Chapter 9

THE PANTHÉONTHE PANTHÉON

THE PANTHÉON

“The Quarter knows that the student is its aristocracy,—an aristocracy that gives more than it gets, against whom the Carmagnole or the ‘Ça Ira’ could not be sung, whose spirit is democratic and of the people.”

Gilbert Parker.

“It took a rugged faith in the future to pass the evenings—without a fire—polishing verses, after having painted all day long interminable registers.”—Emile Goudeau, in Dix Ans de Bohème.

“If an artist obeys the motive which may be called the natural need of work, he deserves indulgence, perhaps, more than ever. He obeys then neither ambition nor want. He obeys his heart: it were easy to believe that he obeys God. Who can know why a man who is neither vain nor in want of money decides to write?”—Alfred de Musset.

“How much of priceless life were spentWith men that every virtue decks,And women models of their sex,Society’s true ornament,—Ere we dared wander, nights like this,Through wind and rain, and watch the Seine,And feel the Boulevard break againTo warmth and light and bliss!”Robert Browning.

“Say I’m weary, say I’m sad,Say that health and wealth have missed me,Say I’m growing old; but add—Jenny kissed me.”Leigh Hunt.

THE persons organically connected with the University of Paris—the students and the professors—are only the nucleus, the rallying-point, so to speak, of the intellectual population of the Latin Quarter. About them, and quite as numerous as the thousands the university at any one time enrolls, are gathered those students in the largest sense of the word—painters, sculptors, architects, poets, novelists, critics, journalists, historians, philosophers, philologists, scientists, inventors, and bibliophiles—who need the help of lectures, museums, laboratories, and libraries in their daily tasks, or who, dependent on that indefinable something called atmosphere for productiveness, can hardly conceive being at their scholarly or artistic best anywhere in the world but in this particular corner of it which has given them their training and inspiration.

About the university as a centre are also grouped those alumni who, quite independently of their callings, cling to theQuartieras a cockney clings to the town for reasons gay or serious, trivial or weighty, fantastic or rational,—attachment to a lodging, a café, a club, a restaurant, to the Luxembourg Gardens or the quays of the Seine, to book-stalls or shops of antiquities, to a chum or a mistress,—from any of the various motives of habit, taste, sentiment, or passion.

Finally, theQuartierretains those alumni who, cut off (whether by the achievement of a degree or the failure to achieve one) from the convenient parental remittances, are dismayed by the risks of a penniless plunge into the great, unfamiliar world. In theQuartier, where they are known, they can count on a modicum of credit for a modicum of time from tailors,restaurateurs, and landlords, and on the unusurious loans of a little knot of friends. “One knows,” wrote Richepin, apropos of this matter, in hisEtapes d’un Réfractaire, “that at such an hour in the rue de l’Ecole de Médecine or at the head of the rue Monsieur-le-Princean easy-chair holds out its arms to him, a tobacco pouch opens its heart to him, a friend lets him bellow his verses. These are so many consolations. What do I say? They are so many resources,—sometimes the only ones.”

In theQuartier, with these resources, a fellow will not starve in one month or two, as he might elsewhere. Besides, if the worst comes to the worst, there is the familiar and friendly Seine near by and the sweet, clean “Doric little morgue,” where he is bound to feel at home and where he will be speedily recognised.

A good proportion of these post-graduate denizens of theQuarterare either by choice or by necessity Bohemians. To the former class (Bohèmes par goût) belongs my friend B——, whom for conveniences’ sake we will call Berteil,—Gustave Berteil.

In a dingy hôtel of the rue Racine, just off theQuartier’shighway, the Boulevard St. Michel, in a room which costs perhaps forty francs a month, perhaps forty-five, and which has nothing about it to distinguish it from the room of a student who arrived in Paris yesterday, except for a shelf of original and other editions of the elder French dramatists, M. Berteil (Gustave Berteil, simple Gustave to his friends), bachelor, aged forty-three, has lived continuously ever since his salad days.

Twenty-three years ago Gustave came up to Paris from a Provençal town, where his father was a wealthy notary, to prepare himself, in pursuance of the paternal desire, for admission to the bar. He was equipped with so much knowledge of life as the average provincial youth has at twenty, so much book knowledge as the average provinciallycéeaffords, a close acquaintance with the old French drama, for which thelycéewould have shuddered to be held accountable, and a consuming desire to write for the contemporary stage.

During as many years as are ordinarily required for taking a degree in law, Gustave devoted the pleasant days to foraging for old dramatists in the book-stalls and along the quays, the rainy days to play-writing and to perusing, repairing, and fondling his yellowed, tattered, worm-eaten acquisitions in his room,—wherehe had his meals served him,—and his evenings (whatever the weather) to the auditoriums or stage entrances of the theatres and to the cafés where thecabotins(actors) most do congregate.

His relations to the law were limited, so far as is known, to thebona fidepurchase of expensive legal text books, which he invariably bartered, after a decent interval, for editions of his favourites,—a device, less ingenious than ingenuous, for at once quieting his conscience and obtaining larger remittances from home.

When the time came for Gustave (supposed young advocate) to return to the Côte d’Azur and there assist his father in handling testaments and deeds, he made a clean breast of it by post.

Thereupon the father cut off the son’s allowance, thinking thus “to starve the rascal,” as he bluntly expressed it, “into submission.” He very nearly succeeded in the starving part of his programme, as he discovered to his genuine horror,—for he was at bottom not a bad papa,—when, at the end of an anxious year without tidings from the boy, he came to Paris and found his novel prodigal out at heels and elbows, hollowed in at stomach, and rickety at the knees; with absolutely nothing quite intact in fact about his person or surroundings—except the shelf of old dramatists, which would easily have procured him food and fuel. Berteilpèrewas mollified, if sadly disillusionised, by this ocular demonstration of pluck on the part of Berteilfils. He settled on his unnatural offspring an allowance of 2,500 francs a year, to be trebled whenever he should abandon Bohemia for legitimate business, and left him to live his own life in his own way.

This way has not turned out to be greatly different from the way of Gustave’s nominal student days, and for at least ten years it has not varied from one year to another by the value of a hair.

Every morning at ten, winter and summer, the hôtel garçon enters M. Berteil’s room, without rapping, to bring him his coffee and to inform him of the weather. If the garçon reports that it is really pleasant,—and the garçon knows from long experience, you may be sure, what M. Berteil considers really pleasant,—M. Berteil spends the day book-hunting on the quays, where everybouquineurandbouquinistegreets him cordially as an old acquaintance. If the garçon’s weather bulletin is unfavourable, he orders hisdéjeunerand dinner sent up to his room, and spends the day in the society of his old dramatists and such of his friends, whose name is legion, as may chance to call. He still haunts, evenings, as he did in the beginning, the cafés affected by thecabotins, with whom he passes for the most brilliant conversationalist on theatrical matters in or out of the “profession.” But he abjured long ago theatre auditoriums and stage entrances, the latter because he can now meet histrionic celebrities on an equal footing, the former because he holds modern plays trash and modern methods of interpreting old plays tinsel. He also put away long ago his youthful, disquieting ambition to write for the contemporary stage, because he despaired of matching the old dramatists in their manner and disdained the manner of the new.

When he receives his monthly remittance of fr. 208.35, he gives the odd centimes to the first street beggar he meets,—for luck,—and consecrates fifty francs at once to a dinner with one or two of his intimates and theamieof his law-student (?) days, who, still fair, though “fat and forty,” is the prosperous proprietress of a little stationery shop in his street. The balance of the remittance amply suffices him to live thirty days more in his modest fashion and to add a new specimen or two to his collection of books.

I do not know of a person whose life is organised more rationally,—I would say scientically if Gustave did not abhor the word science and all its derivatives; and, in the teeth of the adage which warns us to call no man happy till he dies, I do not hesitate to say that Gustave Berteil is happy, and has been happy from the day of his reconciliation with his sire. Indeed, if I were asked to name the happiest man of my acquaintance, I should answer, “Gustave Berteil,” without a moment’s pause.

Gustave, like the majority of the Bohemians from choice, was a Bohemian by necessity for a time; but theQuartierhas always had a sprinkling of brilliant, forceful personalities whohave taken Bohemian vows without ever having had to consider the bread-and-butter question.

Such was the deceased artist Henri Pille (associated in his latter days with Montmartre), whose appearance implied utter poverty, but who is said to have had landed property in a southern province which made the fluctuations of the picture market a matter of little concern to him.

Such is, or, perhaps, was, the poet Maurice Bouchor, to whom Richepin dedicated his virile volume,Les Blasphèmes. Bouchor, who now devotes almost all his time and energy to the elevation of the working people through reading clubs and theUniversités Populaires, is regarded by many of his old associates as a renegade from Bohemia. He is confessedly a renegade from many of its livelier and noisier pleasures, as his age and his gentle nature entitle him to be. But he still lives less pretentiously than his means permit, is still “thinking his own thoughts, following the leadings of his own heart, and holding to the realities of life where-ever they conflict with its conventions,” and so has not entirely forfeited his claim, it is to be hoped, to be ranked with the Bohemians of the Quarter.

Such also is Jean Richepin, in spite of his sumptuous establishment on the Right Bank, a sort of Parisian Menelik, whose barbaric costumes and audacious exploits have entered as completely into the legendary lore of the Quarter as the explosive inconsistencies of Jules Vallès and the alternate aspirings and back-slidings of Paul Verlaine. In the early eighties, when he paraded the fantastic title ofRoi des Truands(King of the Vagrants), Richepin wore a talismanic bracelet and a curiously-shaped hat, as badges of his rank. “There was even,” says his fellow-Bohemian, Emile Goudeau, “an epic struggle between Jean Richepin and the poor but great caricaturist André Gill [a Bohemian by necessity] as to which of the two would root out of the hatteries of Paris the most bizarre head-dress. Now Gill and now Richepin had the advantage. The illustrious Sapeck was the judge of last resort, and awarded the palm to the victor.” It would takea long chapter to describe the costumes which have played a part in Richepin’s numerous and strange avatars. At one time, if the narrative of a friend can be trusted, he remained in hiding for almost a fortnight because his wardrobe was reduced to a simpleJEAN RICHEPINJEAN RICHEPINwindow curtain; and his adventures have been so extraordinary that this ludicrous incident, improbable as it sounds, does not defy belief.

Richepin, Bouchor, and Paul Bourget, returning from “The Sherry Cobbler” one night, halted under the arcade of theOdéon, named themselvesLes Vivants, and solemnly pledged each other eternal aid and fidelity. This was the period when Bourget’s ambition was poetry, when he wore pantaloons of water green, and imitated the miraculous cravats of Barbey d’Aurévilly and the mode of living of Balzac. “Bourget submitted himself,” says Goudeau, “to a ferocious Balzacian régime. He dined very early, went to bed immediately after, and had himself called on the stroke of 3A.M..... The poet-recluse then drank two or three bowls of black coffee, like Balzac, and, like Balzac, worked until seven. Then he slept again for an hour, rose, for good this time, and applied himself to the bread-winning activities which poverty imposes on young littérateurs.”

Bourget, who began thus as a Bohemian from necessity, hasended as a snob. He is a fair sample of the “arrivé” who disavows his past, and

“Looks in the clouds, scorning the base degreesBy which he did ascend.”

“I shall be adjudged severe, perhaps,” says the poet and socialist deputy Clovis Hugues; “but I am of those who think that the sacrifice of thechevelure[long hair] is the most dangerous of concessions to the modernbourgeoisie.... In literature there is an affinity between the sudden disappearance of the familiar mane and the forsaking of the good comrades of the days of want. The transformation effected, one may still have muchesprit, but one has ceased to be a good fellow. Beware, then, of the tribunes and the poets who establish relations with thegarçons coiffeurs!”

I do not know that Bourget ever had any “chevelure” to leave in the hands of the Delilah of bourgeois respectability, but it would seem that he had sacrificed on the altar of his parvenu-ship the sincere soulfulness of which the “chevelure” as well as another thing may be the visible symbol, since he apparently has no sympathy or helping hand for his younger painter brother who is bravely struggling up to recognition against heavy odds.

Even the conceited “arrivés” of literature and the arts are entitled to a certain respect, especially when they have “arrived,” as has Bourget, by force of genuine talent and persistent work. However ridiculous the pretentious airs they assume, they are not cravens. They have left Bohemia, but they have left it with colours flying, with all the honours of war. As much cannot be said for the recreants,—called the “soumis” or, still more expressively, the “moutons,”—who have forsaken Bohemia, without the excuse of having “arrived,” from sheer pusillanimity, because they found its paths of hardship, struggle, and sacrifice too rugged in comparison with the easy highways of bourgeoisdom. Towards these one’s dominating sentiment can hardly be other than pity or contempt,—contempt, if they take greedily to the flesh-pots without regret at selling their souls to Mammon; pity, if they do regret.

Richepin, who knows this Bohemian world so well, has characterised the two varieties of “moutons.” Of the first (the unconscious “moutons,” so to speak) he says, “Having returned to the paternal roast, married their little cousins, and established themselves notaries in towns of thirty thousand inhabitants, they have the self-satisfaction of rehearsing before the fire their poor-artist adventures with the magniloquence of a traveller who describes a tiger hunt”; and of the others (the conscious “moutons”), “Wretchedly sad in the existence into which they have entered against their wishes, in the intellectual tombs to which they have consigned themselves, they slowly atrophy. The banal is particularly terrible in this,—that, if one returns to it after having been disgusted with it, it is to find it morebanalstill, and to die of it.”

Few of the Bohemians who have been intimately associated with the Quarter during the last twenty-five or thirty years have been able to make shift with their literature or their art alone. In order to keep body and soul together, most have been constrained to resort to compromises which are humiliating and disillusionising, but which are not necessarily demoralising, and which stop a long way this side of absolute surrender. Mallarmé taught English in thelycéesnearly all his life, and conducted alone, during a short period, a journal entitledLa Dernière Mode. Verlaine was long an employee of theHôtel de Ville, had periods of teaching, and even tried his hand at farming. Edmond Haraucourt,72Camille St. Croix, Léon Dierx, Emile Goudeau, Canqueteau, and Trimouillat have been at one time or another petty functionaries. Nearly all have dabbled in journalism. The happiest compromise, however, the most independent form of dependence, so to say, has been hit upon by Jacques Le Lorrain, poet and author ofL’Au Delà, who set up as a cobbler in 1896 in the rue du Sommerard, close by the Cluny Museum.73

It is no infrequent thing for the loyal Bohemian to “arrive” too late to profit by his success because his spirit has been imbittered or his constitution ruined by the hardships he has undergone.

“The maimed heart, the heart poniarded in this mute struggle for life,” says Jules Vallès in hisRéfractaires, “cannot be taken out of the chest and replaced by another. There are no wooden hearts in the market. It remains there, bleeding, the poniard at its centre. Rich one day, famous, perhaps, these victims of obscure combats may perfume their sores if they will, sponge up the blood, wipe away their tears; memory will tear open the wounds, strip off the bandages. A word, a song,—joyous or sad,—will be enough to raise in these sick souls the phantom of the past.”

THE TAVERNE DU PANTHÉON ON MARDIGRASTHE TAVERNE DU PANTHÉON ON MARDIGRAS

Jehan Rictus more recently, in his terribleSoliloques du Pauvre, has expressed the same thought in another fashion:—

“Même si qu’un jour j’ tornais au richePar un effet de vot’ Bonté,Ce jour-là j’ f’rai mett’e une affiche,On cherche à vendre un cœur gâté.”

The following poem embodies the experience of a Latin Quarter Bohemian whose hard-won victory came too late because his health was gone:—

IDo you remember, Marguerite,How first we met in the Latin Quarter?I was a poet, far from gay,And you, well, you were—somebody’s daughter.You dropped a glove upon the curb,—Say, was it Fate or yourself who willed it?I picked it up, a natural thing,Laid it within the hand that had filled it.“Merci, monsieur,” was all you said;But, somehow, I knew from your tone, as you said it,That, if I kept the hand awhile,It would not count to my discredit.216So, hand in hand, we strolled and we chatted,Happy as pups whose heads have been patted.We drank a bock on the Saint Michel;And, when we parted, I knew you so wellThat I even dropped the “Mademoiselle.”Do you remember I whispered low,As I gazed in your eyes, so dark, so sweet,“A bientôt, Marguerite,Au revoir and à bientôt”?IIDo you remember, Marguerite,How we rubbed along in the Latin Quarter?I Roland, the poet, almost gay,And you, my mistress and—somebody’s daughter?There were only a bed and a chair or twoIn our tiny chamber under the mansard;But our thoughts were simple, our hearts were true,Something in each to the other answered.Fresh youth was there, and love was there,My hopes were strong, your face was fair;And we lived and loved as devoted a pairAs ever old Paris sheltered.In a worn béret and a faded blouse,I scribbled for fame. You kept the house,—That is, as much as there was to keep.You must, sometimes, have suffered in silence then,—It was, oh, so little I earned with my pen!—But you never allowed me to see you weep.And whenever I left for an hour or so,My Marguerite, do you remember?Over and over you made me repeat,As if you’d a dread I’d get lost in the street,“A bientôt, Marguerite,Au revoir and à bientôt.”217IIIFor ten long years, my Marguerite,Heart has beaten to heart in the Latin Quarter,The heart of the poet, almost gay,The heart of the mistress, the—somebody’s daughter.We’ve hold to each other through thick and through thin,As the years have gone out and the years have come in;And we’ve always held to the Latin Quarter.Now fame has come and my pen earns more,We have furnishings choice and books in store.What a change it is from the days of yore!The starving days when we lived on air!No more we climb to the hundredth stair;We have plenty to eat and plenty to wear;Whenever we wish, we can have a fire.Once that was the acme of our desire.We’re as snug and slick as the parvenus;But it’s come too late for me and for you,This luck that we prayed for when days were blue.My work is done in the Latin Quarter.God bless you, my dear, for your love for me!Bless God for my love for—somebody’s daughter!IVIt’s over, over, Marguerite,The fair, fair life in the Latin Quarter.I’m dying, dearest; and, when I’m dead,You’ll be once more just—somebody’s daughter.But you’ll not be driven to work for bread,Or worse than work in the Latin Quarter.Thank God for that! You can hold up your head:So you’ve funds, it’s enough to be—somebody’s daughter.All that is mine will be yours, of course,—The world has been kind these last glad years,—Don’t be foolish, I beg of you, over my corse,218Just give what is natural,—a few real tears.Be a good girl, don’t yield to regretFor the thing that is gone. What is must be.You were born for love, don’t you dare to forget!Make some poor devil happy, as you’ve made me!It’s the very last thing I shall ask, I ween;For I feel the whirr of Death’s sickle keen....I know not what this death may mean,For I scarcely credit what churchmen tellOf a future heaven and a future hell.Without any future all is well,If the life that is past has been loving and true,As the life has been that we have to review;But my heart is breaking at leaving you.Well, just because it’s my habit so,And because it makes it more natural to go,I’ll say, quite as if we were likely to meet“A bientôt, Marguerite,Au revoir and à bientôt.”

THE INSTITUTETHE INSTITUTE

“Whoever throws himself into the streets of a great city, into the mêlée of rapacities and ambitions, with a pen for a weapon, takes‘La Misère’for a flag.”—Jean Richepin, in Les Etapes d’un Réfractaire.

“You have the stuff of three poets in you; but, before you become known, you run the risk of dying six times of hunger, if you count on the income from your poetry for the means to live.”

Etienne Lousteau to Lucien de Rubempré, inBalzac’s Illusions Perdues.

“Cressot died of want the day want forsook him. He died because his body, habituated to suffering, was not able to accept well-being.”

Jules Vallès.

FIFTY odd years ago, in a volume of short stories,—little read in France nowadays, and quite unknown, I fancy, elsewhere,—Le Roman de Toutes les Femmes, Henry Mürger, author of the universally known and lovedLa Vie de Bohème, narrated, under the title “La Biographie d’un Inconnu,” the life history of a young sculptor who died of “the malady to which science does not dare to give its true name,la misère.”

Joseph D——, born in a provincial town of poor, hard-working, respectable parents, manifested a strong vocation for sculpture from his early boyhood. His father having decided to put him to the carpenter’s trade, Joseph, who had no notion of becoming a mechanic, went secretly to the Free School of Design. The professor of the school procured him a place as pupil with a government architect, which his father, under the impression that carpentry and architecture were very much the same thing, allowed him to accept. Joseph made such progress that he paid his way at the end of a month, and at the end of six months earned his seven or eight francs a day. But he was getting no nearer to sculpture by this work; and he left the architect’s office, in the face of his father’s opposition, and entered a sculptor’s atelier for study, paying a month in advance for his teaching. He took part in a competition for admission to theBeaux-Arts, and failed. Having no money with which to pay for lessons, he was forced to leave the atelier, but was received—about the only bit of good luck in his whole career—by the great master, Rude. He lodged at this time in the rue du Cherche-Midi, over a cow stable, where he was warmed only by what heat ascended through a hole in the floor.

Finding he could not pay for the models and materials necessary to enter theSaloncompetitions, he assisted for a year, without entirely neglecting his studies, a noted ornament-worker, and put by enough to enable him to pursue his art studies togood advantage. Working by night in a cold workshop, he contracted a sickness which confined him to his bed for a time, and which swept away all his savings. As soon as he was well again, he went back to work for his first employer (the architect), designing ornaments whose execution was intrusted to others. He thus gained a little pile—about 1,200 francs—with which to compete for theSalon. It was stolen by a roof-worker who, while repairing an adjacent building, had seen him counting it.

This “mischance”—to go on in Mürger’s own language—“was a terrible blow to Joseph. ‘There are some people who have no luck,’ he said, ‘who would lose with all the trumps of the pack in their hands.’ ‘Never mind,’ he resumed, brightening, ‘I will attempt the assault of the Louvre74with what little I have left. I will enter there with plaster instead of bronze or marble.’”

All his courage had returned. He tried making fanciful statuettes, which he could prepare without the expense of hiring models; but he had little success in selling them.

“La Misèrereturned, and knocked at his door. She entered, terrible and pitiless, like a vanquished foe whose turn has come to triumph, and who uses without mercy the right of reprisal. Joseph’s destitution reached such a point that, when one of his friends invited him to dinner, he answered naïvely, ‘I’m afraid it will put me out: it’s not my day.’ For tobacco he smoked walnut leaves, which he gathered in the forest of Verrières, then dried, and chopped up fine.

“His sole hope was the comingSalon. In a room without a fire,”—the odorous days of the calorific cow stable must have seemed a paradise in retrospect,—“in a Siberian temperature, he worked during three consecutive months on a Saint Antoine, for he had been forced to renounce his group of Galatea, the too costly execution of which he had deferred to better times. Clay, in spite of its moderate cost, was too dear for his empty purse, thissame purse which had held almost a fortune; for, by a strange irony, the thief who had taken his money had left him his purse. He dug his clay himself, therefore, in some fields of thebanlieue. A rag-picker of the rue Mouffetard whom he had met, I know not where, gave him sittings at five sous an hour; and three-quarters of the time the worthy man invented angelic ruses to avoid being paid.

“The date set for sending to theSalonwas near. It was time to think of taking the plaster cast of the statue. Michelli, Fontaine, and the other moulders who worked for the artists, when they saw Joseph’s destitution, were unwilling to venture credit. All he could obtain from one of them was the furnishing of the necessary plaster. Aided by several friends, Joseph took the cast of his statue himself. The operation lasted two days, and turned out well.

“It was the eve of the day on which the jury was to begin its sittings and on which the works to be passed upon must be at the Louvre, by midnight at the very latest. During the night it came on cold, and Joseph, to minimise the action of the frost upon his statue, the still damp plaster of which had not acquired the solidity which dryness gives, wrapped his only blanket about it, and piled up on it, as a cuirass of warmth against the darts of the cold, all his clothing, playing thus, towards Saint Antoine, the rôle of Saint Martin.

“The next forenoon two or three friends came to aid Joseph in transporting his statue to the Louvre. The wagon arrived four hours too late. Nor was this all. At this point, fatality intervened in the person of an absurdconcièrge, who declared that he would let nothing leave Joseph’s room before the back rent was paid. The artists explained to theconcièrgethat a statue was not a piece of furniture, and that the law did not permit him to hold it back. He would not listen to reason, and, stony in his stubbornness, demanded a written permit from the landlord. They hurried to Passy, where the landlord lived, and did not find him. He would not be in before dinner. They returnedat the dinner hour. He had just gone out. It was already eight o’clock in the evening. They decided to apply to a justice of the peace. The justice turned them over to the commissary of police, who began by sustaining theconcièrge, but who decided, on Joseph’s representations of the injury that would be done him if he were made to miss theSalon, to authorise the removal of the statue. It was then eleven o’clock. They had barely an hour to get to the Louvre. A dangerous coating of thin ice rendered the streets impracticable. Vehicles could only advance at a walk. The artists needed three hours at least, and they had only one. Furthermore, repairs which were being made on the sewers forced them to take the longest route. In crossing the Pont-Neuf, Joseph and his friends heard it strike the half-hour.

“‘It’s half-past eleven,’ said Joseph, who was sweating great drops in spite of the fact that the thermometer marked a north-pole temperature.

“‘It’s half-past twelve,’ volunteered a young man who detached himself from a band of painters who were returning with their pictures because they had arrived at the Louvre too late. They were making the best of it, and were singing gaily, ‘Allons-nous-en, gens de la noce! etc.’

“Joseph and his friends retraced their steps.

“A little later Joseph exposed his Saint Antoine and a statuette of Marguerite at theExposition du Bazar Bonne Nouvelle(corresponding to the modernSalon des Réfusés), and sold the two to the Museum of Compiègne for 150 francs.

“This paltry sum enabled him to drag himself about some time,—a year almost. Then he entered the hospital through the intervention of an interne, for he had no characterised malady. He died there of exhaustion at the end of three months....

“Joseph D—— died at the age of twenty-three, without rancour or recrimination against the art that had killed him, as a brave soldier falls on the field of battle, saluting his flag.”

If I have reproduced here with much fulness this old story of Mürger’s, it is because Joseph D—— stands to the Bohemiansof theQuartieras a kind of saint,Saint Joseph de la Dèche,75patron of poor artists, and because the half-century during which civilisation is supposed to have been advancing with enormous strides has made no appreciable difference in the hardships of the needy artist or in the bravery with which he faces them. Parents are still too often dull-witted, narrow, and unsympathetic where their offspring are concerned. Rents are still hard to pay, and art materials and models, food, clothes, and fuel hard to be had just when they are most needed. Luck is as capricious, theconcièrgeas officious, winter as brutal, warmth as coy, and death as chary of reprieves as ever. Joseph D—— is as strictly up to date as if he had been born in 1881 and died in 1904. One hesitates to depict the slow starvation of one’s acquaintances and friends, even under assumed names; and the fateful career of Mürger’s Joseph is so perfectly typical of the careers of the poor devils of artists in theQuartierof the present period that there is no necessity of depicting it.

Quite as terrible, though far less romantic than themisèreof the Bohemian artist and littérateur, is the “misère en habit noir”—the nomenclature is Balzac’s—of the patientless doctor, the briefless barrister, and the unemployed or underpaid teacher and professor.

Your poet, your painter, or your sculptor, is, as a rule, a careless, jolly dog, who has something of the genuine vagabond or adventurer in him. He cannot tolerate anything that is cut and dried, not even prosperity; and he would be infinitely bored by life if its elements of uncertainty were quite eliminated. He prefers agreeable surprises to disagreeable surprises, of course; but he prefers disagreeable surprises to no surprises at all.

Dissimulation is not an indispensable part of his artistic baggage. He may flaunt and vaunt his poverty, swear at it or make game of it, and be none the less considered, at least in hismilieu. He is excused from playing the dismal farce of keeping up appearances. He may live in an attic, clothe himself in tattered and seedyraiment, shirk the bath-tub, ignore the very existence of the laundress and the barber, be noisy and reckless, and defy all the canons of the social code without stultifying himself or dishonouring his calling. Best of all, his life is rarely a lonely one. He suffers, but he has thecamaraderieof suffering; and this enables him to laugh or shout his misery away.

On the other hand, your so-called professional man—your physician, for instance—must be more than decently lodged; be arrayed, at no matter what hour of the day,—such is the Old World convention,—in a faultless frock-coat and silk hat; be restrained, not to say dignified, in demeanour; assume to be busy when he is weary unto death with inaction,—and all this though hunger be consuming his very vitals.

He must button his suffering securely under his respectable black waistcoat, and wear his professional complacence when his heart is torn with sobs. If the reputable lodging or the reputable bearing fail him, even for a little, he is lost irrevocably.

Four years ago or thereabouts a young physician, one Dr. Laporte, was arraigned before a Paris court for criminal negligence in the practice of his profession. The court condemned him to prison, in spite of the testimony of an eminent specialist in his favour, but with the palliative of theLoi Bérenger.76

The condemnation was based on these facts: Summoned to an emergency case already compromised by lay treatment, and not possessing the surgical instrument which it called for, Dr. Laporte cast around for a makeshift tool. He used unsuccessfully the only thing in any way adapted to his purpose that he discovered in the patient’s house; and then, finding his efforts futile, and foreseeing the fatal issue, which was not slow to arrive, he withdrew, saying there was nothing more to be done.

The reasons for the attachment of clemency to the sentence were these: the evidence showed conclusively that he had had no patients for days and perhaps weeks; that he had no money to keep in proper repair the instruments he owned, to say nothing ofbuying the instrument in question; and that he had not eaten a morsel of food for a full day previous to the emergency visit, and was a prey to the giddiness of hunger at the moment he made his deplorable attempt.

“The police investigation,” said the presiding judge to the culprit while the trial was in progress, “shows you as nervous, excitable, unbalanced, passing quickly from a state of exaltation to a state of the most profound depression.” What wonder!

THE LOUVRETHE LOUVRE

“They are logical in their insane heroism, they utter neither cries nor plaints, they endure passively the obscure and rigorous destiny which they allot themselves. They die for the most part, decimated by the malady to which science does not dare to give its true name, ‘la misère.’”

Henry Mürger, Introduction to La Vie de Bohème.

“This world’s been too many for me.”

Mr. Tulliver, inGeorge Eliot’sMill on the Floss.

“Et j’ai grand peur à tout momentDe voir mourir d’épuisementL’ami d’enfance,Que pour moins de solennitéJ’appelle ici le Chat Botté,Mais qu’on nomme aussi l’espérance.”André Gill.

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