“The manOf virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys.Power, like a desolating pestilence,Pollutes whate’er it touches; and obedience,Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth,Makes slaves of men and, of the human frame,A mechanized automaton.”Shelley.
“The manOf virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys.Power, like a desolating pestilence,Pollutes whate’er it touches; and obedience,Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth,Makes slaves of men and, of the human frame,A mechanized automaton.”Shelley.
“When the students sing theCarmagnole,France trembles.”
“The monarchy of July persecuted the cancan, which historically seems to have been the anarchy of the period.”—Aurélien Scholl.
“Humble spot, dingy little court, oh, how charming I find you! Hence will go forth some day the Revolution which shall save us; the age which by chloroform has already suppressed pain will suppress hunger also.”
Micheleton the Collège de France.
“The great movement of ideas which occurred in France under the silent reign of Napoleon III., when the tribune was mute, the press muzzled, and the right of assembly confiscated, had for its stage thebrasseriesof the Latin Quarter.”—Edmond Lepelletier.
“THE Sorbonne,” says Eugène Pelletan, “shines from the heights through the early mists like the dawn of intelligence. It is there that the French Revolution was really born, thence was its point of departure....
“On this sacred mount of the university a philosopher in monkish garb spoke one day in the open air. What did he say? It matters little. He said something new, and the multitude listened because he was the first to defend the claims of the earth,—the right of reason to reason; and, while he spoke, a veiled woman, with lips on fire, clung to the grating of a convent over yonder, and encouraged him with gestures in default of words.
“The man represents human intellect hampered by the church, and the woman represents France confined in a cloister; but Abélard will grow, and will assume day by day, like the Indian god, a fresh avatar. To-morrow—for what is to-morrow in the life of a people?—he will bear, according to the ironical or severe humour of France, the name of Rabelais, the name of Descartes, the name of Rousseau, the name of Voltaire. And, side by side with him, the Idea, the insulted, the abused Idea, will advance with slow and tragic steps between two rows of fagots, a flame in her forehead and her hands at her sides, until the day when she shall wrest the torch from the executioner, and proclaim herself Queen.”
Whoever would unfold the progress of the revolutionary spirit in France from the earliest times through the centuries must needs write a history of the Sorbonne and of the seat of the Sorbonne, thePays Latin(the Latin Quarter).
In the relatively limited area included between Notre Dame, where the goddess of Reason was enthroned in the Great Revolution;the Place Maubert,62with its statue of Etienne Dolet, the sixteenth-century printer, burned for impiety and atheism; the Square Monge, with its statue of François Villon; the Place Monge, with its statue of Louis Blanc; the Panthéon, with its memorials to the intellectual liberators, Rousseau, Victor Hugo, and Voltaire; the Place de l’Ecole de Médecine, with its statue of Danton doughtily inscribed, “Pour vaincre les ennemis de la justice, il faut de l’audace, encore de l’audace et toujours de l’audace”; the Place St. Germain des Prés, with its statue of Diderot; and the Place de l’Institut, with its statue of Condorcet,—every inch of ground is rich in souvenirs of the intellectual history of France and of the convulsions by which this history’s various stages have been marked.
Here on the left bank of the Seine, where Abélard, in the twelfth century, “discoursed to all the earth,—to two popes, twenty cardinals, and fifty bishops, to all the orders, all the modern schools which descended from the mountain and inundated Europe”;63whither came Dante in the fourteenth century for the lectures of Siger de Brabant; the Greek Lascaris in the fifteenth and Calvin and Loyola in the sixteenth centuries; where thetrouvèreRutebœuf in the thirteenth century and the poet Villon in the fifteenth carried on thepropagande par l’exempleand even thepropagande par le fait; where, in the early part of the fifteenth century, theCabocheriedecreed the reign of virtue and equality, pillaged the dwellings of the wealthy, and had all things common; where, in the sixteenth century, theCommune Catholiquewas set up at the instigation of an anti-royalist preacher of St. Sévérin; where, in the same century, François Rabelais, Clément Marot, and La Boétie (friend of Montaigne and social democrat before his time) prepared themselves, in their very different fashions, to alternately edify and castigate the civilisation of their epoch, and René Descartes, in the seventeenth century, to foundmodern philosophy and to destroy scholasticism; where the eighteenth-century Encyclopedists set themselves to solve the problem of human destiny, and begot the Revolution; where, in the century just closed, the trinity of the Collège de France, Michelet, Quinet, and Mickiewicz, formed the men who were to set up the Third Republic on the ruins of the Second Empire,—in this intellectual and nerve centre of Paris, of France, and at intervals of the world, revolutionary action has been so often suited to the revolutionary thought that no one dreams of crying out crime or mystery when, in the course of excavations, human bones are exhumed.
MÉGOTIERS OF THE PLACE MAUBERT
MÉGOTIERS OF THE PLACE MAUBERTMÉGOTIERS OF THE PLACE MAUBERT
Revolutionary thinking has not been practised with impunity in theQuartier Latin. From Abélard to Michelet and Renan, religious, political, and philosophical heresies have called down ecclesiastical, governmental, and academicalwrath with the usual result of helping to propagate the heresies.
Abélard was censured for heterodoxy, hounded from one monastery to another, and condemned finally to perpetual silence. Ramus, antagonist of the philosophy of Aristotle, was included in the massacre of St. Bartholomew. “In Ramus,” says Michelet, “they fancied they were killing a second Abélard. They thought to butcher mind.” Clément Marot was imprisoned, and forced to flee from France. Descartes, maltreated by Catholics and Protestants alike, forbidden to teach, and threatened with death, took refuge first in Holland and then in Sweden. Vanini was burned at the stake. Buffon was persecuted for hisHistoire Naturelle, and Montesquieu for hisEsprit des Lois. Michelet, who “scratched the heavens with his white hand,”64Mickiewicz, Quinet, and Renan were expelled from the Collège de France.
There have been periods, it is true, when the university faculties have been servile and cringing,—mere tools of the potentates of church and state,—and periods when the students have been craven or lethargic; but these periods are the exceptions. Speaking broadly, theQuartierhas been from first to last a preserve of free living and free thinking, a stronghold of opposition, a centre of agitation, and a hot-bed of revolution.
Eugène Pelletan thus describes the students of the university’s beginnings:—
“A mixed, vagabond population, drifted together from nobody could say where, they live by the grace of God, they eat when they can, they sleep on straw, and carry their begging wallets proudly, as if conscious they hold there the word of the future.... When they do not dine, they have the resource of the cabaret; and, always noisy, always care-free, they prowl about at nightfall, they force now and then the door of a bourgeois, and, when the watch rushes to the uproar, they put it to rout, quit with answering for the misdemeanour to the rector, who invariably exonerates.”
“Scantily clad and almost vagabonds,” says another historian of this early period, “but not depriving themselves of good cheer, the future magistrates and theologians, who were to antagonise in parliament the will of the king, were already revolutionary.”
In the fourteenth century the faculties, morally, and the students, both morally and materially, cast in their lots with the revolution of Etienne Marcel, who is credited with having invented the barricade.
Reign succeeded reign, and still the good habit of thrashing the watch was kept up. Besides, there were battles-royal galore between the students and the troops of the king.
The students made themselves jugglers, fakirs, and buffoons on the Pont-Neuf, then a favourite, shop-lined promenade. They sacked cook-shops and taverns, and levied tribute from belated pedestrians. The lawless exploits of François Villon, singer of villanelles to Guillemette, thetapissière, and Jehanneton, thechaperonnière, in the reigns of Charles VII. and Louis XI., have become legendary.
That other great François (Rabelais) has portrayed the democratic and turbulent temper of the students of a somewhat later period.
During the reign of Louis XIV., the merry, strolling players and mountebanks, Tabarin and Gaultier-Garguille (the latter the inventor of the farce), had numerous imitators among the students; which jovial humour did not prevent the latter from entering heartily into theFronde,65risking their lives on “the Day of the Barricades” and exercising their caustic wit against the court and the hated foreign minister, Mazarin, in lampoons calledMazarinades.
The trenchant criticisms and the comprehensive formulas, which appeared in the Encyclopedists’ published works, captivated many professors of the university,66and made a direct andprofound impression on the students. But it seems to be no exaggeration to say that it was the cafés and cabarets of the Left Bank rather than the university that fanned the smouldering flame of discontent into a conflagration of rebellion. In them the fiercest revolutionary clubs of the epoch had their rendezvous. At theCafé Procope,—transformed, alas! into a vulgar restaurant only a year or so back,—Hébert presided over a club which burned before the door the journals found too tame for its ideas, and Danton met with Marat, Legendre, and Fabre d’Eglantine; and the Procope was only one of a score. Indeed, it would take a volume to do full justice to the part played in French history by the Latin Quarter cafés from 1780 to Napoleon’s establishment of himself in power.
Under the Restoration the social and political Utopias of the Icarians, the Fourierites, and the Saint-Simonians, commanded the interest, if not the allegiance, of a considerable portion of the university. “The new Sorbonne,” says Vacherot, “far from viewing unmoved the liberal movement which was to culminate in the revolution of July, participated in it actively, lending it the prestige of its mostspirituel, its most serious, and its most eloquent teaching.”
It was in great part the students, as all know who have followed the vicissitudes of Marius and Cosette inLes Misérables, who were responsible for the insurrection of 1830.
It was in the spheres of literature and art, however, where Romanticism was struggling to supplant Classicism, that the hottest passions were kindled. The influence of Scott, Byron, and the rising Hugo dominated, even in the matter of dress. Romanticists adopted the costumes of Moslems, Corsairs, and Giaours: theQuartierresembled a fancy-dress ball-room, and men fought in its streets for their artistic as they had in other times for their political and religious creeds.
The students of the reign of Louis Philippe have been thus pictured by De Banville: “Young, gay, reckless, but possessed of native distinction, coquettishly arrayed in velvet and all sorts oforiginal and fancy costumes, capped with Basquebéretsand feltsà laRubens, they went up and down, sauntering, singing, gazing into space, alone, or in pairs, or in groups, or three by three, selling their text-books willingly at the old book dealers in order to enter the cabaret,—a custom which, as you know, dates from the twelfth century.”
Of this same youth and that which came immediately after it Aurélien Scholl writes: “The young men of the schools thought solely of fêtes and of fun. TheQuartierresembled strangely theBohèmeof Mürger,—la noce, nothing butla noce. The historiographer of this epoch finds only farces to narrate, and such farces!”
And yet the students played almost as large a part in the revolution of 1848 as in that of 1830. Under their masks of flippancy they were serious. They had merely been waiting for the strategic moment and a leader; and, when in 1847 Antonio Watripon, bent on a “reawakening of the schools,” founded a journal,La Lanterne du Quartier Latin, as a means of organising and directing the student opposition, they took an active part in the demonstrations which brought about the downfall of the government of Louis Philippe.
They sprang to arms again, soon after, against the disillusionisingcoup d’étatof the third Napoleon, while the workingmen remained relatively submissive. “At the news that Louis Napoleon is getting ready to confiscate the public liberties,” says Scholl, “a wave of indignation sweeps over the length and breadth of theQuartier. The students invade, and pronounce inflammatory discourses in, café after café,crèmerieaftercrèmerie. They descend without hesitation into the street to combat the troops of the tyrant, and many pay for their heroism with their lives.”
The discouragement which followed the complete establishment of the authority of the usurper naturally gave rise to a sort of lassitude, which was mistaken by many for sycophancy or indifference, and was generally regarded as proof positive of the degeneration of the student type. But the students, althoughtemporarily silent and outwardly submissive, had not disarmed. It was not long before Vallès, Gambetta, Vermesch, Blanqui, Rochefort, and scores of others, who participated a little later in the Commune or in the founding of the Third Republic, were busily sowing the seeds of disaffection in the cafes; and in 1865 this fresh revolutionary movement was given coherence and direction byLes Propos de Labienus, the little masterpiece of Rogeard.
It was, in point of fact, mainly in the cafés of the Latin Quarter rather than in the university proper that the revolution of 1871, as well as that of 1789, was fermented.
In 1866, at theCafé de la Renaissance Hellénique, a revolutionary club was formed, consisting of eight persons, the oldest of whom was barely twenty-two,—five law students, a medical student, a painter, and arentier,—the first overt act of which was a riotous protest against the production of Augier’sLa Contagionat theOdéon. Most, if not all, of the charter members of this club, which was soon consolidated with a club of older men meeting at theCafé Serpente, saw the inside of the prison of Ste. Pélagie before the Commune was achieved.
“The Renaissance,” says Auguste Lepage in hisCafés Artistiques et Littéraires de Paris, “had a special physiognomy at the absinthe hour and after dinner. Noisy, uncombed students entered, mounted to the second floor, got together in groups, and talked politics or took a turn at billiards. They lighted long pipes, artistically coloured; and through the smoke clouds might be heard, together with the voices of the speechifiers, the clicks of the ivory balls as they met on the green cushions.Etudiantesaccompanied the students. These strikingly dressed girls smoked cigarettes and occupied themselves with politics.”
The imperial police had a special fondness for the Renaissance, and this café shared with theBrasserie de St. Sévérin, after the Commune was set up, the distinction of being used as a headquarters by the Communard officials.
The Procope, also affected by police spies, was frequented by Spuller, Ferry, Floquet, Vermorel, and Gambetta, who preservedtheir liberty on more than one occasion by utilising the back door, which had rendered a similar service to Danton in another century.
TheCafé Voltaireharboured, among others, Gambetta and Vallès, theCafé de BuciVallès and Delescluze, and theBrasserie Audlerand theRestaurant LaveurCourbet and his unconventional intimates.
To summarise: from the time of Abélard—the Abélard who was sustained and inspired by the thought of the flaming lips of Héloïse pressed against the convent grating—to and through the Commune, thePays Latinwas characterised by a revolutionary spirit which was composed of three seemingly independent, if not mutually antagonistic, but, in reality, complementary and vitally interrelated traits,—love of laughter, love of liberty, and love of love.
The different persons of this emancipating trinity were equally potent impellers to Quixotic thought and action; and no one of the three could have long survived—such is the French temperament in or out of theQuartier—without both of the others. The Gallic imagination and conscience are dependent on good cheer and affection; they cease to operate if a fellow may not unbend in buffoonery with the boys and may not adore a woman. And, without conscience and imagination, is no revolution.
NOTRE DAME FROM PONT D'AUSTERLITZNOTRE DAME FROM PONT D’AUSTERLITZ
“Ever the undiscouraged, resolute, struggling soul of man*********Ever the grappled mystery of all Earth’s ages old or new;*********Ever the soul dissatisfied, curious, unconvinced at last;Struggling to-day the same—battling the same.”Walt Whitman.
“Ever the undiscouraged, resolute, struggling soul of man*********Ever the grappled mystery of all Earth’s ages old or new;*********Ever the soul dissatisfied, curious, unconvinced at last;Struggling to-day the same—battling the same.”Walt Whitman.
“Each Jack with his Jill.”Ben Jonson.
“Each Jack with his Jill.”Ben Jonson.
“What is love? ‘Tis not hereafter;Present mirth hath present laughter;What’s to come is still unsure:In delay there lies no plenty;Then come kiss me, sweet-and-twenty;Youth’s a stuff will not endure.”Shakespeare.
“What is love? ‘Tis not hereafter;Present mirth hath present laughter;What’s to come is still unsure:In delay there lies no plenty;Then come kiss me, sweet-and-twenty;Youth’s a stuff will not endure.”Shakespeare.
“It once might have been, once only:We lodged in a street together,You, a sparrow on the house-top lonely,I, a lone she-bird of his feather.”Robert Browning.
“It once might have been, once only:We lodged in a street together,You, a sparrow on the house-top lonely,I, a lone she-bird of his feather.”Robert Browning.
“The rôle of a pretty woman is more serious than we think.”
Montesquieu(Lettres Persanes).
“I was twenty, age when the heart all illumined with poesy guards religiously the subtile vibrations of the beautiful and the just; the sweet human season in which one yearns to have a thousand mouths to bite to bleeding—during an eternity—the bare pink bosoms of the beautiful chimeras that go singing by.”—Clovis Hugues.
“I shall eternally hide my deepest emotions under the mask ofinsoucianceand the perruque of irony.”
Jules Vallès, in Jacques Vingtras—Le Bachelier.
Agreat dealA CAVEAU OF THE LATIN QUARTERA CAVEAU OF THE LATIN QUARTERA CAVEAU OF THE LATIN QUARTERA CAVEAU OF THE LATIN QUARTERhas been said of late years about the change which has taken place in thePays Latinand in the student character. The “old boys” tell us, with sneering superiority or quavering regret, that theQuartier Latinis no longer what it was. Some evoke the revels and thegrisettesdepicted in Louis Huart’sPhysiologie de l’Etudiant, Musset’sMimi Pinson, and Mürger’sLa Vie de Bohème, and others the rebellious souls of the student martyrs of 1789, 1830, 1848, and 1871.
According to the former, the contemporary student is a morose, prudent, selfish, woman-hating, digging prig, with no higher dreams thanpettifogging politics and bourgeois comfort, and theétudiantea scheming, avaricious adventuress. According to the latter, he is snobbish, extravagant, and dissipated, a brainless spendthrift, gambler, debauchee, and drunkard, and his amorette, aside from differences of sex, his perfect counterpart.
There is truth in these somewhat conflicting charges, since both these types of student do exist. The curious thing is that similar complaints have been made by the alumni out in the world for almost as long as there have been alumni. It is not easy to go back far enough into the history of theQuartier Latinto escape caustic aspersions on its ignoble present and fond reversions to its fine and proper past.
If there is one period that is vaunted to-day above another as the golden age of the Latin Quarter, it is the period portrayed in the writings of Mürger, De Musset, and Nestor Roqueplan,—period when “le vin était spirituel et la folie philosophique”; period of innumerable drolleries and of two revolutions; and yet each of these three writers, even the happy-hearted Mürger, had recourse to that necessary, if puerile, vanishing point of the perspective of thought,—an anterior golden age.
A person who did not know their authorship would take the opening chapters of De Musset’sConfession d’un Enfant du Siècleto have been written in this year of grace 1904 by a disgruntled university alumnus, who was casting longing, lingering looks behind him to De Musset’s time. As, for instance, this passage: “The ways of the students and the artists—ways so fresh, so beautiful, so full of buoyant youthfulness—felt the effects of the universal change. Men, in separating from women, had muttered a word which wounds unto death,—disdain. They plunged into wine, and ran after courtesans. The students and the artists did likewise. They treated love as they treated glory and religion: it was a hoary illusion. They haunted low places. Thegrisetteso imaginative, soromanesque, so sweet and tender in love, found herself left behind her counter. She was poor, and she was no more lovable; she must have hats andgowns; she sold herself. O shame! The young man who should have loved her, whom she would have loved, he who formerly escorted her to the forests of Verrières and Romainville, to the dances on the greensward, to the suppers in the shady coverts, he who came to chat by the lamp in the back shop during the long winter evenings, he who shared the morsel of bread steeped in the sweat of her brow and her poor but sublime love,—he, this very man who had deserted her, found her, during some night of orgy, within thelupanar, pale and livid, utterly lost, with hunger on her lips and prostitution in her heart.”
A sight-seeing visitor to the highways of theQuartieris apt to feel that the grumbling of the elders is well grounded. The conventional, imperturbable, faultlessly attiredfils à papa, and the over-dressed, over-breezy, blondined young (?) women he observes on the café terraces and in the public places, seem to have little or nothing in common with the students andgrisettesof poetry and romance he is out for to see.
TheQuartier Latinhas changed along with the rest of the world, of course, in the last thirty eventful years. The humiliating memory of the Franco-Prussian war and the failure of the Third Republic to fulfil its promises of social equality and freedom have necessarily rendered the student somewhat more reflective; the analytic fearlessness of science has made him more relentlessly introspective; the growing fierceness of the struggle for existence occasioned by the overcrowding of the professions and the obligatory military service has forced him, in his own despite, to be somewhat more practical; the phenomenal expansion of industry, commerce, and finance, and their disillusionising tendencies, have not, in the nature of things, left him entirely untainted; and the equally phenomenal spread of luxury has instilled some absurd and deplorable sybaritic notions into his head.
There has been a net loss in theQuartier—and where has there not been?—in picturesqueness and spontaneity. But the vapouring cads and the stolid “digs” who call down the wrath of the elders are not representative: they are at the extremes of thestudent body. Taken all in all, the student has changed less than the big world about him, not only during the last thirty years, but even during the centuries which have elapsed since he came to his class with a bundle of straw under his arm for a seat and his professor lecturedsub Jove, liable to the interruptions of passing washerwomen and street porters.
He has changed less; and such changes as he has undergone are, for the most part, superficial. His love of laughter, his love of liberty, and his love of love have not been lost. They manifest themselves a little differently, that is all.
His love of liberty is not, for the moment, manifested, as it was in the beginning, when Rutebœuf and Villon played the highwayman and Clément Marot was king of the Bassoche, by forcing the doors of the bourgeois and beating the watch; nor, as it was in 1789, 1830, 1848, and 1871, by mounting the barricade, though there is never a certainty that he will not mount a barricade to-morrow. His love of laughter does not often lead him to the pillaging of taverns and workshops nowadays, as it did the roistering blade of the time of Louis XI., nor to the metamorphosing of himself into a juggler, tumbler, clown, or mountebank. And his love of love rarely blossoms into such dainty idyls as are recounted of the period of the Restoration and Louis Philippe. Perhaps, if the truth were known, it was rarely they so blossomed even then.
The ragged doublets, begging wallets, and pallets of straw have gone forever, as have the street classes exposed to the inclemency of the weather, of which they were the fitting accompaniment. The stiff, ugly fashions of this superlatively ugly age—the cut-away and frock coats, the “plug” and Derby hats, and the close-cropped hair—have, in a measure, replaced the feltsà laRubens and flowing ties and the wavy locks, velvet jackets, and blouses and tasselled Basquebéretsof Romanticism. Among theétudiantesthe simple muslin caps and chintz, muslin, and gingham frocks have fled alarmed before modish hats and tailor-made gowns. Thecancan, a pitiably tamecancan, is danced—in public—only to satisfythe curiosity of sensation-seeking tourists. But, allowing for differences of customs and costumes, for the unavoidable concessions to the more insistent claims of the spirit of the age, theQuartier Latinis still the same oldQuartier.
There are numbers who still “live by the grace of God, eat when they can,” not when they would, and “sell their books to the old book dealer for a meal or an evening at the cabaret.” Poverty still stalks through thePays Latin, and is still bravely cuffed or blithely bluffed out of countenance there. The student demand for rooms ranging from fifteen to thirty francs a month, and the lively, almost fierce student patronage of thecrèmeries,bouillons, and little wine-shops (where anà la carteexpenditure of 18 sous verges on extravagance), and of theprix fixerestaurants at 22 and 25 sous, are eloquent of a wide-spread scarcity of funds.
“Flicoteaux exists, and will exist,” wrote Balzac inIllusions Perdues, “as long as the student shall wish to live. He eats there,—nothing more, nothing less; but he eats there, as he works, with a sombre or joyous activity, according to his circumstances and his character.”
One cannot have lived in theQuartierlong and not have had student friends who had more than a passing acquaintance with hunger and for whom a fire in winter was a festival event. In his mansard, where the student is doomed to freeze in winter and broil in summer, or in his stuffy, windowlesscabinet, where he is doomed to suffocate the year round, are enough outward signs of destitution to rive the heart of the most hardened professional charity visitor; and yet, ten to one, this poor devil of a “Jack” has his “Jill,” for thegrisetteexists.
Yes, countless Jeremiads to the contrary notwithstanding, thegrisetteexists; under another name or, rather, under several other names,—there are words that defy strict definition; but she exists; changed somewhat, as the student himself is changed somewhat, but unchanged, as he is unchanged, in her love of laughter, her love of liberty, and her love of love. Gracious, graceful, and tender as ever; ignorant and clever, superstitiousand sagacious, selfish and self-sacrificing, garrulous and reticent, cruel and kind-hearted, outspoken and deceitful, conscientious and unscrupulous, generous and avaricious, and so forthad infinitum; inconsequent, inconsistent, capricious, contradictory, bewitching bundle of opposites; best of comrades and sincerest, because ficklest, of mistresses; adorable, ever-changing, and unchangeablegrisette!
Greedy of dress, the dance, and the theatre, she will sacrifice them all at the beck of a real affection. Indifferent to fortune when it comes her way, she will go without eating to have her fortune told her. She will ruin a nabob without a twinge, and share her last crust with the poor. She is true to nothing but her latest impulse. She fears nothing but being bored.
Jack nibbles scant bread and cheese, goes without wine and a fire, pawns his overcoat, his watch, and his best hat to provide Jill with a silk petticoat or a new hat. Jill refuses a carriage and pair for love of Jack, and makes merry, coquettish shift, for his sake, with “a ribbon and a rag”; and she will be as ready to go with him to the barricade to-morrow (for she dearly loves a scrimmage) as she is to go with him to a banquet or a ball to-night.
Thanks to Jack (this latter-day Abélard) and almost as much to Jill (this latter-day Héloïse), to their unaffected sentimentalities and innocent deviltries, theQuartierhas a luminous atmosphere of gayety and poesy, is, in a word, an adequate emblem of “the folly of youth that amuses itself breaking window-panes, and which is, nevertheless, priceless beside the wisdom of age that mends them.”
Note the student’s street masking, dancing, and singing, and his manifold extravagances at the time of the Carnival, theMi-carême, and theQuatorze Juillet, and on special outdoor festival occasions of his own. Watch his pranks and listen to his magpie chatter in his restaurants, cafés, andbrasseries,—not the big, gaudy establishments of the “Boul’ Mich,” where he apes thechicof the bourgeois with whose purse he comes into direct and, for him, disastrous competition, and where, for the matter of that,the bourgeois often outnumbers him; but in the dingy resorts of the back and side streets, where he is quite his harum-scarum self, where he is free to shout, sing, caper, and guy to his heart’s content, play combs and tin horns, and applaud with beer-mugs and canes, use floors for chairs, chairs for hobby-horses, tables for floors and chairs, and sandwiches for missiles, and dance his Mariette upon his shoulder or dandle her upon his knee; and where he can vary the monotony of his dominoes andmanilleby throwing a somersault or executing a pigeon-wing or by a turn atsavate, leap-frog, or puss-in-the-corner. Follow him into the meetings of his bizarre clubs and sodalities; to the spots where he dances for the love of dancing,—nottheBullier, where, except for rare occasions, he merely forms part of a show; to his midnight suppers and masquerades,—Bal des Internes,Bal des Quat’z’ Arts,Bal Julien, and others quite as characteristic because less renowned: in all these places and situations he displays a faculty for impromptu larking, for fabricating jocund pandemoniums at short notice, that prove him no degenerate son of his father and no mean perpetuator of the mirthful prowess of his grandsires and great-grandsires.
Go with him and his Finette, his Blanchette, his Rosette, his Louisette, or his Juliette, for a Sunday picnic at Bois-Meudon or Joinville-le-Pont, and share with them—if your wind is sufficient and your Anglo-Saxon dignity can bear it—their more than infantile or lamb-like gambols over the meadows and under the trees. Keep with him, if you can be so privileged, his or her Saint’s Day. Celebrate with him theFête des Rois, theJour de l’An, and theRéveillon. Rejoice with him at the successful passing of his “exams” or condole with him for being plucked. Help him empty the pannier and the cask received from home. Enter into the spirit of his yarns, toasts,gaudrioles, andchansonson these occasions; into the spirit of his betrayal of sentiment and play of wit, of his gallantry and persiflage, his repartee and poetry, his exaggerations and fantasies; of hispas-seulsandpas-à-quatres, his revivals ofcancan(not the tame variety),bourrée, andchahut,his imitations of fandangos and jigs, his ceremonious travesties of saraband and minuet, and his impulsive launching ofdanses inédits. Enjoy with him his accompaniments on glasses and symphonies on plates, his sallies and his salads, his coffee and his antics, hispâtésand his mummeries, his horse-play and his wine. Under their spell you will be convinced, if you have any relish for life in you, that for graces of fellowship, refinements of revelry, and subtleties of tomfoolery the student of theQuartierhas not his peer upon the planet.
The memory of Mürger and the cult of merriment under misfortune which his immortalVie de Bohèmesymbolises is faithfully cherished. His anniversary is observed every summer about the time of St. Jean by a pilgrimage to his monument in the Luxembourg and a banquet at an average price of fifteen sous in some indulgent cabaret or café. A recent menu was as follows: bread, wine, blood pudding, fried potatoes, almond cakes, cigars for the students and flowers for theétudiantes. One year a thoughtless board of managers committed the indiscretion of elevating the price of the Mürger banquet to something over a franc, whereat the wholeQuartierwas thrown into a veritable tumult of protest.
The real student cafes and cabarets67—which I would not name nor locate for a kingdom, since their obscurity is the one thing that saves them from being spoiled—are the lineal descendants and,mutatis mutandis, the worthy successors of the cafés and cabarets of the students’ fathers and grandfathers and of the taverns of his remote forbears.
There the ancient custom of charcoaling or chalking the walls with skits, epigrams, and caricatures, is kept up.68
There long-haired, unkempt poets mount on tables and counters, glass in hand, and flaunt their new-born epics, tragedies, and ballads, or loll in dreamful, languishing poses and intone their elegies and idyls, as did Rutebœuf, Villon, Gringoire, and Cyranode Bergerac in their respective epochs; Molière, Boileau, Racine, and Crébillon, in the seventeenth century, at the “Mouton Blanc”; as did only yesterday Mérat, Anatole France, Léon Vallade, and Leconte de Lisle at theCafé Voltaire; De Banville, Mürger, Daudet, and Paul Arène at theCafé de l’Europe; Coppée, Mendès, Rollinat, Mallarmé, Bourget (who began as a poet), Bouchor, Richepin, and Villiers de l’Isle-Adam at “The Sherry Cobbler”; and as did all the versifiers of a generation at theCafé Bobino(adjoining the famous little theatre of the same name), “which was,” says Daudet, “the holy of holies for everybody who rhymed, painted, and trod the boards in theQuartier Latin.”
There they fête the victories of their respective poetic sects—Roman,Instrumentiste,Magique,Magnifique,Déliquescent,Incohérent, orNéo-Décadent, as the case may be, just as the Romanticists in their time, and the Parnassians, Décadents, and Symbolists in their times, fêted their victories at theCafé Procope. There they burn incense—as it was burned erstwhile at theSoiréesandPetits Soupers Procopeto Hugo, Baudelaire, and Verlaine—to their divinities who have consented—oh, monstrous condescension!—to foregather with them.
There, too, they blend becomingly philosophy and disputation with good cheer, as did D’Alembert, Voltaire, Condorcet, Diderot, and Rousseau in this same all-absorbent Procope; Corot, Gérôme, Français, Jules Breton, Baudry, Harpignies, Garnier, Falguière, André Theuriet, and Edmond About at theCafé de Fleurus; and Thérion, the original of the Elysée Mérant of Daudet’sRois en Exil, Wallon, the original of Colline in Mürger’sVie de Bohème, and Barbey d’Aurévilly, as famous for his lace-embroidered neckties and red-banded white trousers as for his caustic wit, at theCafé Tabourey.
The student’s lyric gift andpenchantfor good fellowship find further vent in little cellar (caveau), back-room, or upper-roomcafé-concerts69of his own founding, at which, in a congenial atmosphereof tobacco and beer, he sings and recites to sympathetic listenerschansonsand monologues of his own composition, and at which he permits theétudiante, who almost invariably fancies herself predestined to a brilliant career on the operatic stage, to dispense, by way of interlude, the popularrisquéand sentimental songs of the day.
The editorial staffs of the ephemeral literary journals and reviews (revues des jeunesandjournaux littéraires) are so many mutual admiration societies whose business meetings—there is so little business to be done—are very apt to be banquets orsoirées littéraires. In fact, more than one sheet of theQuartierhas no other business office than the back room of the cabaret its editors frequent.
These amateur publications (in which, for the matter of that, nearly every one who counts in French literature has made his début) are not burdened with modesty. Witness the closing paragraph of the leading editorial of the first, last, and only number of theRoyal-Bohème:—
“Our aim is to demand charity of those who, having intelligence and heart, will not see in us a band of useless beggars; our hope, to more than repay our benefactors with the fruits of our thoughts and the flowers of our dreams.”
For a naïve and concrete statement of the revolutionist’s pet formula, “From every one according to his ability and to every one according to his need,” or as an example of what would be called, in good American, “unmitigated nerve,” the above would be hard to match.
An anonymous writer has defined the Bohemian as “a person who sees with his own eyes, hears with his own ears, thinks his own thoughts, follows the lead of his own heart, and holds to the realities of life wherever they conflict with its conventions.” The typical Bohemian student of Paris is a Bohemian of this sort. He loves his comfort as well as another fellow, but he is not ready to sell his soul for it. Material well-being at the price of submission—moral, social, or political—he will none of. Practicalconsiderations do not count with him when they antagonise his ideals.
A LATIN QUARTER TYPEA LATIN QUARTER TYPE
A LATIN QUARTER TYPE
In his monumentalIllusions Perdues, Balzac describes at length a Latin Quartercénacleof nine persons, of which his hero, the poet Lucien de Rubempré, became a member. Among other things, he says:—
“In this cold mansard the finest dreams of sentiment were realised. Here brothers, all equally strong in different regions of knowledge, enlightened each other in good faith, telling one another everything, even their base thoughts,—all of an immense instruction, and all tested in the crucible of want.” Something of the beautiful earnestness of these ideal and idealised Bohemians of Balzac has laid hold on the Bohemian student of to-day. Like the members of this mansardcénacle, he is seeking conscientiously and eagerly for a comprehensive formula of life.
“The student is thinking,” writes an actual student, in answer to the charges of materialism, dilettanteism, and subserviency brought against the student body. “His thought is fermenting, trying its force, preparing the future. The present hour is grave, an hour of transition. In literature, in art, in politics, something new is desired, expected, sought after. Everywhere is chaos. Everywhere opposing elements clash. A general synthesis or an exclusive choice from which harmony may spring is called for. What are the laws of this synthesis, what is the criterion of this choice? These are the questions which, anxiously, without ceasing, and, perhaps, in spite of himself, the contemporary youth is asking.”
There have been brief seasons when the whole university world—students and faculties alike—has been afflicted with intellectual snobbishness, indifference, discouragement, disillusion, fatigue, and even despair.
The present has its share of disillusion and discouragement, but it is primarily a period of search. In the faculties, alongside of those figure-heads—in which faculties always and everywhere have been rich—who cling tenaciously to whatever is ancient,respectable, and commonplace, are men who are looking up and out.70M. Lavisse, for instance, with his recurring emphasis on the necessity of a closer union of the university with the people, is a sort of second (and a more scientific) Michelet; and M. Lavisse has several colleagues who are little, if any, behind him in large suggestiveness. The thought-stirring influence of the disinterested, investigating zeal of Pasteur (and his successors, Roux and Duclaux) and of Berthelot is also profound. A provincial professor, M. Hervé, has recently been disciplined for unblushing anti-patriotism.
TheCollège Libre des Sciences Sociales(subsidised by the state) and theEcole des Hautes Etudes Socialeshave flung their doors wide open to socialism. Furthermore, this once descried doctrine has a hold on the university itself. Just what the following of socialism is among the students, it is not possible, in the complete absence of reliable statistics, to determine; but it is safe to say that it is large and fervent, since student socialists appear in convincing force at every important socialistic demonstration.
At the last anniversary of the “Bloody Week” of the Commune, in Père-la-Chaise I chanced upon two students wearing red eglantines in their buttonholes, with whom I had taken my meals for several weeks previous without having been given the slightest intimation that they were interested in social or political problems, to say nothing of being socialists. The talk that resulted from this chance meeting revealed to me that they were actively affiliated with an important socialistic organisation, and that their convictions had marched fearlessly and far. There are many such unproclaimed and unsuspected socialists in the Quarter.
Anarchy also—that is, the philosophical type of anarchy so much in favour in certain literary and artistic and even in certain scientific groups—has an indefinite and fluctuating but extensive student penumbra.
No, the student’s noble aspirations have not all forsaken him. He abhors, as he has always abhorred, the prudish, the prudent,the politic, the hypocritical, and the mean. He has not become hopelessly subservient any more than he has become hopelessly morbid or hopelessly unsentimental. He can still resent dictation, as he can still laugh and love. If he truckles to his professors in the matter of Greek and Latin roots, it is that Greek and Latin roots are subjects of supreme indifference to him. When his honest thinking and his deeper emotions are concerned, he is as recalcitrant as ever. He recognises no authority, neither president nor prelate, general nor judge, nothing but his own sense of truth and right.
He is thinking. What is more, he is ready to accept the logical consequences of his thinking. When the time comes that these consequences tally with action, he will act. He has the same imperious need to act that he has to romp and to love. He looks to action—direct action, street action—for redress of wrong. He cannot help it: it is his nature. Intensity is the primal law of his being and will out, though he is merely telling a story, playing a joke, kissing a cheek, or singing a song. He is not fifty, and he is French. He has the Quixotism, the fine rashness, the sublime foolhardiness, of his years and of his race.
With a mobility impossible for the Teuton or Anglo-Saxon to understand, but which may be, notwithstanding, the highest form of self-control, he passes from vigorous frolic to vigorous work andvice versainstantaneously. For him it is no farther from a laugh or a kiss to a barricade than it is from a laugh to a kiss; and why should it be, when the laugh, the kiss, and the barricade are (as they are with him), co-ordinate assertions of liberty? “Frivolous as a pistol bullet,” he flashes to his mark. Given the impact of provocation, he does not know what veering or wabbling means.
Some contemporary—De Vogüé, I think—has said, “The student always rules those who think they are ruling him,” in which he resembles a womanly woman; “and, when the critical moment comes, he resumes his liberty of action.”
If he has not been on a barricade in thirty years, it is becauseneither Boulangism, Dreyfusism,71Déroulèdism, nor anti-Combeism, though he played some part in each, won, or deserved to win, his full allegiance. He has not taken the traditional chip off his shoulder, however, nor given any one permission to tread on his toes. On the contrary, he has shown flashes of his old temper, even in the tranquil third of a century just passed, often enough to leave no doubt of its persistence. It is only a little more than twenty years since theQuartierwas in an uproar by reason of a slanderous article on the students published in theCri du Peuplethe day after the death of Jules Vallès.
It is only a round fifteen years since the students, taking into their own hands the punishment of thesouteneursof theQuartier, ducked a number of them in the frog-pond of the Luxembourg.
It is only ten years since the students set all Paris and all France by the ears because the government had interfered—unwarrantably, as they believed—with the immemorial usages of theQuat’z’ Artsball. TheQuartierwas flooded with soldiers, blood was shed, and there was one life lost. The students carried their point. Parliament intervened, and the proceedings begun in the courts against the organisers of the ball were dropped. What the consequences might otherwise have been no one can tell; but it is almost certain they would have been not local, but national.
It is only six or seven years since it took a strong force of police to defend against the wrath of the students the director of theEcole des Arts Décoratifs, whose offence was nothing more heinous than favouring the sale, under school auspices, of the drawing materials, by dealing in which a medical student had hitherto earned the money to pursue his studies; and this state of things lasted several days. And only a little over two years ago the students protested as vigorously against the condemnation of Tailhade for his incendiary article inLe Libertaireas they had against the condemnation of Richepin for hisChansons des Gueuxa quarter of a century before.
It was in a café of the Left Bank that French volunteers for the Boer war were recruited; and it was most of all from the students, when Kruger came to Paris, that the ministry feared the anti-British demonstrations that might bring international complications,—demonstrations which it craftily diverted by allowing the student pro-Boer enthusiasm the fullest scope.
The persecution of the Russian students by the Russian government aroused among the students of Paris no little sympathy, which was given expression in indignation meetings. It was probably quite as much the dread of the student displeasure as of the anarchist bomb that kept the czar on his last visit to France from entering Paris.
The above illustrations of the students’ irritability are the proverbial straws that show which way the wind blows, and they might be multiplied indefinitely.
There is no possible doubt of the student’s growing disgust with the corruption and hypocrisy of the present republic,—this nominal democracy that is in reality a plutocracy,—nor of his slowly crystallising resolution to have either something better than a republic or a better republic; and, in the long run, he always gets what he wants. The student strength is out of all proportion to the student numbers. Let the students take their old place in the streets of theQuartierto-morrow—5,000 or 500 strong—with a real rallying cry, and thrills of joy and shudders of apprehension will traverse the length and breadth of France.