Vache Enragée, also, young Balzac living on a few sous a day and writing the inevitable five-act drama in an icy garret, because his father, who had intended the boy for the law, had said to him,“There are people who have a vocation for dying in the hospital,” and his mother, “It seems that monsieur has a taste for misery!”

Vache Enragée—young Daudet arriving in Paris, after an over-long fast, shod only with rubbers (as he has narrated inTrente AnsandLe Petit Chose), and existing there on his share of the seventy-five francs a month his brother Ernest earned!

AndVache Enragée—young Zola stifling in a “room under the roof where one was forced to perform a series of acrobatic feats to sit down—on the bed”; living several days on bread soaked in olive oil sent to him from the Midi, and pitifully imploring the editors ofLe Travail(a little Latin Quarter review) to print for him a poem written in the style of De Musset!

Vache Enragéeagain—Eugène Boudin sighing in his journal: “There are moments hard to bear when on every side you see the impossibility of getting a little money. There is a poor old mother who entreats, there is the rent to pay, there is the necessity of clothes, of brushes, of canvases, which you finally have to get along without. Petty economy and the worry that accompanies it kill you by inches.”

Vache Enragée, in short, the privations of all those for whom liberty is a necessity, and beauty a religion, and with whom a glowing faith in art more than atones for the absence of bread, of fire, and of clothes!

Winter before last a painter, fifty-three years of age, well known in art circles, was detected extracting money out of a church poor-box with the aid of a glue-smeared stick. This revolting sort of infidelity to the hard fare of theVache Enragéeis, it need hardly be said, a rare occurrence; but it is not rare for men to be forced to familiarity with theVache Enragéeafter they have become famous.

Glatigny never got entirely free of poverty, and it was of disease produced by hunger and exposure that both he and his wife died.

La rue Mont-Cénis

O Muse de Montmartre, ouvrièreaux doigts finsQui saurait broder d’or l’azur desSéraphinsEt qui daignez sourire aux larmes despoètes,Salut! Salut! pour t’applaudir nosmains sont prêtes.Te voici parmi nous, vagues chercheursde rien,L’un sculpteur, l’autre peintre, un telmusicien,Guettant un idéal parmi les âpres cimes,Songeur des formes et des rhythmes etdes rimes.Te voici parmi nous! Tes levres decorailNous chantent le couplet sublime dutravail.Emile Goudeau.

At the height of his fame the critic Gustave Planche was often without money enough to go to the barber-shop,—if Vallès is to be believed,—and occupied an attic at twenty-five francs amonth. He never earned more than four thousand francs a year, and rarely as much as three thousand francs,—a sum which was destitution, nothing more nor less, for a person whose vocation forced him into the world and whose inability to walk necessitated a perpetual outlay for carriage hire.

In a striking passage of his novel,La Faiseuse de Gloire, Paul Brulat writes: “An old man approached the desk timidly, and stammered something in a low voice. The editor, annoyed at being interrupted, repelled him with cruel words. ‘Oh, say now, won’t you ever stop coming here begging?’ The old man moved off with a senile shake of the head. He bore a great name in literature. He was called Villiers de l’Isle-Adam.”

Henry Becque, whoseCorbeauxwas refused by ten theatres before it was accepted by theThéâtre Français, “lived on a seventh floor, under the roof,” says his friend and admirer, Henri Bauer. “The furnishings of his single room were an iron bed, an unpainted table, and three straw-bottomed chairs.” And this was long after Becque’s masterpieces had been given a hearing, at a time when he was regarded by a large and influential group of his contemporaries as the greatest French dramatist the last half of the nineteenth century had produced.

Berlioz, Millet, Verlaine, and Hégésippe Moreau ate of theVache Enragée, more or less regularly, all their lives. So have many other artistic natures, not the least worthy and not the least celebrated.

Franz Servais, after having given fifteen years of labour, at untold sacrifice, to the creation and perfection of his opera,L’Apollonide, won the support of the Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar only to have his patron die just as the preparations for the production of the opera were complete and to die himself a few days after. In a letter to a friend, Servais has related how on one occasion, when everything looked dark, he missed an almost certain order from a musical publisher for want of presentable shoes: “I was unable to keep the appointment. At the last moment I perceived that my best shoes were all broken open. They gaped at the endslike carps’ noses. You can imagine the face of the good editor, his regret for having offered me a little money, and how he would have torn up the contract! I must wait for better luck.”

Franz Servais took himself too tragically in letting a good thing escape him simply because he had holes in his shoes. But Servais, though identified with Paris, was a Belgian, not a Frenchman, by birth, and was not aMontmartrois.

With a remunerative offer as an incentive, your typicalMontmartroiswould not have taken more than fifteen minutes to beg, borrow, or steal, hire or buy on the strength of the offer itself or of a supposititious heritage, the necessary shoes, and would have celebrated the happy outcome with his friends the very same night. Resourcefulness is a salient trait of the Bohemian wherever he may be found, and of none more than of the Bohemian of Montmartre. His contrivances for making the pot boil are legion.

In a tight place, he utilises the erudition, of which he is ordinarily more than half ashamed, in teaching foreigners French, working on cyclopedias or dictionaries, and giving lessons in the “three Rs,” for a few sous a day, to the children of hisconcièrge. He gives lessons just as readily in dancing, fencing, sparring, andsavate.

If his talents are literary, he contributes to diet and fashion journals, writes advertisements or puffs for trade organs, sings songs of his own composition in the streets, or prints original poetry on slips and sells it in the cafés. He reads and writes letters at so much a piece for illiterate neighbours, supplies street singers (at a nominal price) with words for their songs, makes almost presentable (by editing) the productions of snobs, and constructs forfeuilletonistesromances which saidfeuilletonistessign. He writes indifferently theses for students, brochures for pamphleteers, placards and palaver for strolling showmen, prospectuses for charlatans, anniversary rhymes for husbands or wives, god-parents or god-children, toasts for empty-pated banqueters, and funeral speeches or elegies for unimaginative mourners. If his gift is musical, he plays in night orchestras. If his gift is artistic,he poses as a model for his companions of the chisel and brush who chance to be in funds, copies old masters at ten to fifteen francs a picture, designs posters and daubs scenery for the fêtes of the faubourgs, colours crude religious prints for the provincial market, paints workingmen’s children in their first communion regalia, and makes portraits for fond widows and widowers—between demise and burial—of their dear deceased. If his health is particularly robust, he figures the cured patient in quack doctors’ waiting-rooms.

He may, quite regardless of his bent, hawk toys in the street on fête days, play the races (under sealed orders) for a friend too busy to attend, fish tadpoles in the suburbs for the reptiles of menageries, help out a small shopkeeper with his book-keeping, back envelopes for a big bazaar, perform the duties of a valet under the euphuistic title of secretary, and advertise wares by demanding them insistently where they are not kept. He may even make himself a printer’s, house painter’s, mason’s, blacksmith’s, or carpenter’s assistant, a market porter, or adéménageur(mover). In all these contingencies, however, the immediate need having been satisfied, he takes up again his normal autonomous existence. He has not bound himself to lasting servitude. He has not sold his soul, and it is a rare thing that he is seriously demoralised by his half-humorous concessions. On the other hand, he has touched life at new points, deepened his sentiments, broadened his human sympathies, and lifted his horizon without lowering his ideal.

“Implacable sausage!” cries the author ofLe Dimanche d’un Jeune Homme Pauvre. “We do not give sufficient credit to the influence of the hog on literature! I know men of lettersen routefor the Academy who ate kilometres ofboudin[blood pudding] during the hard years of their novitiate.” This is merely a highly concrete way of saying that the French Bohemian is much less exercised over the savouriness of food than over its staying power. The problem he has to solve oftenest is not how most to tickle his palate, but how to give his system the maximum ofbracing at the minimum of expense. To the solution of this problem, theMontmartroisbrings an address that is amazing. So long as he can keep in the good graces of hisrestaurateuror of his butcher, baker, grocer, and sausage-man by painting handsome portraits of them and of their families or by flooding them with inscribed copies of his poems, the equation is a simple one, and all goes easily enough. But when the inevitable day of reckoning comes for him, when credit is withdrawn, and all relations with these well-nigh indispensable individuals are incontinently snapped; when, furthermore, he has dined with his friend the interne, J——, at the hospital table with his friend the sergeant, K——, in the sub-officers’ mess, and with his former classmates, the Baron Y—— and the leather merchant X——, in their homes, and when he has made the round of thecénaclesat which he is welcome for the verses he recites, the stories he tells, or the songs he sings,—then the simple equation becomes an affected quadratic one, and a lugubrious change comes over the spirit of his dreams. Then bread andboudin, bread and cheese, bread and a sou’s worth of the meat kept for dogs, or bread helped down with a glass ofvin ordinaireat the corner wine-shop, are the most that he can hope to obtain, unless, like Zola, he takes to snaring sparrows on the house-top, and roasting them, spitted on a curtain rod, by way of a brochette.

If the bread and cheese and the bread and wine also fail, if theboudinhas to be put into the category of the unattainable along with beefsteak, and if the sparrows are coy, he may join the cats, dogs, and rag-pickers in exploring the garbage boxes at the break of morning; but he usually prefers—perhaps because he does not easily accommodate himself to early rising—some less direct, more diplomatic proceeding, such as tasting the stock of the market and street venders with the fastidious air of an intending buyer. Thus, walking up to a barrow of strawberries: “Your strawberries look good. How do you sell them?” “Four sous a pound.” “May I taste them?” “Certainly.”

He munches and savours two or three berries attentively, asif almost convinced of their merit, puts his hand into his pocket and draws out his purse as if to order, but, tasting another berry as he does so, makes a wry face, and ejaculates, “No, no, they’ll never do at all: they’re too sour,” and moves on to another barrow.

Berry by berry, slowly, but surely, he amasses a meal, as the miser amasses his hoard; and, if he has the luck to get a sou’s worth of bread with which to punctuate his butter, cheese, and fruit tastings, the result is not half a gastronomic failure. Happy, however, the taster whose crisis of penury coincides with the opening of the “Ham Fair”!

Picking petty quarrels for the sake of the substantial festivity that is likely to accompany the making up and betting on its eating capacity are other favourite ways for penniless hunger to satisfy itself.

Catulle Mendès, who made the acquaintance of theVache Enragéeduring the brief period when his family were unsympathetic with his aims, tells of a poet, presumably himself, who after thirty-six hours of abstinence succeeded in breaking his fast by making a gingerbread bet:—

“The poet eyed the sweets wistfully, eyed them long.... He was just going away, I know not where, in the direction of the river perhaps, when he heard his name called. It was some one he scarcely knew, a young man also, not a poet, met somewhere by chance.

“‘How hard you look at that gingerbread!’ he said. The poet replied with gravity, ‘It is because I adore it.’

“‘Really?’

“‘Yes, to distraction. There are days when I could eat a franc’s worth at a sitting.’

“‘You’re joking. I bet you the franc you can’t eat as many as you say.’

“‘I take you up,’ cried theParnassien, with starveling enthusiasm; and he precipitated himself upon the stall, and devoured the gingerbreads,—would have eaten of them for still greater, for enormous, sums,—taking pains to choose the pieces withoutalmonds, which were poorer in quality, but which were bigger for the price. It was thus that he did not die of hunger.”

It is said that Ibsen in his early days of poverty before the publication ofBrandmade it an invariable rule to take a long walk at noon, whether he had the money for a meal or not, in order not to lose caste—and hence credit—with his landlady by revealing that he could not dine as often as every day. Similarly the Montmartre Bohemian displays a fine pathetico-humorous ingenuity in making others believe he has eaten when he has not, and even—supreme prestidigitation!—in making himself believe it: as when he passes the day in bed or puts his watch back to cheat his appetite; when he takes hisdéjeunerin the middle of the afternoon, not only to get a dinner at the price of adéjeuner, but to afford himself the illusion of having both; or when he makes the Heaven-sentapéritifthat should precede or the gratuitous cigar that should follow a dinner, stand him in the stead of the dinner itself.

His so-called affectations and poses—bizarre accoutrementMONTMARTRE TYPESMONTMARTRE TYPESand outlandish speech—are, in the last analysis, so many devices for cheap living, so many expedients for disguising the completeness of his destitution from his fellows and from himself, so many talismans for metamorphosing a hard necessity into an idiosyncrasy of genius, or so many modes of whistling, so to speak, to keep up his courage. Thus Goudeau, under the stress of exceptional ill-hap, consecrated himself solemnly to playing practical jokes in aphalanstère; and the rotund and rippling Raoul Ponchon flaunted a splendid Breton costume at the very time he had nothing better than a wash-house to sleep in.

If theMontmartroiscarries his hat in his hand with a distrait, philosophical air,it is certain that the last piece of head-gear Providence has vouchsafed him is either too large or too small for his head. If he speaks feelingly of his old aunt, he is referring indubitably to the pawn-shop, whose quotations are of far more moment to him than are those of the Bourse. If you detect him in a railway station, waiting more than half an hour for a train, it is that the shelter of the café has been, for some reason or other, temporarily denied him. And, if he appears more than half a mile from his lodging in dressing-gown and slippers, with a salad or a bunch of radishes under his arm, it is either because dressing-gown and slippers are, for the nonce, the sum of his wardrobe or because he has put on the dressing-gown to match compulsory slippers or the slippers to match a compulsory dressing-gown. You may be sure he has carried the salad or radishes ever since he set out, and that he will renew them when they have become too withered to serve his deceitful end.

THE REAL MONTMARTRETHE REAL MONTMARTRE

THE REAL MONTMARTRE

He carries his burdens buoyantly, as the best type of old man carries his years, and, making hard necessity pass for a joke, extracts no end of amusement from his vicissitudes, caps himself with a Merry Andrew’s bonnet, and “drapes himself,” to use a phrase of Maurice Barrès, “with irony in order not to appear stark naked before men.”

A young couple, who had long been habitués of a certain restaurant in the rue Lepic, entered one night equipped with violin and guitar, made profound obeisance to the assembled company, and announced that they had got to earn their dinner on the spot that night, if they had one. With their instruments and voices they proceeded to earn it, amid their own and their whilom comrades’ jests and laughter. After a fortnight of this unenviable, if mirthful, prominence, their fortunes mended; and they dropped contentedly back into their obscurity as ordinary diners, the richer for an invigorating experience. Three handsome, long-haired, bearded fellows of the rue Menessier have taken Paris by storm this very summer with their mandolin and guitar music in the open air.

A Montmartre Bohemian, who is at once a superior musician and a species of Hercules, having made himself provisionally adéménageur, amused himself mightily at his work, confounding the petty bourgeois he served, by playing their pianos. The natural though totally unforeseen result of his somewhat impudent facetiousness was an opportunity to give lessons, which floated him back into the musical current.

AnotherMontmartrois(Raoul Pouchon, I think), wearied with walking the streets the night after he had been evicted from his lodging, revenged himself by baiting with sugar all the street curs of his district, and introducing them at two o’clock in the morning into the stairway of his evictor’s house.

Sometimes, perhaps, these merry Montmartre shifts come near transgressing the bounds which separate fun from lawlessness. Thedéménagement à la cloche de bois,88the nailing of one’s emptied trunk to the floor to impress one’sconcièrgewith its weight, the paying of one’s rent by abstracting the clothes of one’s landlord and putting them in pawn, and the grateful acceptance of thepâté, chop, or sausage brought in by one’s pilfering dog, as if one were Elijah and one’sToutouwere a raven of the wild, can hardly be defended by any of the recognised bourgeois codes. But even these flagrant escapades proceed less from malice than from mischief, and even these fall strangely in line with equity in nine cases out of ten.

On its Bohemian side, Montmartre is a second and, to the thinking of many, a greater and more brilliantQuartier Latin.

Here abound the literary and artistic restaurants, cafés,bouillons,crèmeries, and cabarets which have always conferred a peculiar charm on Paris. Here, as well as in the Latin Quarter (and more numerous and varied, perhaps, here than there), are the modern counterparts of theTreille d’Or, thePomme de Pin, theRadis Couronné, thePressoir d’Or, theCeinture qui Craque, theDeux Torches, and theTrois Entonnoirsof the time of Cyrano; theProcope,de Valois,de Foy,du Caveau, andMécaniqueof the timeof Louis XVI.; theViot,Bléry,Flicoteaux,de Buci, andde la Rotondeof the Restoration and Louis Philippe; theMolière,Voltaire,L’Orient, “Sherry Cobbler,” andBobinoof the last empire. And here they have been long enough to have already developed their legends andesprit de corps.

In theBrasseries des MartyrsandFontaine,Cabarets de Ramponneau,de la Grande Pinte,du Plus Grand Bock, andde la Place Belhomme, and theCafés Jean Goujon,Laplace,de la Nouvelle Athénée, andDu Rat Mort,89poets and painters, now grizzled, chattered and revelled before the grey hairs came. Dinochaux, of theCafé Dinochaux(rue Bréda), who nourished several of his patrons gratis for years, and bestowed credit unsolicited on any one who showed himself worthy in literature or art, has taken his place in history alongside of Ragueneau, the keeper of theRôtisserie des PoètesofCyrano.

You recall Ragueneau, the quaint saint, it is to be hoped. If not, here is a scrap of dialogue to evoke him:—

“Cyrano.Bercés par ta voix.Ne vois-tu pas comme ils s’empiffrent?“Ragueneau.Je le vois....Sans regarder, de peur que cela ne les trouble;Et dire ainsi mes vers me donne un plaisir double,Puisque je satisfais un doux faible que j’ai,Tout en laissant manger ceux qui n’ont pas mangé.“Cyrano(lui frappant sur l’épaule).Toi, tu me plais!”

The cook at Marguéry’s, being asked once upon a time what he thought of theVache Enragée, replied: “Mon dieu, de la vache enragée! Je crois qu’on pourrait en faire un plat mangeable avec beaucoup de bonne humeur et des petites femmes autour.”

At Montmartre the sagacious chef’s words are daily verified. At Montmartre, if nowhere else in the world, theVache Enragéeis a “plat mangeable.”

The line of boulevards extending from the Place de Clichy to the Place d’Anvers which strikes American tourists, who visit it for Montmartre, as a vulgar hodge-podge of Coney Island, the Bowery, the Broadway of the Tenderloin, and South Fifth Avenue, with a dash of, say, a Boston “Pop” concert on a Harvard night, is no more the real Montmartre than Paris is the real France. The real Montmartre is the abrupt hill known as “The Butte,” just north of said boulevards90and included between them,—the rue Marcadet, the rue de Clignancourt, and the avenue de St. Ouen, a section of which the gigantic Byzantine cathedral of theSacré Cœur, theMoulin de la Galette, until recently an unsophisticated popular ball, and thecimetière de Montmartre(the second cemetery of Paris) are the salient features.

This real Montmartre (the Montmartre of the Butte) contains a tiny local cemetery (long disused), a tiny twelfth-century parochial church (St. Pierre), a tiny district theatre, a tiny village plaza (Place du Tertre) with the customary trees, benches, and aged, ruminating idlers, a tiny public park (Square St. Pierre), two gaunt, grey windmills, and several sleepy wine-shops, over which sleepy publicans preside. Here are five, six, and seven story city buildings, to be sure, but here are also (particularly on the northern slope) ancient garden-girdled mansions reminiscent of the epoch when the whole district was open country; sculptured gate-posts, crumbling, but stately, and rusty iron gates opening on symmetrical avenues; small one-and-a-half-story tile-roofed and straw-thatched dwellings, also garden-girdled, clutching with the grip of the Swiss chalet the steep hillsides; narrow streets and winding lanes, and worn stone stairways where the hill’s incline forbids streets and lanes; high, erratic, heavily buttressed stone walls, bulging with age, over which houses also bulging with age (from the windows of which a Paul might be let down in abasket) beetle as if to fall; diminutive fruit orchards and vegetable gardens; and diminutive barnyards, cluttered with chicken-coops, dove-cotes, pig-pens, and rabbit-cages, which advertise cows’ and goats’ milk, compost, and young pigs for sale. Here cats and dogs and hens roam multitudinous and unmolested, birds sing in the shrubbery, and chanticleer proclaims the dawn.

THE REAL MONTMARTRE

THE REAL MONTMARTRETHE REAL MONTMARTRE“One would believe himself more thantwo hundred miles from Paris.”

In sum, the Butte, the real Montmartre, seems at first view to be one-half country village and one-half large provincial town. In the rue St. Vincent, the rue Mont-Cénis, the rue des Saules, rue de la Fontaine-du-But, rue de la Borne, rue St. Rustique, rue Norvins, and rue de l’Abreuvoir, where one is scarcely a twenty minutes’ walk from the Grands-Boulevards, one would believe himself more than two hundred miles from the metropolis,—so different are these streetsfrom the average metropolitan ways,—were it not for the constant outlooks on Paris spread out beneath one, for the large proportion of Angoras among the ubiquitous cats, and the phenomenalsavoir-vivre, good-nature, and friendliness of the dogs; were it not for an indefinable coquetry, tell-tale of Parisianism, about the little garden-girdled houses and a hundred artistic whimsicalities, such as are represented by a windmill studio and a tram-car dwelling; were it not also that certain vistas are closed by the flippant entrance to theMoulin de la Galette, that sundry glimpses of studio interiors are vouchsafed, and that silhouettes of long-haired, capering artists and of artists’ models loom up fitfully against the sky; and were there not a sort of vagabond humour in the very atmosphere that accords ill with provincial straight-lacedness.

As the Butte wears the general aspect of a provincial community, so it has the provincial community’s spirit of neighbourliness; but, as its provincial aspect is enlivened by coquetry and mirth, so its provincial neighbourliness is happily modified by being shorn of the meddling spirit. TheMontmartroisis not indifferent to the welfare of his fellow-Montmartrois; but he minds his own business, which the neighbourly provincial rarely, if ever, does. He is as willing as the most naïve countryman to lend a helping hand upon occasion; but, the occasion passed, he speedily effaces himself. He does not feel entitled to enter into your intimacy, to summer and winter with you, so to say, because he has done you a casual good turn.

When I entered Montmartre, as most fellows enter it, with mylares and penatesenthroned on a hand-cart, and experienced the difficulty other fellows, thus encumbered, have experienced in scaling the Butte, a butcher’s boy and an artist who was sketching in the street were prompt to put their shoulders to the wheel (to the tail-board, to be strictly accurate); but they did not by the same token cross-question me regarding my antecedents and intentions, as countrymen, in the same circumstances, would have done. They gracefully accepted my invitation to a social glass at an adjacentwine-shop, then went their ways to their respective tasks; and that was the end of it.

The Butte, then, the real Montmartre, is in Paris, but not of it, and yet, of necessity, perpetually conscious of it,—a community which is and which is not a provincial town, which has anesprit de corpsnot inconsistent with independence, a unity not destructive of variety, and a sociability admirably accordant with a seemly privacy; while theMontmartroissees Paris without being blinded by it, touches Paris without being crushed by it, and is stimulated by Paris without losing his identity therein.

“J’ vis en philosophe et p’tê’t’ bienQu’étant presqu’heureux avec rien,J’ai su résoudre un grav’ problème,A mon septième,”

sings achansonnierof Montmartre. And it is indeed this ability to “be almost happy with nothing,” this fairy-godmother power to transform by a simple flourish a pumpkin into a coach, a dowdy into a fair princess, and a cabbage into a rose, this talent, amounting to genius, for squeezing so very much more out of life than there really is in it, that lifts completely out of the commonplace the life of Montmartre.

For four hundred to five hundred francs a year, monsieur and madame,—as in the Latin Quarter every Jack has his Jill, so on the Butte everyMontmartroishas hisMontmartroise,—monsieur and madame may have alogement,91consisting of two or three rooms and a kitchen with peerless views of Paris and the valley of the Seine; and in the shops of thebrocanteursthey may procure antique furnishings of real beauty and durability, not, alas! for the proverbial song, but for less than the bourgeois pay for their ugly, up-to-date flimflams.

Prices are dearer at Montmartre than in several other parts of Paris. Nevertheless, there is no district where, day in and day out, there is so much genuine poetry and so much honest zest in living.

Louise France,92a dramatic artist of vigorous talent, who has been associated with nearly all the important literary movements of Montmartre, is said to have welcomed a party of friends to her modestlogementone day with, “Maintenant, en guise d’apéritif, je vais vous offrir une vue splendide sur Paris: c’est tout ce que je possède.”

Good Madame France is a thoroughMontmartroise, and the incident is admirably representative of the jocund humour of the Butte. TheMontmartroiswill not only regale himself with a view from a window in lieu of anapéritif, but he will merrily substitute achansonfor a roast, console himself with a kiss for the absence of the dessert, and warm himself, as my friend L——, who has not had a fire for three winters, expresses it, with sunsets and tobacco smoke,—his own, if possible.

During the periods of moving (namely, the 1st to the 15th of January, April, July, and October) the essential domesticity of the Butte is amply and amusingly revealed, and the complete congruity of domesticity and the arts is graphically demonstrated.

Chiffonniers lord it over model-thrones, paint brushes peep over the rims of soup-kettles or hide their heads in coal-scuttles, manikins fraternise with hat-trees and colour-boxes with stew-pans, stretchers snuggle up to pillows, pastels and aquarelles lie cheek by jowl with dish-towels and table-cloths, brooms pay court to easels, palettes make eyes at feather dusters, and impressionistic landscapes dazzle mirrors. Monsieur, aided by a chum, tugs a precariously loaded hand-cart,93or, if the distance to be traversed makes the hand-cart unnecessary or a lack of funds makes it impossible, he staggers, sweats, and swears under the weight of trunks, chests, bureaus, and wardrobes; and madame, bareheaded,in wrapper and slippers, proffers highly unwelcome caution and advice while carrying the company coffee-cups or the parlour lamp.

Like most other localities that partake of the idyllic, Montmartre is most idyllic in the spring. Then painters work at their easels in its streets, while their mesdames, who have followed them forth with camp-chairs, sew and chatter in the nearest shade. Then its poplars and limes are the same crisp, inviting green as the salads that pass in the hand-barrows. Then its myriad lilac, horse-chestnut, and acacia clusters are thyrsi awaiting the rhythmic wavings of the bacchanals, and then its circumambient fragrance would inflame a Hippolyta’s blood, trouble a Vestal’s vows, and make a Diana’s senses reel. Then, too, models, posing in court-yards and back gardens for the supernal effects of sunlight on flesh, are like great pink-and-purple-dappled exotic blooms escaped from Shelley’s pages.

The spirit of nature that with soft music is bursting the bonds of winter, and the spirit of the artist, spontaneous, impulsive, capricious, and free, are in absolute accord. One breathes contempt for prudery and custom with the very air. Nature’s upward-rushing sap and the artist’s careering fancy alike defy repression.

“Tout être a le droit d’être libre,” the splendid throbbing lyric climax of Charpentier’s Montmartre opera,Louise, had here its origin.

“Tout être a le droit d’être libre!”—the careless attire, unconstrained mien, and thesans-gêneof the lovers of Montmartre proclaim it.

“TOUT ÊTRE A LE DROIT D’ÊTRE LIBRE!” the Montmartre winds and birds and rivulets sing.

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