Chapter 12

“Et que faudrait-il faire?*****Calculer, avoir peur, être blême,Préférer faire une visite qu’un poème,278Rédiger des placets, se faire-présenter?Non, merci! non, merci! non, merci! mais chanter,Rêver, rire, passer, être seul, être libre,Avoir l’œil qui regarde bien, la voix qui vibre,Mettre, quand il vous plaît, son feutre de travers,Pour un oui, pour un non, se battre—ou faire un vers!Travailler sans souci de gloire ou de fortune,A tel voyage, auquel on pense, dans la lune.”94

A Montmartre CarrouselChapter XVILITERARY AND ARTISTIC CABARETS OF MONTMARTRE“We sang when the English dismembered the kingdom, we sang during the civil war of the Armagnacs, during the ‘Ligue,’ during the Fronde, under the Régence; and it was to the sound of thechansonsof Rivarol that the monarchy disappeared at the end of the eighteenth century.”—De Jouy.“Thechansonbecame history: it donned defiantly the Phrygian bonnet, and marched in the forefront.... Men went singing to the guillotine.”Henri Avenel.“It is certain that thechansonis, like wine, a product of our soil, a flower ofla patrie.”—Jules Claretie.

“We sang when the English dismembered the kingdom, we sang during the civil war of the Armagnacs, during the ‘Ligue,’ during the Fronde, under the Régence; and it was to the sound of thechansonsof Rivarol that the monarchy disappeared at the end of the eighteenth century.”—De Jouy.

“Thechansonbecame history: it donned defiantly the Phrygian bonnet, and marched in the forefront.... Men went singing to the guillotine.”

Henri Avenel.

“It is certain that thechansonis, like wine, a product of our soil, a flower ofla patrie.”—Jules Claretie.

“And I send these words to Paris with my love,And I guess some chansonniers there will understand them.”Walt Whitman.

THE Bohemians of theTHE REAL MONTMARTRETHE REAL MONTMARTRETHE REAL MONTMARTRECabaret du Lapin AgileQuartier Latinwho do not starve, commit suicide, return to their parents to eat the fatted calf, become rich and famous or alcoholic and insane, have one other resource left them,—a resource beside which the proverbial jump out of the frying-pan into the fire is the quintessence of discretion,—namely, emigration to Montmartre.

Originally given over to windmills and plaster ovens, a suburb at the time of the Great Revolution (when it went for awhile by the name of Mont-Marat), Montmartre did not become a part of Paris proper until 1859.

“I knew Montmartre,” says one of its ardent admirers, “thirty-five years ago. It was a quarter like another, less alive, in fact, than most others, except in the immediate vicinity of the balls,le Grand Turc,la Boule Noire, etc.

“All of a sudden the Haussmannising empire bound it to Paris by the Boulevard Magenta, and the picks of the workmen have had no respite since.”

The Eighteenth Arrondissement, which corresponds roughly with Montmartre, has nearly doubled in population since the Franco-Prussian war, and is now a city of more than 225,000 souls.

“Travellers tell us,” wrote Aurélien Scholl in 1898, “that in America cities spring up with incredible rapidity.... I know only two localities in France which have undergone a similar speedy transformation,—Royan95and Montmartre. It is not so very long ago that we saw from the boulevards looking up the rue Laffitte a verdantbuttewith a few windmills whose arms enlivened the perspective. There were hovels and tiny, shabby-looking shops along the present boulevards (Clichy and Rochechouart).

“Montmartre is to-day one of the finest cities of France. It has three theatres, five or sixcafés-concerts, a circus, restaurants, andbrasseries....La cigalesings there all summer—and all winter.”

In the partial eyes of the loyalMontmartrois, Montmartre, “Ville Libre,” literary and artistic Bohemiapar excellence, is as much the capital of Paris96as Paris is the capital of France. To them all the rest of Paris, the Latin Quarter included, is merely Montmartre’s back yard.

Montmartre, by reason of its surpassing view, has always been favoured as a place of residence by detached writers and artists;and, after the closing of theThéâtre Bobinoin theQuartier Latin, a perceptible literary and artistic current thitherward set in. But it was the exodus of the “Hydropathes” and “Hirsutes” of theQuartierto theChat Noirthat marked (marked rather than caused) the real beginning of Montmartre’s supremacy.

TheCercle des Hydropathes97owed its origin to one Charles Cros, who, tiring of being relegated to an inglorious obscurity while CoquelinCadetwon laurels by the recitation of monologues, which he (Cros) had written, decided to recite his monologues himself.

The first formal meeting of theHydropatheswas held on a Friday of October, 1878, in a small upper room of a Latin Quarter café, corner of the rue Cujas and the Boulevard St. Michel. There were five persons present. At the next meeting there were seventy-five, at the third one hundred, at the fourth one hundred and fifty, and so on, until, driven from café to café by the need of more room, they settled in a vacant store, with an average attendance of three hundred to three hundred and fifty twice a week.

Emile Goudeau presided,—as nearly, that is, as any one can be said to preside in a Latin Quarter assembly. There was liberty to drink, smoke, and woo thegrisette. There were folly and tumult, confusion and fun; violin, piano, and guitar music; singing in concert of riotous roof-lifting refrains; recitations of novelties and the classics by Villain, Leloir, Le Bargy, and CoquelinCadetof theComédie Française. Paul Mounet, also of theComédie, arrayed in a blue blouse and red neckerchief, interpretedLa Grève des Forgeronsweek in and week out with telling effect. Maurice Rollinat sang his own songs and those of Pierre Dupont, and recited selections from hisNévrosesandBrandes. Laurent Tailhade, Jean Moréas, Georges d’Esparbès, Louis Marsolleau, Jean Ajalbert, André Gill, Léon Valade, Charles Monselet, Paul Marrot, Edmond Haraucourt, Félicien Champsaur, Mac-Nab, Auguste Vacquerie, Louis Tiercelin, Alphonse Allais, Jules Jouy,and a full score more of poets andchansonniersrendered their works. Bourget, Coppée, Paul Arène, Luigi Loir, and Bastien-Lepage were frequent, though for the most part passive, spectators. All degrees of talent, all shades of politics, and all of the poetic schools were represented. Bernhardt was proud to be known as aHydropathe. Francisque Sarcey and Jules Claretie visited theHydropathes, and praised them in the press. The police threatened to dissolve them, but wisely refrained.

TheHirsutesdiffered from theHydropathesonly in name and in the fact that the name had an obvious significance.

It was theGrand’ Pinte(a Louis XIII. cabaret of Montmartre, frequented, but without mummery or fracas, by a band of painters and poets) that gave Rodolphe Salis, anex-Hydropathe, the idea of putting the boisterousHydropatheperformances into a picturesque setting and inviting the paying public to attend. Salis, who was the son of a prosperous man of affairs, was in Bohemia against his father’s wishes. Half-artist and half-littérateur, he supported himself, when the paternal purse-strings were tightened, by writing for the press and paintingViae Dolorosaeat fourteen francs apiece. In making himself “gentilhomme-cabaretier,” as he called it, this resourceful Salis had hit upon a device for reconciling theory with practice, filial submission with personal inclination, and Bohemia with business, which, to say the least, was not commonplace.

Salis’Chat Noir, “Cabaret Moyen-Age fondé en 1114 par un fumiste,” was opened on the Boulevard de Rochechouart in December, 1881; and the first number of its literary organ of the same name, illustrated by Forain, Willette, Rochegrosse, Henri Pille, Rivière, and Steinlen, was published the month following. The cabaret’s bizarre frescos, contributed by the cleverest young artists of Paris, and its fantastic furnishings of curios and antiques, which Salis had zealously collected since his boyhood, have been described too many times to be dwelt upon here. Suffice it to say, the juxtaposition of the beautiful with the grotesque, the serious with the flippant, and the reverent with the blasphemous,was so ingenious and piquant that attempts to imitate it (for the most part unsuccessful) have been made all over the civilised world.

AT ARISTIDE BRUANT'SAT ARISTIDE BRUANT’SCabaret du Boulevard Rochechouart

AT ARISTIDE BRUANT’S

Cabaret du Boulevard Rochechouart

In this suggestive setting nearly the entirepersonnelof theHydropathesand a number of poets and dramatists, notHydropathes, who have since become celebrities, among them Georges Courtéline and Maurice Donnay, held witty carnival.

There was an even greater license of speech and act at theChat Noirthan there had been among theHydropathes. There were also more all-night revels, more startling antitheses of the lively and severe, and more practical joking. All this in spite of the fact (or, perhaps, because of it) that the performers, almost without exception, affected impassibility, maintaining a supernatural gravity while dispensing the most side-splitting productions.

Salis’ attempt to serve both God and Mammon resulted, as such attempts have usually resulted, advantageously for Mammon. Bohemia was reconciled to business by being completely swallowed up by business. Salis, thegentilhomme-cabaretier, waxed rich, and in waxing rich stooped to methods of holding and dealing with his galaxy that have made his memory the execration of the Butte. Nevertheless, Rodolphe Salis, all unworthy Bohemian as his good fortune revealed him to be, gave Paris, as impresario of theChat Noir, a new manifestation of art and did more than any one man towards establishing that modern republic of arts and letters which is known as Montmartre.

The phenomenal success of theChat Noir, whose fame from being Parisian became European, naturally led to the opening of establishments which copied one or more of its features. Montmartre was soon honeycombed withcabarets artistiques et littéraires.

Steinlen, Willette, De Feure, Roedel, Redon, Toulouse-Lautrec, Truchet, Bellanger, Le Petit, Grün, and other artists of the Butte, especially the first three, were kept busy decorating; and the most popular monologists andchansonniers,—Dominique Bonnaud,Hugues Delorme, Jacques Ferny, Jules Jouy, E. Girault, Eugène Lemercier, Camille Marceau, Georges Millandy, Marcel Legay, Gaston Couté, Paul Delmet, Théodore Botrel, Léon Durôcher, Vincent Hyspa, Yann Nibor, Maurice Boukay, Charles Gallilée, Jehan Rictus, Octave Pradels, Victor Meusy, Camille Roy, Gabriel Montoya, Edmond Teulet, Paul Briand, Xavier Privas, Raoul Ponchon, Fragson, Lefèvre, Xanrof, Perducet, Dumestre, Montéhus, Ivanof, Chatillon, Fursy, Canqueteau, and Trimouillat,—most of whom had received a part of their training at theChat Noir,—performed regularly in two or three places on the same evening.

La Grand’ Pinte(joint inspirer with theHydropathesof theChat Noir) became under the direction of another Salis—Gabriel—thecabaret artistique et littéraire, L’Ane Rouge. Its next-door neighbour,Le Clou, fitted itself out with a picturesque second-story supper-room and an eccentriccaveau, in which tourneys of poetry were frequently given.Le Café des Décadents(laterCafé Duclerc, where the singers wore nooses about their necks), with its “Bruxellois Soupers”;Le Carillon, with its “Assizes”;Le Fraternistère, with its “Guignol Social” and its “chansons et recréations sociologiques”;Le Casino des Concièrges, with its “Soupers Panamistes”;La Fourrière(The Pound),La Roulotte(The Gypsy Van),Le Cabaret des Assassins(nowLe Lapin Agile),Le Cabaret des Pommes-de-terre Frites,La Purée,La Purée Sociale, and theCabarets du Ciel, de l’Enfer, anddu Néant,—had each its little day of notoriety; and the last three, though by all odds the flattest of the lot, are still run for the benefit of country visitors.

Le Conservatoire(whose specialty is theThéâtre d’Ombres Chinoises—shadow pantomime—with which the subtle artist Henri Rivière helped build up the vogue of Salis),Le Cabaret des Quat’z’ Arts,Le Cabaret des Arts,La Veine, andLa Lune Rousseare the five closest existing counterparts of theChat Noir. Their decorations are highly effective, and they employ most of theChat Noircelebrities who have not, like Salis, passed over to thegreat majority.98But their performances, while of high average merit, are totally lacking in the elements of spontaneity and unexpectedness, which constituted the rare and peculiar charm of the programmes of theChat Noirin its early and unspoiled days; and their prices, which have increased in direct proportion as intrinsic interest has decreased, are prohibitive for most of the real Bohemians of Montmartre. The truth is, these cabarets have long ceased to attract theMontmartrois, and are kept up as mere show places for provincial and foreign tourists. It is only in their front rooms, where prices are normal and no performances worth mentioning are given—at the hour of theapéritif, that one may find any number of truly representativeMontmartrois.

AtLa Boîte à Fursy(in the building to which theChat Noirrepaired when the complaints of its neighbours and the need of more room forced it to quit its original home on the Boulevard de Rochechouart) andLe Tréteau de Tabarin(also under the management of Fursy) the prices are still more prohibitive, so far as Bohemia is concerned, and the audiences, by just so much the more, unrepresentative.

All these places have been practically abandoned by their former patrons, and by the unprofessional singing, rhyming, reciting Bohemians in general, for tiny, obscure cafés or wine-shops,99whose tininess and obscurity are defences against sight-seeing invasion, and for private ateliers, from which the uninvited may be readily ejected. Those who, depressed by the professionalism, mercenary spirit, and monotony of the best-known cabarets, declare that the spirit of Bohemianism has abandoned the Butte, do not take into account these multitudinous Bohemian conclaves, of which they are, in all probability, totally ignorant.

One group, to which for two years the writer was privileged to belong, included fifty members, whose ages ranged from twenty to seventy and whose reputations ranged from zero to boulevardcelebrity. It dined every Tuesday evening at a really cheap and really Bohemian restaurant of the rue de la Rochefoucauld, adjourned after dinner to the atelier of a musician in the rue Bréda for literary and musical exercises mingled with horse-play, and readjourned at midnight to the supper-room of an adjacent café for unadulterated horse-play, without the slightest literary or musical pretence.

In France thechansonis second only to the press (if, indeed, it really be second to anything) as a moulder of public opinion. It instructs less than the press, perhaps, but it excites more.

“Thechanson, like the bayonet,” says Jules Claretie, “is a French weapon.... We are afraid of thechanson. It is a dishevelled personage who tells the truth. We exile it, we pursue it. M. Javert pursued not otherwise Fantine.... We are afraid of it because it is necessarily, fatally, of the opposition. It has no reason for existence, if it is not factious.... From theMazarinadesto the amusingChansons Rossesof Fursy, thechansonhas administered fillips to the powers. It is its lot. I add, it is its right....Vive la chanson! even the cruelchanson, when it is a sort of Daumier!”

Only a small percentage of the songs heard in thecabarets artistiques et littérairesof Montmartre are frankly revolutionary or even “of the opposition,” in the narrow partisan sense of that phrase; but they nearly all “tell the truth to people,” they are nearly all satirical and captious to the last degree—“of the opposition,” that is, in the broader sense of the phrase. They assail all the existing institutions,—army, state, church, property, and marriage,—not with the direct invective which would put them at the censorship’s mercy, but with the ridicule which in Paris, as in perhaps no other spot on the globe, is more potent than invective, and before which the censorship, though it turn pale and tear its hair with rage, is powerless.

Jules Jouy,100one of the bright particular stars of theChat Noirand of several of its successors and imitators, was at once averitable Gavroche for saucy wit and a fervent pleader for the poor. He was a regular contributor to several socialistic sheets; and hisChansons de Bataille—La Terre,Les Enfants et les Mères,La Veuve,Fille d’Ouvrier,Les Inconnus,La Grève Noire,Pâle Travailleur,Victimes du Travail,Le Sang des Martyrs,La Carmagnole des Meurts-de-Faim, etc.—are superb examples of the chanson of social revolt and reclamation.

The manager of theCasino des Concièrges,Le Cabaret des Pommes-de-terre Frites, andLa Purée Sociale, was an ancient revolutionist, Maxime Lisbonne, who had distinguished himself on a barricade of the Place du Panthéon during the Commune.

In the supper-rooms of theClouthe anarchist poet Paul Paillette was wont to recite his anarchist poems, and theClouis still a favourite meeting-place for revolutionary groups.

At theQuat’z’ ArtsMarcel Legay varies his répertoire of sentimental and patriotic ballads with the stirring revolutionarychansonsof Maurice Boukay and J. B. Clément; Gaston Couté recites his subversive “Les Conscrits” and “Le Christ en Bois”; Eugène Lemercier with genial malice, Gaston Sécot with waggery, and Yon Lug with Chinese imperturbability ridicule officialism in its every phase; Xavier Privas (Prince ofChansonniersby formal election), in his highly individual and snappy fashion, renders—between two idyls—his fine socialistic songLes Résignésor exalts poverty with hisNoëlorTestament de Pierrot; and Jehan Rictus intones his heart-breakingSoliloques du Pauvre.

TheQuat’z’ Artshas also had courses of Sunday afternoon lectures on thechansonby the socialist deputies Clovis Hugues and Maurice Boukay.

TheBoîte à Fursy, though catering palpably to the snobs, is shut up nearly every season by an irate censorship, and this more often for reasons of politics than from any consideration of public morality.

“I have been allowed this merit, and it is the sole one I claim,” says Fursy, in the introduction to hisChansons Rosses, “of never letting pass, or rarely letting pass, a salient happening withoutsinging it immediately, and attempting to draw from it, in a refrain, the morality—or immorality—which the worthy man calledMonsieur Tout-le-Mondeassigns it in his talk. I do my utmost not to lose time, and to serve actuality piping hot. I am really satisfied only when I manage to sing, in the evening, couplets inspired by that morning’s event; and I have had the luck almost always to succeed.”

Even theCabarets du Ciel,de l’Enfer, anddu Néant—which, being mainly dependent for their effects upon machinery, hardlyBuffalobelong at all in the class ofcafés artistiques et littéraires—have, lurking under all their vulgar clap-trap, no small fund of pungent satire on religion and the church.101

Finally, there are at Montmartre a round half-dozen resorts,cabarets de la chanson d’argot(also calledcabarets brutaux), of which Bruant’sMirliton, Alexandre’sCabaret Bruyant, and “Buffalo’s”l’Alouetteare the most conspicuous examples. They have had their day so far as spontaneity is concerned, like thecabarets artistiques et littéraires, though, like them, they still attract foreigners and provincials.

Mercenary and meretricious now to the last degree, however genuine they may have been in the beginning, they still have thismuch, at least, of sincerity,—namely, cordial detestation of the bourgeois; and it is to this very spirit, strangely enough, that their vogue with the bourgeois has been due.

It was of one of thesecabarets brutaux(Bruant’sMirliton, probably) that Zola wrote inParis: “Pleasure-seeking Paris, theBourgeoisie, mistress of money and of power, sickened by their possessions in time, but unwilling to let anything go, flocked thither—to receive insults and obscenities full in the face.... Far more than in the words, the burning insult was in the manner with which the singer cast the words in the teeth of the rich, of the favoured, of the fine ladies who elbowed each other to hear him. Under the low ceiling, amid the smoke of pipes, in the blinding heat of the gas, he launched his verses brutally likecrachats, a very hail-squall of furious contempt.”

Bruant himself rarely appears nowadays at hisMirliton, which, with the aid of under-studies, he, nevertheless, keeps up. Loaded with notoriety and wealth, he has come to prefer following the hounds or emptying a bottle of good wine, as the Châtelain of Courthenay, to entertaining the bourgeois by affronting them.

Not long back Bruant was an unsuccessful candidate for deputy at Belleville, which adjoins Montmartre. His address to his electors—with which it is customary for candidates to placard the walls of their districts—was in rhyme. The verses, though not of his best, are novel enough to demand quotation:—

AUX ELECTEURS

de la première conscription du vingtième arrondissementBelleville-Saint-Fargeau

ProgrammeISi j’étais votre député,—Ohé! Ohé! qu’on se le dise,—J’ajouterais “Humanité”292Aux trois mots de votre devise ...Au lieu de parler tous les joursPour la République ou l’EmpireEt de faire de longs discoursPour ne rien dire.IIJe parlerais des petits fieux, ...Des filles-mères, des pauvres vieuxQui l’hiver gèlent par la ville....Ils auraient chaud comme en été,Si j’étais nommé députéA Belleville.IIIJe parlerais des tristes gueux,Des purotins batteurs de dèche,Des ventres plats, des ventres creux,Et je parlerais d’une crèchePour les pauvres filles sans lit,Que l’on repousse et qu’on renvoieDans la rue! ... avec leur petit!...Mères de joie!IVJe parlerais de leurs mignons,De ces minables chérubinsDont les pauvres petits fignonsNe connaissent pas l’eau des bains,—Chérubins dont l’âme et le sangSe pourrissent à l’air des bougesEt qu’on voit passer, le teint blancEt les yeux rouges.293VJe parlerais des vieux perclusQui voudraient travailler encore,Mais dont l’atelier ne veut plus, ...Et qui traînent jusqu’à l’auroreSur le dur pavé de Paris,—Leur refuge, leurs Invalides,—Errants, chassés, honteux, meurtris,Les boyaux vides.VIJe parlerais des petits fieux, ...Des filles-mères, des pauvres vieux,Qui l’hiver gèlent par la ville....Ils auraient chaud comme en étéSi j’étais nommé députéA Belleville.

Bruant’sMirliton, thanks to the forceful talent of its founder, its lugubrious but artistic furnishings, and its cavalier treatment of its patrons, is the most famous, the most picturesque, and the most startling of thecabarets brutaux.

Alexandre owes such success as he has had at theCabaret Bruyantless to his talent as a writer and singer ofchansons, which is not great, than to his having sung in the streets with Mme. Eugénie Buffet for the benefit of the poor102(his cabaret is also known asLe Cabaret du Chanteur des Cours) and to his having been haled into court by Bruant for plagiarising his costume. The court decided in thiscause célèbre(Bruantvs.Alexandre) that the top-boots, velvet jacket, scarlet scarf, and mountaineer’s felt which Bruant wore professionally were his trade-mark, so to speak, and that the professional costume adopted by Alexandre—which, without being an exact copy, was as close a copyas the word “Bruyant,” for example, is of Bruant—constituted a palpable infringement. And it granted Bruant an injunction restraining Alexandre from appearing therein. The judgment was reaffirmed upon appeal.

In his first burst of rage over the result, Alexandre threatened to sing without any costume whatsoever; but he thought better of that. What he did do was to defy the court. SwearingALEXANDREALEXANDREthere was not force enough in France to undress him, he persisted in wearing the prohibited garb.

These strained relations with the law of the land made a hero of Alexandre, in a small way. He became thus a sort of Jules Guérin, and his cabaret a sort of Fort Chabrol. He elucidated the situation to his audiences nightly in a speech that ran somewhat like this:—

“What do you say to a republic where you can’t wear, so that they be decent, any clothes you like? This business has cost me more than ten thousand francs already. Every day—and it’s seventeen months now it’s been going on—the sheriff appears. ‘Still in the costume, Alexandre?’ And that means twenty francs! Twenty francs a day—to say nothing of the costs—counts up. Well, what of it? Let the bill swell! Let them come as oftenas they please! It’s their right! But I keep on wearing the clothes all the same.

“Not that I don’t recognise in Bruant, for all the harm he’s trying to do me, mycher maître. What should I be without him? Nothing at all. Oh, yes, I’m ready enough to admit that. I am no ingrate. For the man who is ruining me, I have somethingthere, at the heart, which abides, and which nothing can take away.

“When I began to wear the costume, Aristide didn’t object. Not he. He thought me beneath his notice, I suppose. But, when he sees I am succeeding, then he brings me up in court.

“The truth of it is, he dreads my competition. I frighten him. My glory throws him in the shade. He says to Alexandre, ‘Get out of my light!’

“The Law has smitten me in the name of Bruant: the Law does not know me. Since I have sung, I have gleaned upon the public places, in the streets, twenty-two thousand francs for the poor; and I am ordered to strip off my trousers. There’s justice for you!

“Now on with the music! Twenty francs to pay every time I dare to don the forbidden costume, the costume Bruant. It’s cheap at twenty francs. I don the costume, and I pay.”

The law is effective, it would seem, in preventing Alexandre from appearing publicly in the costume outside of his own cabaret.

Out of the medley of monologists andchansonniers(largely, of course, made up of mediocrities) who practise their professions in the cabarets of Montmartre, several of genuine poetical talent have emerged; and, of these, at least three are characterised by a thoroughly lawless or revolutionary spirit. These three are: Aristide Bruant, who exhibits a reality, a virility, a brutality, a grim humour, a picturesqueness of epithet, a boldness of imagery, and a tragic quality in caricature which make him (in a narrow field) a sort of French Kipling, with an honest devil-may-care quality by the side of which Kipling’s bravadoseems fustian; Jehan Rictus, less facile, less humorous, and less insolent than Bruant, but his equal in realism and his superior in sentiment; and Maurice Boukay (retired, and now a deputy), who lacks the grip on reality of Bruant and Rictus, but who atones partially for this lack by a wealth of stirring appeal.

Boukay’s point of view is that of thelettré, the social philosopher, the reformer, the enlightened friend of the poor. His words are words of faith, trumpet-calls from the heights instead of gibes or moans from the depths. They ring true of reasoned and righteous revolt. HisChansons Rougesare neither narrative nor descriptive; notchansons vécues,—that is,chansonsbased on his own experience,—but symbolic poems,—symbolic in both language and thought, what he himself might call “chansons d’humanité multiple et objective.”

“They were all written,” says M. Boukay in his introduction, “in a complete independence of spirit, at a time when, not yet having entered political life, I listened to the great voice of the people, and endeavoured to seize its hidden meaning.... My master Verlaine said: ‘Thechansonof love is blue. Thechansonof dreams is white. Thechansonof sadness is grey.’ Thechanson socialeis red.... It is the colour of the glass of wine that your good heart offers the vagrant to comfort him on the high road of life. It is the colour of the rising sun towards which your ardent, hopeful eyes yearn. It is the most intense hue of the tricolor flag, which lies close to the heart of all the miseries, which waves in the wind of all the liberties.

“‘Stop there!’ exclaims some timorous spirit. ‘Do you not fear, singer of fraternity, to deepen the regrets and inflame the anguish of the people under pretext of describing them?’

AT ALEXANDRE'SAT ALEXANDRE’SCabaret de la rue Pigalle

AT ALEXANDRE’S

Cabaret de la rue Pigalle

“But, my good critic, will voicing the plaint of him who travails and suffers, always, then, be to wound the sanctimonious egoisms of him who digests and does nothing else? Would you resemble the iniquitous rich man,—tolerate the stretching forth of the hand, silent and ashamed, to beg, and forbid the quivering lips to groan? If you do not hear the groan, how can youconsole it? If you do not see the sore of poverty stripped of all its bandages, how will you know how to cure it?... Be brave and be just, good critic! Open thine eyes! Open thy heart!...MAURICE BOUKAYMAURICE BOUKAYThe love of woman has for its necessary complement the love of humanity. Is this your belief? If yes, you will sing theseChansons Rouges. If no, you will let the people sing them. In any case, you will understand.”

The titles of theChansons Rougesbear out the promise of this foreword:Le Soleil Rouge,Le Coq Rouge,Le Noël Rouge,L’Etoile Rouge,La Cité,La Chanson du Pauvre Chanteur,Fille et Souteneur,La Chanson de Nature,Le Mot Passé,La Dernière Bastille,La Madeleine,La Femme Libre,Les Rafles,La Chanson de Misère; and the songs bear out the promise of their titles.

Note the thrilling refrain ofLe Soleil Rouge,—

“Compagnon, le vieux monde bouge:Marchons droit, la main dans la main!Compagnon, le grand soleil rougeBrillera, brillera demain,”—

and the poignant, threateningChanson de Misère:—

LA CHANSON DE MISÈREIJ’ai chanté l’amour à vingt ans,Et j’ai perdu l’une après l’une,Blonde ou brune, au clair de la lune,Mes illusions et mon temps.298Mon cœur oubliait la Misère,Lire lon laire,Pourtant la Misère était là,Lire lon la!IIC’était un matin de rancœur,Que de ma tristesse accrue,Je butai du pied, dans la rue,Un pavé rouge comme un cœur.C’était le cœur de la Misère,Lire lon laire,Entre deux pavés planté là,Lire lon la!IIILe pavé, se dressant vers moi:“Combien j’ai vu de barricades,Combien j’ai reçu d’estocadesDe par la lettre de la loi!”Passant, prends garde à la Misère,Lire lon laire.Son cœur n’est pas mort. Halte là!Lire lon la!IVJe saigne à chaque iniquité,Je suis le pavé de souffrance,Je suis rouge du sang de FranceRépandu pour l’humanité.Fleur de pavé, fleur de Misère,Lire lon laire,L’héroisme a passé par là,Lire lon la!299VEgoïsme, arrière! Je veuxTe marquer de ma chanson rouge.L’espoir grandit. Le pavé bouge.Debout, clairon! Sonne les vœux!C’est la chanson de la Misère,Lire lon laire.La Justice viendra par laLire lon la!

There is not a character of the Paris underworld nor a phase of its life about which Bruant has not cast the glamour of his suggestiveargot: beggars and vagabonds; semi-vagabond acrobats, rag-pickers, and sandwich-men; thieves, thugs,maquereaux,103and murderers; foundlings and the lowest grades of prostitutes, a veritable Maxim Gorky galaxy; starving, shivering, loafing, sinning, and suffering men and women; attractive sloth, picturesque horror, piquant degradation and savoury crime,—all in a lurid setting of teeming faubourg streets, public balls, all-night restaurants, bagnios, prisons, and the guillotine!

“Le Philosophe,” the opening poem of Bruant’s published volume,Dans la Rue,—

“T’es dans la rue, va t’es chez toi,”—

the songs of the different faubourgs,—A Batignolles,A la Villette,A Montpernasse,A Belleville,A Ménilmontant,A Montrouge,A la Glacière, etc.,—Le Guillotine,A la Roquette,Le Rond des Marmites,A Mazas,Casseur de Gueules,Le Grelotteux,Marcheuses,Les Quat’ Pattes, andPus de Patronsare absolutely convincing as literature and as studies of society, and, to be appreciated, have no need of their author’s dramatic delivery. His most widely knownchanson,A St. Lazare, is one of thepoems of a generation; and hisA Biribi104has probably done more toMAQUERAUXMAQUERAUXrouse the common people against the army than all the anti-militarist meetings of the socialists and anarchists combined. But propriety, alas! forbids their presence—and the presence of most of the best of Bruant’s work in this volume.

The monologues of Jehan Rictus (Soliloques du Pauvre,Doléances, andCantilènes du Malheur) are conspicuous among the poems of poverty for their absolute and abject despair. Jehan Rictus is a man who has done many kinds of hard manual labour, if report speaks true, and who knows the wretchedness of extreme penury by long and cruel experience. “A strange and highly typical figure; a pale, emaciated head we seem to have seen somewhere before. Where?—in church paintings, perhaps; sad, lean, narrow-chested, tall, ‘long as a tear,’ and an expression so weary! He does not essay a gesture. He has only his voice, the anguish of his face, and the feverish gleam of his eyes with which to move us. His hands, held always behind him, twitch ineffectually as if trying to burst invisible bonds.”

Jehan Rictus

In portraying the physical discomforts of poverty, the racking coughs, raging thirsts, aching bones, the nights without shelter or sleep, the days without food, the tears that scald and the tearlessness that deadens, Jehan Rictus has only done what has been done a score of times in prose and verse. Surely, an empty heart keeps close company, more often than not, with an empty stomach, and it is in portraying vividly the mental and spiritual aspects of poverty that his work is fresh and unique. The humiliation of poverty’s uniform,—unkempt hair, missing shirt, drafty shoes, outlandish and threadbare garments,—of the pavement bed, of the paroxysms of hunger attributed to intoxication, of the unsuccessful search for work, of debarment from places of public resort, of silent submission to insult and gibe; the disgust with filth, vermin, vulgar noise, endless monotony, enforced celibacy, patronising pity, petty deceits improvised to hide destitution, and hilarity improvised to keep back tears; the hatred of those who practise injustice and hypocrisy; the scorn of those who bestow and those who accept charity; the incipient madness of starvation, at once impelling to a shedding of the blood of the guilty and raising a horrid dread of confounding the innocent with the guilty; the regret for loss of respectability, courage, ambition, energy, talent, faith; the oppressive lonesomeness; the yearning for fresh distractions, innocent joys, cleanly living, for kindly words, sympathetic hand-clasps, kisses, caresses, companionship, friendship, love, precious responsibility; the stolid indifference to death,—all these, the underlying sentiments of poverty, have never before been given in poetry, at least not without the blight of palpable literary effort or factitious emotionalism.

Equally unique and equally powerful with the exhibition of the multiform woes of the destitute is the poet’s satirical exposure of the inconsistencies, insincerities, vanities, and refined cruelties of the various sorts of people who exploit the destitute. With an ironical pretence of rendering deserved homage to poverty, he elaborates the important part it plays in the social scheme. Thanks to it, the employees of theAssistance Publiqueare able to maintaintheir families in comfort; magistrates to attain a rotund and tranquil old age; economists (deferring to it as a dignified entity) to win professional chairs and academic honours; politicians to get the public ear; socialistic and anarchistic bawlers to finish out their careers as dawdling, alcoholic deputies; poets, painters, and novelists to swim in glory and good wine, and found luxurious establishments for their offspring.

The arrival of winter, which clots the blood of one class, stimulates the circulation of all the others. Then reputable benevolence drums a réveille on hollow stomachs; burial companies wax radiantly bustling; salons, languishing for want of something to talk about, revive promptly; the tourist in the Midi and the bourgeois, smug and snug by his fireside, daily commiserate suffering—after dinner—in a manner both magnificent and ample; society gambols at charity fêtes and balls; the press “rediscovers distress”; journalists sob, weep, and implore—at three sous a line. In a word, pitying the unfortunate is a profession like another; and, if the day should ever arrive when there were no more poor in the world, “many people”—to render idiom for idiom—“would be badly in the soup.” Such satire stings and routs by virtue of the moral force behind it: it is the whip of small cords plied by the man with a soul.

Satire broadens to rollicking humour in depicting the abject terror of a conscience-stricken bourgeois shopkeeper before the embarrassing spectre of a hungry man:—

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