(group of men dining)You will see a family of rich bourgeois enter, just in from the country, for the Montparnasse station is opposite. The fat, sunburned mama, and the equally rotund and genial farmer-papa, and the pretty daughter, and the newly married son and his demure wife, and the two younger children—and all talking and laughing over a good dinner with champagne, and many toasts to the young couple—and to mama and papa, and little Josephine—with ices, and fruit, and coffee, and liqueur to follow.All these you will see at Lavenue’s on the “cheap side”—and the beautiful model,too, who poses for Courbel, who is breakfasting with one of the jeunesse of Paris. The waiters after 2P.M.dine in the front room with the rest, and jump up now and then to wait on madame and monsieur.It is a very democratic little place, this popular side of the house of M. Lavenue, founded in 1854.And there is a jolly old painter who dines there, who is also an excellent musician, with an ear for rhythm so sensitive that he could never go to sleep unless the clock in his studio ticked in regular time, and at last was obliged to give up his favorite atelier, with its picturesque garden——“For two reasons, monsieur,” he explained to me excitedly; “a little girl on the floor below me played a polka—the same polka half the day—always forgetting to put in the top note; and the fellow over me whistled it the rest of the day and put in the top note false; and so I moved to the rue St. Pères, where one only hears, within the cool court-yard, the distant hum of the busy city. The roar of Paris, so full of chords and melody! Listen to it sometimes,monsieur, and you will hear a symphony!”“LA FILLE DE LA BLANCHISSEUSE”By Bellanger.—Estampe ModerneAnd Mademoiselle Fanny will tell you of the famous men she has known for years, and how she has found the most celebrated of them simple in their tastes, and free from ostentation—“in fact it is always so, is it not, with les hommes célèbres? C’est toujours comme ça, monsieur, toujours!” and mentions one who has grown gray in the service of art and can count his decorations from half a dozen governments. Madame will wax enthusiastic—her face wreathed in smiles. “Ah! he is a bon garçon; he always eats with the rest, for three or four francs, never more! He is so amiable, and, you know, he is very celebrated and very rich”; and madame will not only tell you his entire history, but about his work—the beauty of his wife and how “aimables” his children are. Mademoiselle Fanny knows them all.But the men who come here to lunch are not idlers; they come in, many of them, fresh from a hard morning’s work in the studio. The tall sculptor opposite you hasbeen at work, since his morning coffee, on a group for the government; another, bare-armed and in his flannel shirt, has been building up masses of clay, punching and modeling, and scraping away, all the morning, until he produces, in the rough, the body of a giantess, a huge caryatide that is destined, for the rest of her existence, to hold upon her broad shoulders part of the façade of an American building. The “giantess” in the flesh is lunching with him—a Juno-like woman of perhaps twenty-five, with a superb head well poised, her figure firm and erect. You will find her exceedingly interesting, quiet, and refined, and with a knowledge of things in general that will surprise you, until you discover she has, in her life as a model, been thrown daily in conversation with men of genius, and has acquired a smattering of the knowledge of many things—of art and literature—of the theater and its playwrights—plunging now and then into medicine and law and poetry—all these things she has picked up in the studios, in the cafés, in the course of her Bohemian life. This “vernis,”as the French call it, one finds constantly among the women here, for their days are passed among men of intelligence and ability, whose lives and energy are surrounded and encouraged by an atmosphere of art.In an hour, the sculptor and his Juno-like model will stroll back to the studio, where work will be resumed as long as the light lasts.A TRUE TYPEThe painter breakfastingat the next table is hard at work on a decorative panel for a ceiling. It is already laid out and squared up, from careful pencil drawings. Two young architects are working for him, laying out the architectural balustrade, through which one, a month later, looks up at the allegorical figures painted against the dome of the blue heavens, as a background. And so the painter swallows his eggs, mayonnaise, and demi of beer, at a gulp, for he has a model coming at two, and he must finish this ceiling on time, and ship it, by a fast liner, to a millionaire, who has built a vault-like structure on the Hudson, with iron dogs on the lawn. Here thisbeautiful panel will be unrolled and installed in the dome of the hard-wood billiard-room, where its rich, mellow scheme of color will count as naught; and the cupids and the flesh-tones of the chic little model, who came at two, will appear jaundiced; and Aunt Maria and Uncle John, and the twins from Ithaca, will come in after the family Sunday dinner of roast beef and potatoes and rice pudding and ice-water, and look up into the dome and agree “it’s grand.” But the painter does not care, for he has locked up his studio, and taken his twenty thousand francs and the model—who came at two—with him to Trouville.At night you will find a typical crowd of Bohemians at the Closerie des Lilas, where they sit under a little clump of trees on the sloping dirt terrace in front. Here you will see the true type of the Quarter. It is the farthest up the Boulevard St. Michel of any of the cafés, and just opposite the “Bal Bullier,” on the Place de l’Observatoire. The terrace is crowded with its habitués, for it is out of the way of the stream of people along the “Boul’ Miche.” The terrace isquite dark, its only light coming from the café, back of a green hedge, and it is cool there, too, in summer, with the fresh night air coming from the Luxembourg Gardens. Below it is the café and restaurant de la Rotonde, a very well-built looking place, with its rounding façade on the corner.(studio)At the entrance ofevery studio court and apartment, there lives the concierge in a box of a room generally, containing a huge feather-bed and furnished with a variety of things left by departing tenants to this faithful guardian of the gate. Many of these small rooms resemble the den of an antiquary with their odds and ends from the studios—old swords, plaster casts, sketches and discarded furniture—until the place is quite full. Yet it is kept neat and clean by madame, who sews all day and talks to her cat and to every one who passes into the court-yard. Here your letters are kept, too,in one of a row of boxes, with the number of your atelier marked thereon.At night, after ten, your concierge opens the heavy iron gate of your court by pulling a cord within reach of the family bed. He or she is waked up at intervals through the night to let into and out of a court full of studios those to whom the night is ever young. Or perhaps your concierge will be like old Père Valois, who has three pretty daughters who do the housework of the studios, as well as assist in the guardianship of the gate. They are very busy, these three daughters of Père Valois—all the morning you will see these little “femmes de ménage” as busy as bees; the artists and poets must be waked up, and beds made and studios cleaned. There are many that are never cleaned at all, but then there are many, too, who are not so fortunate as to be taken care of by the three daughters of Père Valois.VOILÀ LA BELLE ROSE, MADAME!There is no gossip within the quarter that your “femme de ménage” does not know, and over your morning coffee, which she brings you, she will regale you with thelatest news about most of your best friends, including your favorite model, and madame from whom you buy your wine, always concluding with: “That is what I heard, monsieur,—I think it is quite true, because the little Marie, who is the femme de ménage of Monsieur Valentin, got it from Céleste Dauphine yesterday in the café in the rue du Cherche Midi.”In the morning, this demure maid-of-all-work will be in her calico dress with her sleeves rolled up over her strong white arms, but in the evening you may see her in a chic little dress, at the “Bal Bullier,” or dining at the Panthéon, with the fellow whose studio is opposite yours.A BUSY MORNINGAlice Lemaître, however, was a far different type of femme de ménage than any of the gossiping daughters of old Père Valois, and her lot was harder, for one night she left her home in one of the provincial towns, when barely sixteen, and found herself in Paris with three francs to her name and not a friend in this big pleasure-loving city to turn to. After many days of privation, she became bonne to a woman known asYvette de Marcie, a lady with a bad temper and many jewels, to whom little Alice, with her rosy cheeks and bright eyes and willing disposition to work in order to live, became a person upon whom this fashionable virago of a demi-mondaine vented the worst that was in her—and there was much of this—until Alice went out into the world again. She next found employment at a baker’s, where she was obliged to get up at four in the morning, winter and summer, and deliver the long loaves of bread at the different houses; but the work was too hard and she left. The baker paid her a trifle a week for her labor, while the attractive Yvette de Marcie turned her into the street without her wages. It was while delivering bread one morning to an atelier in the rue des Dames, that she chanced to meet a young painter who was looking for a good femme de ménage to relieve his artistic mind from the worries of housekeeping. Little Alice fairly cried when the good painter told her she might come at twenty francs a month, which was more money than thisvery grateful and brave little Brittany girl had ever known before.(brocanteur shop front)“You see, monsieur, one must do one’s best whatever one undertakes,” said Alice to me; “I have tried every profession, and now I am a good femme de ménage, and I am ‘bien contente.’ No,” she continued, “I shall never marry, for one’s independence is worth more than anything else. When one marries,” she said earnestly, her little brow in a frown, “one’s life is lost; I am young and strong, and I have courage, and so I can work hard. One should be content when one is not cold and hungry, and I have been many times that, monsieur. Once I worked in a fabrique, where, all day, we painted the combs of china roosters a bright red for bon-bon boxes—hundreds and hundreds of them until I used to see them in my dreams; but the fabrique failed, for the patron ran away with the wife of a Russian. He was a very stupid man to have done that, monsieur, for he had a very nice wife of his own—a pretty brunette, with a charming figure; but you see, monsieur, in Paris it is always that way. C’est toujours comme ça.”JCHAPTER VI“AT MARCEL LEGAY’S”JUST off the Boulevard St. Michel and up the narrow little rue Cujas, you will see at night the name “Marcel Legay” illumined in tiny gas-jets. This is a cabaret of chansonniers known as “Le Grillon,” where a dozen celebrated singing satirists entertain an appreciative audience in the stuffy little hall serving as an auditorium. Here, nightly, as the pièce de résistance—and late on the programme (there is no printed one)—you will hear the Bard of Montmartre, Marcel Legay, raconteur, poet, musician, and singer; the author of many of the most popular songs of Montmartre, and a veteran singer in the cabarets.MARCEL LEGAYFrom these cabaretsof the student quarters come many of the cleverest and most beautiful songs. Here men sing their own creations, and they have absolute license to sing or say what they please; there is no mincing of words, and many times these rare bohemians do not take the trouble to hide their clever songs and satires under a double entente. No celebrated man or woman, known in art or letters, or connected with the Government—from the soldier to the good President of the République Française—is spared. The eccentricity of each celebrity is caught by them, and used in song or recitation.Besides these personal caricatures, the latest political questions of the day—religion and the haut monde—come in for a large share of good-natured satire. To be cleverly caricatured is an honor, and should evince no ill-feeling, especially from these clever singing comedians, who are the best of fellows at heart; whose songs are clever but never vulgar; who sing because they love to sing; and whose versatility enables them to create the broadest of satires, and,again, a little song with words so pure, so human, and so pathetic, that the applause that follows from the silent room of listeners comes spontaneously from the heart.It is not to be wondered at that “The Grillon” of Marcel Legay’s is a popular haunt of the habitués of the Quarter, who crowd the dingy little room nightly. You enter the “Grillon” by way of the bar, and at the further end of the bar-room is a small anteroom, its walls hung in clever posters and original drawings. This anteroom serves as a sort of green-room for the singers and their friends; here they chat at the little tables between their songs—since there is no stage—and through this anteroom both audience and singers pass into the little hall. There is the informality of one of our own “smokers” about the whole affair.Furthermore, no women sing in “Le Grillon”—a cabaret in this respect is different from a café concert, which resembles very much our smaller variety shows. A small upright piano, and in front of it a low platform, scarcely its length, complete the necessarystage paraphernalia of the cabaret, and the admission is generally a franc and a half, which includes your drink.In the anteroom, four of the singers are smoking and chatting at the little tables. One of them is a tall, serious-looking fellow, in a black frock coat. He peers out through his black-rimmed eyeglasses with the solemnity of an owl—but you should hear his songs!—they treat of the lighter side of life, I assure you. Another singer has just finished his turn, and comes out of the smoky hall, wiping the perspiration from his short, fat neck. The audience is still applauding his last song, and he rushes back through the faded green velvet portières to bow his thanks.A POET-SINGERA broad-shouldered,jolly-looking fellow, in white duck trousers, is talking earnestly with the owl-like looking bard in eyeglasses. Suddenly his turn is called, and you follow him in, where, as soon as he is seen, he is welcomed by cheers from the students and girls, and an elaborate fanfare of chords on the piano. When this popular poet-singer has finished, there follows a round of applauseand a pounding of canes, and then the ruddy-faced, gray-haired manager starts a three-times-three handclapping in unison to a pounding of chords on the piano. This is the proper ending to every demand for an encore in “Le Grillon,” and it never fails to bring one.It is nearly eleven when the curtain parts and Marcel Legay rushes hurriedly up the aisle and greets the audience, slamming his straw hat upon the lid of the piano. He passes his hand over his bald pate—gives an extra polish to his eyeglasses—beams with an irresistibly funny expression upon his audience—coughs—whistles—passes a few remarks, and then, adjusting his glasses on his stubby red nose, looks serio-comically over his roll of music. He is dressed in a long, black frock-coat reaching nearly to his heels. This coat, with its velvet collar, discloses a frilled white shirt and a white flowing bow scarf; these, with a pair of black-and-white check trousers, complete this every-day attire.But the man inside these voluminous clothes is even still more eccentric. Short,indefinitely past fifty years of age, with a round face and merry eyes, and a bald head whose lower portion is framed in a fringe of long hair, reminding one of the coiffure of some pre-Raphaelite saint—indeed, so striking is this resemblance that the good bard is often caricatured with a halo surrounding this medieval fringe.In the meantime, while this famous singer is selecting a song, he is overwhelmed with demands for his most popular ones. A dozen students and girls at one end of the little hall, now swimming in a haze of pipe and cigarette smoke, are hammering with sticks and parasols for “Le matador avec les pieds du vent”; another crowd is yelling for “La Goularde.” Marcel Legay smiles at them all through his eyeglasses, then roars at them to keep quiet—and finally the clamor in the room gradually subsides—here and there a word—a giggle—and finally silence.“Now, my children, I will sing to you the story of Clarette,” says the bard; “it is a very sad histoire. I have read it,” and he smiles and cocks one eye.His baritone voice still possesses considerable fire, and in his heroic songs he is dramatic. In “The Miller who grinds for Love,” the feeling and intensity and dramatic quality he puts into its rendition are stirring. As he finishes his last encore, amidst a round of applause, he grasps his hat from the piano, jams it over his bald pate with its celestial fringe, and rushes for the door. Here he stops, and, turning for a second, cheers back at the crowd, waving the straw hat above his head. The next moment he is having a cooling drink among his confrères in the anteroom.Such “poet-singers” as Paul Delmet and Dominique Bonnaud have made the “Grillon” a success; and others like Numa Blés, Gabriel Montoya, D’Herval, Fargy, Tourtal, and Edmond Teulet—all of them well-known over in Montmartre, where they are welcomed with the same popularity that they meet with at “Le Grillon.”Genius, alas, is but poorly paid in this Bohemia! There are so many who can draw, so many who can sing, so many poets and writers and sculptors. To manyof the cleverest, half a loaf is too often better than no bread.You will find often in these cabarets and in the cafés and along the boulevard, a man who, for a few sous, will render a portrait or a caricature on the spot. You learn that this journeyman artist once was a well-known painter of the Quarter, who had drawn for years in the academies. The man at present is a wreck, as he sits in a café with portfolio on his knees, his black slouch hat drawn over his scraggly gray hair. But his hand, thin and drawn from too much stimulant and too little food, has lost none of its knowledge of form and line; the sketch is strong, true, and with a chic about it and a simplicity of expression that delight you. You ask why he has not done better.THE SATIRIST“Ah!” he replies, “it isa long story, monsieur.” So long and so much of it that he can not remember it all! Perhaps it was the woman with the velvety black eyes—tall and straight—the best dancer in all Paris. Yes, he remembers some of it—long, miserable years—years of strugglesand jealousy, and finally lies and fights and drunkenness; after it was all over, he was too gray and old and tired to care!One sees many such derelicts in Paris among these people who have worn themselves out with amusement, for here the world lives for pleasure, for “la grande vie!” To the man, every serious effort he is obliged to make trends toward one idea—that of the bon vivant—to gain success and fame, but to gain it with the idea of how much personal daily pleasure it will bring him. Ennui is a word one hears constantly; if it rains toute le monde est triste. To have one’s gaiety interrupted is regarded as a calamity, and “tout le monde” will sympathize with you. To live a day without the pleasures of life in proportion to one’s purse is considered a day lost.If you speak of anything that has pleased you one will, with a gay rising inflection of the voice and a smile, say: “Ah! c’est gai là-bas—and monsieur was well amused while in that beautiful country?” “ah!—tiens! c’est gentil ça!” they will exclaim, as youenthusiastically continue to explain. They never dull your enthusiasm by short phlegmatic or pessimistic replies. And when you are sad they will condone so genuinely with you that you forget your disappointments in the charming pleasantry of their sympathy. But all this continual race for pleasure is destined in the course of time to end in ennui!The Parisian goes into the latest sport because it affords him a new sensation. Being blasé of all else in life, he plunges into automobiling, buys a white and red racer—a ponderous flying juggernaut that growls and snorts and smells of the lower regions whenever it stands still, trembling in its anger and impatience to be off, while its owner, with some automobiling Marie, sits chatting on the café terrace over a cooling drink. The two are covered with dust and very thirsty; Marie wears a long dust-colored ulster, and he a wind-proof coat and high boots. Meanwhile, the locomotive-like affair at the curbstone is working itself into a boiling rage, until finally the brave chauffeur and his chic companion prepareto depart. Marie adjusts her white lace veil, with its goggles, and the chauffeur puts on his own mask as he climbs in; a roar—a snort, a cloud of blue gas, and they are gone!There are other enthusiasts—those who go up in balloons!“Ah, you should go ballooning!” one cries enthusiastically, “to be ‘en ballon’—so poetic—so fin de siècle! It is a fantaisie charmante!”In a balloon one forgets the world—one is no longer a part of it—no longer mortal. What romance there is in going up above everything with the woman one loves—comrades in danger—the ropes—the wicker cage—the ceiling of stars above one and Paris below no bigger than a gridiron! Paris! lost for the time from one’s memory. How chic to shoot straight up among the drifting clouds and forget the sordid little world, even the memory of one’s intrigues!“Enfin seuls,” they say to each other, as the big Frenchman and the chic Parisienne countess peer down over the edge of the basket, sipping a little chartreuse from thesame traveling cup; she, with the black hair and white skin, and gowned “en ballon” in a costume by Paillard; he in his peajacket buttoned close under his heavy beard. They seem to brush through and against the clouds! A gentle breath from heaven makes the basket decline a little and the ropes creak against the hardwood clinch blocks. It grows colder, and he wraps her closer in his own coat.“Courage, my child,” he says; “see, we have gone a great distance; to-morrow before sundown we shall descend in Belgium.”“Horrible!” cries the Countess; “I do not like those Belgians.”“Ah! but you shall see, Thérèse, one shall go where one pleases soon; we are patient, we aeronauts; we shall bring credit to La Belle France; we have courage and perseverance; we shall give many dinners and weep over the failures of our brave comrades, to make the dirigible balloon ‘pratique.’ We shall succeed! Then Voilà! our déjeuner in Paris and our dinner where we will.”Thérèse taps her polished nails against the edge of the wicker cage and hums a little chansonette.“Je t’aime”—she murmurs.I did not see this myself, and I do not know the fair Thérèse or the gentleman who buttons his coat under his whiskers; but you should have heard one of these ballooning enthusiasts tell it to me in the Taverne du Panthéon the other night. His only regret seemed to be that he, too, could not have a dirigible balloon and a countess—on ten francs a week!(woman)CHAPTER VII“POCHARD”Drunkards are not frequent sights in the Quarter; and yet when these people do get drunk, they become as irresponsible as maniacs. Excitable to a degree even when sober, these most wretched among the poor when drunk often appear in front of a café—gaunt, wild-eyed, haggard, and filthy—singing in boisterous tones or reciting to you with tense voices a jumble of meaningless thoughts.The man with the matted hair, and toes out of his boots, will fold his arms melodramatically, and regard you for some moments as you sit in front of him on the terrace. Then he will vent upon you a torrent of abuse, ending in some jumble of socialistic ideas of his own concoction.When he has finished, he will fold his arms again and move on to the next table. He is crazy with absinthe, and no one pays any attention to him. On he strides up the “Boul’ Miche,” past the cafés, continuing his ravings. As long as he is moderately peaceful and confines his wandering brain to gesticulations and speech, he is let alone by the police.(portrait of woman)You will see sometimesa man and a woman—a teamster out of work or with his wages for the day, and with him a creature—a blear-eyed, slatternly looking woman, in a filthy calico gown. The man clutches her arm, as they sing and stagger up past the cafés. The woman holds in her claw-like hand a half-empty bottle of cheap red wine. Now and then they stop and share it; the man staggers on; the woman leers and dances and sings; a crowd forms about them. Some years ago this poor girl sat on Friday afternoons in the Luxembourg Gardens—her white parasol on her knees, her dainty, white kid-slippered feet resting on the little stool which the old lady, who rents the chairs, used to bringher. She was regarded as a bonne camarade in those days among the students—one of the idols of the Quarter! But she became impossible, and then an outcast! That women should become outcasts through the hopelessness of their position or the breaking down of their brains can be understood, but that men of ability should sink into the dregs and stay there seems incredible. But it is often so.(portrait of woman)Near the rue Mongethere is a small café and restaurant, a place celebrated for its onion soup and its chicken. From the tables outside, one can see into the small kitchen, with its polished copper sauce-pans hanging about the grill.Lachaume, the painter, and I were chatting at one of its little tables, he over an absinthe and I over a coffee and cognac. I had dined early this fresh October evening, enjoying to the full the bracing coolness of the air, pungent with the odor of dry leavesand the faint smell of burning brush. The world was hurrying by—in twos and threes—hurrying to warm cafés, to friends, to lovers. The breeze at twilight set the dry leaves shivering. The sky was turquoise. The yellow glow from the shop windows—the blue-white sparkle of electricity like pendant diamonds—made the Quarter seem fuller of life than ever. These fall days make the little ouvrières trip along from their work with rosy cheeks, and put happiness and ambition into one’s very soul.A GROUP OF NEW STUDIOSSoon the winterwill come, with all the boys back from their country haunts, and Céleste and Mimi from Ostende. How gay it will be—this Quartier Latin then! How gay it always is in winter—and then the rainy season. Ah! but one can not have everything. Thus it was that Lachaume and Isat talking, when suddenly a spectre passed—a spectre of a man, his face silent, white, and pinched—drawn like a mummy’s.A SCULPTOR’S MODELHe stopped andsupported his shrunken frame wearily on his crutches, and leaned against a neighboring wall. He made no sound—simply gazed vacantly, with the timidity of some animal, at the door of the small kitchen aglow with the light from the grill. He made no effort to approach the door; only leaned against the gray wall and peered at it patiently.“A beggar,” I said to Lachaume; “poor devil!”“Ah! old Pochard—yes, poor devil, and once one of the handsomest men in Paris.”“What wrecked him?” I asked.“What I’m drinking now, mon ami.”“Absinthe?”“Yes—absinthe! He looks older than I do, does he not?” continued Lachaume, lighting a fresh cigarette, “and yet I’m twenty years his senior. You see, I sip mine—he drank his by the goblet,” and my friend leaned forward and poured the contents of the carafe in a tiny tricklingstream over the sugar lying in its perforated spoon.BOY MODEL“Ah! those weregreat days when Pochard was the life of the Bullier,” he went on; “I remember the night he won ten thousand francs from the Russian. It didn’t last long; Camille Leroux had her share of it—nothing ever lasted long with Camille. He was once courrier to an Austrian Baron, I remember. The old fellow used to frequent the Quarter in summer, years ago—it was his hobby. Pochard was a great favorite in those days, and the Baron liked to go about in the Quarter with him, and of course Pochard was in his glory. He would persuade the old nobleman to prolong his vacation here. Once the Baron stayed through the winter and fell ill, and a little couturière in the rue de Rennes, whom the old fellow fell in love with, nursed him. Hedied the summer following, at Vienna, and left her quite a little property near Amiens. He was a good old Baron, a charitable old fellow among the needy, and a good bohemian besides; and he did much for Pochard, but he could not keep him sober!”BOUGUEREAU AT WORK“After the old man’sdeath,” my friend continued, “Pochard drifted from bad to worse, and finally out of the Quarter, somewhere into misery on the other side of the Seine. No one heard of him for a few years, until he was again recognized as being the same Pochard returned again to the Quarter. He was hobbling about on crutches just as you see him there. And now, do you know what he does? Get up from where you are sitting,” said Lachaume, “and look into the back kitchen. Is he not standing there by the door—they are handing him a small bundle?”“Yes,” said I, “something wrapped in newspaper.”“Do you know what is in it?—the carcass of the chicken you have just finished, and which the garçon carried away. Pochardsaw you eating it half an hour ago as he passed. It was for that he was waiting.”“To eat?” I asked.“No, to sell,” Lachaume replied, “together with the other bones he is able to collect—for soup in some poorest resort down by the river, where the boatmen and the gamins go. The few sous he gets will buy Pochard a big glass, a lump of sugar, and a spoon; into the goblet, in some equally dirty ‘boîte,’ they will pour him out his green treasure of absinthe. Then Pochard will forget the day—perhaps he will dream of the Austrian Baron—and try and forget Camille Leroux. Poor devil!”GEROMEMarguerite Girardet, the model, also told me between poses in the studio the other day of just such a “pauvre homme” she once knew. “When he was young,” she said, “he won a second prize at the Conservatoire, and afterward played first violin at the Comique. Now he plays in front of the cafés, like the rest, and sometimes poses for the head of an old man!A. MICHELENA“Many grow old so young,” she continued; “I knew a little model once witha beautiful figure, absolutely comme un bijou—pretty, too, and had she been a sensible girl, as I often told her, she could still have earned her ten francs a day posing; but she wanted to dine all the time with this and that one, and pose too, and in three months all her fine ‘svelte’ lines that made her a valuable model among the sculptors were gone. You see, I have posed all my life in the studios, and I am over thirty now, and you know I work hard, but I have kept my fine lines—because I go to bed early and eat and drink little. Then I have much to do at home; my husband and I for years have had a comfortable home; we take a great deal of pride in it, and it keeps me very busy to keep everything in order, for I pose very early some mornings and then go back and get déjeuner, and then back to pose again.A SCULPTOR’S STUDIO“In the summer,”she went on, “we take a little place outside of Paris for a month, down the Seine, where my husband brings his work with him; he is a repairer of fans and objets d’art. You should come in and see us some time; it is quite nearwhere you painted last summer. Ah yes,” she exclaimed, as she drew her pink toes under her, “I love the country! Last year I posed nearly two months for Monsieur Z., the painter—en plein air; my skin was not as white as it is now, I can tell you—I was absolutely like an Indian!FRÉMIET“Once”—and Marguerite smiled at the memory of it—“I went to England to pose for a painter well known there. It was an important tableau, and I stayed there six months. It was a horrible place to me—I was always cold—the fog was so thick one could hardly see in winter mornings going to the studio. Besides, I could get nothing good to eat! He was a celebrated painter, a ‘Sir,’ and lived withhis family in a big stone house with a garden. We had tea and cakes at five in the studio—always tea, tea, tea!—I can tell you I used to long for a good bottle of Madame Giraud’s vin ordinaire, and a poulet. So I left and came back to Paris. Ah! quelle place! that Angleterre! J’étais toujours, toujours triste là! In Paris I make a good living; ten francs a day—that’s not bad, is it? and my time is taken often a year ahead. I like to pose for the painters—the studios are cleaner than those of the sculptor’s. Some of the sculptors’ studios are so dirty—clay and dust over everything! Did you see Fabien’s studio the other day when I posed for him? You thought it dirty? Tiens!—you should have seen it last year when he was working on the big group for the Exposition! It is clean now compared with what it was. You see, I go to my work in the plainest of clothes—a cheap print dress and everything of the simplest I can make, for in half an hour, left in those studios, they would be fit only for the blanchisseuse—the wax and dust are in and over everything!There is no time to change when one has not the time to go home at mid-day.”JEAN PAUL LAURENSAnd so I learned much of the good sense and many of the economies in the life of this most celebrated model. You can see her superb figure wrought in marble and bronze by some of the most famous of modern French sculptors all over Paris.There is another type of model you will see, too—one who rang my bell one sunny morning in response to a note written by my good friend, the sculptor, for whom this little Parisienne posed.She came without her hat—this “vrai type”—about seventeen years of age—with exquisite features, her blue eyes shining under a wealth of delicate blonde hair arranged in the prettiest of fashions—a little white bow tied jauntily at her throat, and her exquisitely delicate, strong young figure clothed in a simple black dress. She had about her such a frank, childlike air! Yes, she posed for so and so, and so and so, but not many; she liked it better than being in a shop; and it was far more independent, for one could go aboutand see one’s friends—and there were many of her girl friends living on the same street where this chic demoiselle lived.At noon my drawing was finished. As she sat buttoning her boots, she looked up at me innocently, slipped her five francs for the morning’s work in her reticule, and said:“I live with mama, and mama never gives me any money to spend on myself. This is Sunday and a holiday, so I shall go with Henriette and her brother to Vincennes. It is delicious there under the trees.”OLD MAN MODELIt would have beenquite impossible for me to have gone with them—I was not even invited; but this very serious and good little Parisienne, who posed for the figure with quite the same unconsciousness as she would have handed you your change over the counter of some stuffy little shop, went to Vincennes with Henriette and her brother, where they had a beautiful day—scrambling up the paths and listening to the band—all at the enormous expense of the artist; and this was how this good little Parisienne managed to save five francs in a single day!There are old-men models who knock at your studio too, and who are celebrated for their tangled gray locks, which they immediately uncover as you open your door. These unkempt-looking Father Times and Methuselahs prowl about the staircases of the different ateliers daily. So do little children—mostly Italians and all filthily dirty; swarthy, black-eyed, gypsy-looking girls and boys of from twelve to fifteen years of age, and Italian mothers holding small children—itinerant madonnas. These are the poorer class of models—the riff-raff of the Quarter—who get anywhere from a few sous to a few francs for a séance.And there are four-footed models, too, for I know a kindly old horse who has served in many a studio and who has carried a score of the famous generals of the world and Jeanne d’Arcs to battle—in many a modern public square.Chacun son métier!CHAPTER VIII
(group of men dining)
You will see a family of rich bourgeois enter, just in from the country, for the Montparnasse station is opposite. The fat, sunburned mama, and the equally rotund and genial farmer-papa, and the pretty daughter, and the newly married son and his demure wife, and the two younger children—and all talking and laughing over a good dinner with champagne, and many toasts to the young couple—and to mama and papa, and little Josephine—with ices, and fruit, and coffee, and liqueur to follow.
All these you will see at Lavenue’s on the “cheap side”—and the beautiful model,too, who poses for Courbel, who is breakfasting with one of the jeunesse of Paris. The waiters after 2P.M.dine in the front room with the rest, and jump up now and then to wait on madame and monsieur.
It is a very democratic little place, this popular side of the house of M. Lavenue, founded in 1854.
And there is a jolly old painter who dines there, who is also an excellent musician, with an ear for rhythm so sensitive that he could never go to sleep unless the clock in his studio ticked in regular time, and at last was obliged to give up his favorite atelier, with its picturesque garden——
“For two reasons, monsieur,” he explained to me excitedly; “a little girl on the floor below me played a polka—the same polka half the day—always forgetting to put in the top note; and the fellow over me whistled it the rest of the day and put in the top note false; and so I moved to the rue St. Pères, where one only hears, within the cool court-yard, the distant hum of the busy city. The roar of Paris, so full of chords and melody! Listen to it sometimes,monsieur, and you will hear a symphony!”
“LA FILLE DE LA BLANCHISSEUSE”By Bellanger.—Estampe Moderne
And Mademoiselle Fanny will tell you of the famous men she has known for years, and how she has found the most celebrated of them simple in their tastes, and free from ostentation—“in fact it is always so, is it not, with les hommes célèbres? C’est toujours comme ça, monsieur, toujours!” and mentions one who has grown gray in the service of art and can count his decorations from half a dozen governments. Madame will wax enthusiastic—her face wreathed in smiles. “Ah! he is a bon garçon; he always eats with the rest, for three or four francs, never more! He is so amiable, and, you know, he is very celebrated and very rich”; and madame will not only tell you his entire history, but about his work—the beauty of his wife and how “aimables” his children are. Mademoiselle Fanny knows them all.
But the men who come here to lunch are not idlers; they come in, many of them, fresh from a hard morning’s work in the studio. The tall sculptor opposite you hasbeen at work, since his morning coffee, on a group for the government; another, bare-armed and in his flannel shirt, has been building up masses of clay, punching and modeling, and scraping away, all the morning, until he produces, in the rough, the body of a giantess, a huge caryatide that is destined, for the rest of her existence, to hold upon her broad shoulders part of the façade of an American building. The “giantess” in the flesh is lunching with him—a Juno-like woman of perhaps twenty-five, with a superb head well poised, her figure firm and erect. You will find her exceedingly interesting, quiet, and refined, and with a knowledge of things in general that will surprise you, until you discover she has, in her life as a model, been thrown daily in conversation with men of genius, and has acquired a smattering of the knowledge of many things—of art and literature—of the theater and its playwrights—plunging now and then into medicine and law and poetry—all these things she has picked up in the studios, in the cafés, in the course of her Bohemian life. This “vernis,”as the French call it, one finds constantly among the women here, for their days are passed among men of intelligence and ability, whose lives and energy are surrounded and encouraged by an atmosphere of art.
In an hour, the sculptor and his Juno-like model will stroll back to the studio, where work will be resumed as long as the light lasts.
A TRUE TYPE
The painter breakfastingat the next table is hard at work on a decorative panel for a ceiling. It is already laid out and squared up, from careful pencil drawings. Two young architects are working for him, laying out the architectural balustrade, through which one, a month later, looks up at the allegorical figures painted against the dome of the blue heavens, as a background. And so the painter swallows his eggs, mayonnaise, and demi of beer, at a gulp, for he has a model coming at two, and he must finish this ceiling on time, and ship it, by a fast liner, to a millionaire, who has built a vault-like structure on the Hudson, with iron dogs on the lawn. Here thisbeautiful panel will be unrolled and installed in the dome of the hard-wood billiard-room, where its rich, mellow scheme of color will count as naught; and the cupids and the flesh-tones of the chic little model, who came at two, will appear jaundiced; and Aunt Maria and Uncle John, and the twins from Ithaca, will come in after the family Sunday dinner of roast beef and potatoes and rice pudding and ice-water, and look up into the dome and agree “it’s grand.” But the painter does not care, for he has locked up his studio, and taken his twenty thousand francs and the model—who came at two—with him to Trouville.
At night you will find a typical crowd of Bohemians at the Closerie des Lilas, where they sit under a little clump of trees on the sloping dirt terrace in front. Here you will see the true type of the Quarter. It is the farthest up the Boulevard St. Michel of any of the cafés, and just opposite the “Bal Bullier,” on the Place de l’Observatoire. The terrace is crowded with its habitués, for it is out of the way of the stream of people along the “Boul’ Miche.” The terrace isquite dark, its only light coming from the café, back of a green hedge, and it is cool there, too, in summer, with the fresh night air coming from the Luxembourg Gardens. Below it is the café and restaurant de la Rotonde, a very well-built looking place, with its rounding façade on the corner.
(studio)
At the entrance ofevery studio court and apartment, there lives the concierge in a box of a room generally, containing a huge feather-bed and furnished with a variety of things left by departing tenants to this faithful guardian of the gate. Many of these small rooms resemble the den of an antiquary with their odds and ends from the studios—old swords, plaster casts, sketches and discarded furniture—until the place is quite full. Yet it is kept neat and clean by madame, who sews all day and talks to her cat and to every one who passes into the court-yard. Here your letters are kept, too,in one of a row of boxes, with the number of your atelier marked thereon.
At night, after ten, your concierge opens the heavy iron gate of your court by pulling a cord within reach of the family bed. He or she is waked up at intervals through the night to let into and out of a court full of studios those to whom the night is ever young. Or perhaps your concierge will be like old Père Valois, who has three pretty daughters who do the housework of the studios, as well as assist in the guardianship of the gate. They are very busy, these three daughters of Père Valois—all the morning you will see these little “femmes de ménage” as busy as bees; the artists and poets must be waked up, and beds made and studios cleaned. There are many that are never cleaned at all, but then there are many, too, who are not so fortunate as to be taken care of by the three daughters of Père Valois.
VOILÀ LA BELLE ROSE, MADAME!
There is no gossip within the quarter that your “femme de ménage” does not know, and over your morning coffee, which she brings you, she will regale you with thelatest news about most of your best friends, including your favorite model, and madame from whom you buy your wine, always concluding with: “That is what I heard, monsieur,—I think it is quite true, because the little Marie, who is the femme de ménage of Monsieur Valentin, got it from Céleste Dauphine yesterday in the café in the rue du Cherche Midi.”
In the morning, this demure maid-of-all-work will be in her calico dress with her sleeves rolled up over her strong white arms, but in the evening you may see her in a chic little dress, at the “Bal Bullier,” or dining at the Panthéon, with the fellow whose studio is opposite yours.
A BUSY MORNING
Alice Lemaître, however, was a far different type of femme de ménage than any of the gossiping daughters of old Père Valois, and her lot was harder, for one night she left her home in one of the provincial towns, when barely sixteen, and found herself in Paris with three francs to her name and not a friend in this big pleasure-loving city to turn to. After many days of privation, she became bonne to a woman known asYvette de Marcie, a lady with a bad temper and many jewels, to whom little Alice, with her rosy cheeks and bright eyes and willing disposition to work in order to live, became a person upon whom this fashionable virago of a demi-mondaine vented the worst that was in her—and there was much of this—until Alice went out into the world again. She next found employment at a baker’s, where she was obliged to get up at four in the morning, winter and summer, and deliver the long loaves of bread at the different houses; but the work was too hard and she left. The baker paid her a trifle a week for her labor, while the attractive Yvette de Marcie turned her into the street without her wages. It was while delivering bread one morning to an atelier in the rue des Dames, that she chanced to meet a young painter who was looking for a good femme de ménage to relieve his artistic mind from the worries of housekeeping. Little Alice fairly cried when the good painter told her she might come at twenty francs a month, which was more money than thisvery grateful and brave little Brittany girl had ever known before.
(brocanteur shop front)
“You see, monsieur, one must do one’s best whatever one undertakes,” said Alice to me; “I have tried every profession, and now I am a good femme de ménage, and I am ‘bien contente.’ No,” she continued, “I shall never marry, for one’s independence is worth more than anything else. When one marries,” she said earnestly, her little brow in a frown, “one’s life is lost; I am young and strong, and I have courage, and so I can work hard. One should be content when one is not cold and hungry, and I have been many times that, monsieur. Once I worked in a fabrique, where, all day, we painted the combs of china roosters a bright red for bon-bon boxes—hundreds and hundreds of them until I used to see them in my dreams; but the fabrique failed, for the patron ran away with the wife of a Russian. He was a very stupid man to have done that, monsieur, for he had a very nice wife of his own—a pretty brunette, with a charming figure; but you see, monsieur, in Paris it is always that way. C’est toujours comme ça.”
J
JUST off the Boulevard St. Michel and up the narrow little rue Cujas, you will see at night the name “Marcel Legay” illumined in tiny gas-jets. This is a cabaret of chansonniers known as “Le Grillon,” where a dozen celebrated singing satirists entertain an appreciative audience in the stuffy little hall serving as an auditorium. Here, nightly, as the pièce de résistance—and late on the programme (there is no printed one)—you will hear the Bard of Montmartre, Marcel Legay, raconteur, poet, musician, and singer; the author of many of the most popular songs of Montmartre, and a veteran singer in the cabarets.
MARCEL LEGAY
From these cabaretsof the student quarters come many of the cleverest and most beautiful songs. Here men sing their own creations, and they have absolute license to sing or say what they please; there is no mincing of words, and many times these rare bohemians do not take the trouble to hide their clever songs and satires under a double entente. No celebrated man or woman, known in art or letters, or connected with the Government—from the soldier to the good President of the République Française—is spared. The eccentricity of each celebrity is caught by them, and used in song or recitation.
Besides these personal caricatures, the latest political questions of the day—religion and the haut monde—come in for a large share of good-natured satire. To be cleverly caricatured is an honor, and should evince no ill-feeling, especially from these clever singing comedians, who are the best of fellows at heart; whose songs are clever but never vulgar; who sing because they love to sing; and whose versatility enables them to create the broadest of satires, and,again, a little song with words so pure, so human, and so pathetic, that the applause that follows from the silent room of listeners comes spontaneously from the heart.
It is not to be wondered at that “The Grillon” of Marcel Legay’s is a popular haunt of the habitués of the Quarter, who crowd the dingy little room nightly. You enter the “Grillon” by way of the bar, and at the further end of the bar-room is a small anteroom, its walls hung in clever posters and original drawings. This anteroom serves as a sort of green-room for the singers and their friends; here they chat at the little tables between their songs—since there is no stage—and through this anteroom both audience and singers pass into the little hall. There is the informality of one of our own “smokers” about the whole affair.
Furthermore, no women sing in “Le Grillon”—a cabaret in this respect is different from a café concert, which resembles very much our smaller variety shows. A small upright piano, and in front of it a low platform, scarcely its length, complete the necessarystage paraphernalia of the cabaret, and the admission is generally a franc and a half, which includes your drink.
In the anteroom, four of the singers are smoking and chatting at the little tables. One of them is a tall, serious-looking fellow, in a black frock coat. He peers out through his black-rimmed eyeglasses with the solemnity of an owl—but you should hear his songs!—they treat of the lighter side of life, I assure you. Another singer has just finished his turn, and comes out of the smoky hall, wiping the perspiration from his short, fat neck. The audience is still applauding his last song, and he rushes back through the faded green velvet portières to bow his thanks.
A POET-SINGER
A broad-shouldered,jolly-looking fellow, in white duck trousers, is talking earnestly with the owl-like looking bard in eyeglasses. Suddenly his turn is called, and you follow him in, where, as soon as he is seen, he is welcomed by cheers from the students and girls, and an elaborate fanfare of chords on the piano. When this popular poet-singer has finished, there follows a round of applauseand a pounding of canes, and then the ruddy-faced, gray-haired manager starts a three-times-three handclapping in unison to a pounding of chords on the piano. This is the proper ending to every demand for an encore in “Le Grillon,” and it never fails to bring one.
It is nearly eleven when the curtain parts and Marcel Legay rushes hurriedly up the aisle and greets the audience, slamming his straw hat upon the lid of the piano. He passes his hand over his bald pate—gives an extra polish to his eyeglasses—beams with an irresistibly funny expression upon his audience—coughs—whistles—passes a few remarks, and then, adjusting his glasses on his stubby red nose, looks serio-comically over his roll of music. He is dressed in a long, black frock-coat reaching nearly to his heels. This coat, with its velvet collar, discloses a frilled white shirt and a white flowing bow scarf; these, with a pair of black-and-white check trousers, complete this every-day attire.
But the man inside these voluminous clothes is even still more eccentric. Short,indefinitely past fifty years of age, with a round face and merry eyes, and a bald head whose lower portion is framed in a fringe of long hair, reminding one of the coiffure of some pre-Raphaelite saint—indeed, so striking is this resemblance that the good bard is often caricatured with a halo surrounding this medieval fringe.
In the meantime, while this famous singer is selecting a song, he is overwhelmed with demands for his most popular ones. A dozen students and girls at one end of the little hall, now swimming in a haze of pipe and cigarette smoke, are hammering with sticks and parasols for “Le matador avec les pieds du vent”; another crowd is yelling for “La Goularde.” Marcel Legay smiles at them all through his eyeglasses, then roars at them to keep quiet—and finally the clamor in the room gradually subsides—here and there a word—a giggle—and finally silence.
“Now, my children, I will sing to you the story of Clarette,” says the bard; “it is a very sad histoire. I have read it,” and he smiles and cocks one eye.
His baritone voice still possesses considerable fire, and in his heroic songs he is dramatic. In “The Miller who grinds for Love,” the feeling and intensity and dramatic quality he puts into its rendition are stirring. As he finishes his last encore, amidst a round of applause, he grasps his hat from the piano, jams it over his bald pate with its celestial fringe, and rushes for the door. Here he stops, and, turning for a second, cheers back at the crowd, waving the straw hat above his head. The next moment he is having a cooling drink among his confrères in the anteroom.
Such “poet-singers” as Paul Delmet and Dominique Bonnaud have made the “Grillon” a success; and others like Numa Blés, Gabriel Montoya, D’Herval, Fargy, Tourtal, and Edmond Teulet—all of them well-known over in Montmartre, where they are welcomed with the same popularity that they meet with at “Le Grillon.”
Genius, alas, is but poorly paid in this Bohemia! There are so many who can draw, so many who can sing, so many poets and writers and sculptors. To manyof the cleverest, half a loaf is too often better than no bread.
You will find often in these cabarets and in the cafés and along the boulevard, a man who, for a few sous, will render a portrait or a caricature on the spot. You learn that this journeyman artist once was a well-known painter of the Quarter, who had drawn for years in the academies. The man at present is a wreck, as he sits in a café with portfolio on his knees, his black slouch hat drawn over his scraggly gray hair. But his hand, thin and drawn from too much stimulant and too little food, has lost none of its knowledge of form and line; the sketch is strong, true, and with a chic about it and a simplicity of expression that delight you. You ask why he has not done better.
THE SATIRIST
“Ah!” he replies, “it isa long story, monsieur.” So long and so much of it that he can not remember it all! Perhaps it was the woman with the velvety black eyes—tall and straight—the best dancer in all Paris. Yes, he remembers some of it—long, miserable years—years of strugglesand jealousy, and finally lies and fights and drunkenness; after it was all over, he was too gray and old and tired to care!
One sees many such derelicts in Paris among these people who have worn themselves out with amusement, for here the world lives for pleasure, for “la grande vie!” To the man, every serious effort he is obliged to make trends toward one idea—that of the bon vivant—to gain success and fame, but to gain it with the idea of how much personal daily pleasure it will bring him. Ennui is a word one hears constantly; if it rains toute le monde est triste. To have one’s gaiety interrupted is regarded as a calamity, and “tout le monde” will sympathize with you. To live a day without the pleasures of life in proportion to one’s purse is considered a day lost.
If you speak of anything that has pleased you one will, with a gay rising inflection of the voice and a smile, say: “Ah! c’est gai là-bas—and monsieur was well amused while in that beautiful country?” “ah!—tiens! c’est gentil ça!” they will exclaim, as youenthusiastically continue to explain. They never dull your enthusiasm by short phlegmatic or pessimistic replies. And when you are sad they will condone so genuinely with you that you forget your disappointments in the charming pleasantry of their sympathy. But all this continual race for pleasure is destined in the course of time to end in ennui!
The Parisian goes into the latest sport because it affords him a new sensation. Being blasé of all else in life, he plunges into automobiling, buys a white and red racer—a ponderous flying juggernaut that growls and snorts and smells of the lower regions whenever it stands still, trembling in its anger and impatience to be off, while its owner, with some automobiling Marie, sits chatting on the café terrace over a cooling drink. The two are covered with dust and very thirsty; Marie wears a long dust-colored ulster, and he a wind-proof coat and high boots. Meanwhile, the locomotive-like affair at the curbstone is working itself into a boiling rage, until finally the brave chauffeur and his chic companion prepareto depart. Marie adjusts her white lace veil, with its goggles, and the chauffeur puts on his own mask as he climbs in; a roar—a snort, a cloud of blue gas, and they are gone!
There are other enthusiasts—those who go up in balloons!
“Ah, you should go ballooning!” one cries enthusiastically, “to be ‘en ballon’—so poetic—so fin de siècle! It is a fantaisie charmante!”
In a balloon one forgets the world—one is no longer a part of it—no longer mortal. What romance there is in going up above everything with the woman one loves—comrades in danger—the ropes—the wicker cage—the ceiling of stars above one and Paris below no bigger than a gridiron! Paris! lost for the time from one’s memory. How chic to shoot straight up among the drifting clouds and forget the sordid little world, even the memory of one’s intrigues!
“Enfin seuls,” they say to each other, as the big Frenchman and the chic Parisienne countess peer down over the edge of the basket, sipping a little chartreuse from thesame traveling cup; she, with the black hair and white skin, and gowned “en ballon” in a costume by Paillard; he in his peajacket buttoned close under his heavy beard. They seem to brush through and against the clouds! A gentle breath from heaven makes the basket decline a little and the ropes creak against the hardwood clinch blocks. It grows colder, and he wraps her closer in his own coat.
“Courage, my child,” he says; “see, we have gone a great distance; to-morrow before sundown we shall descend in Belgium.”
“Horrible!” cries the Countess; “I do not like those Belgians.”
“Ah! but you shall see, Thérèse, one shall go where one pleases soon; we are patient, we aeronauts; we shall bring credit to La Belle France; we have courage and perseverance; we shall give many dinners and weep over the failures of our brave comrades, to make the dirigible balloon ‘pratique.’ We shall succeed! Then Voilà! our déjeuner in Paris and our dinner where we will.”
Thérèse taps her polished nails against the edge of the wicker cage and hums a little chansonette.
“Je t’aime”—she murmurs.
I did not see this myself, and I do not know the fair Thérèse or the gentleman who buttons his coat under his whiskers; but you should have heard one of these ballooning enthusiasts tell it to me in the Taverne du Panthéon the other night. His only regret seemed to be that he, too, could not have a dirigible balloon and a countess—on ten francs a week!
(woman)
Drunkards are not frequent sights in the Quarter; and yet when these people do get drunk, they become as irresponsible as maniacs. Excitable to a degree even when sober, these most wretched among the poor when drunk often appear in front of a café—gaunt, wild-eyed, haggard, and filthy—singing in boisterous tones or reciting to you with tense voices a jumble of meaningless thoughts.
The man with the matted hair, and toes out of his boots, will fold his arms melodramatically, and regard you for some moments as you sit in front of him on the terrace. Then he will vent upon you a torrent of abuse, ending in some jumble of socialistic ideas of his own concoction.When he has finished, he will fold his arms again and move on to the next table. He is crazy with absinthe, and no one pays any attention to him. On he strides up the “Boul’ Miche,” past the cafés, continuing his ravings. As long as he is moderately peaceful and confines his wandering brain to gesticulations and speech, he is let alone by the police.
(portrait of woman)
You will see sometimesa man and a woman—a teamster out of work or with his wages for the day, and with him a creature—a blear-eyed, slatternly looking woman, in a filthy calico gown. The man clutches her arm, as they sing and stagger up past the cafés. The woman holds in her claw-like hand a half-empty bottle of cheap red wine. Now and then they stop and share it; the man staggers on; the woman leers and dances and sings; a crowd forms about them. Some years ago this poor girl sat on Friday afternoons in the Luxembourg Gardens—her white parasol on her knees, her dainty, white kid-slippered feet resting on the little stool which the old lady, who rents the chairs, used to bringher. She was regarded as a bonne camarade in those days among the students—one of the idols of the Quarter! But she became impossible, and then an outcast! That women should become outcasts through the hopelessness of their position or the breaking down of their brains can be understood, but that men of ability should sink into the dregs and stay there seems incredible. But it is often so.
(portrait of woman)
Near the rue Mongethere is a small café and restaurant, a place celebrated for its onion soup and its chicken. From the tables outside, one can see into the small kitchen, with its polished copper sauce-pans hanging about the grill.
Lachaume, the painter, and I were chatting at one of its little tables, he over an absinthe and I over a coffee and cognac. I had dined early this fresh October evening, enjoying to the full the bracing coolness of the air, pungent with the odor of dry leavesand the faint smell of burning brush. The world was hurrying by—in twos and threes—hurrying to warm cafés, to friends, to lovers. The breeze at twilight set the dry leaves shivering. The sky was turquoise. The yellow glow from the shop windows—the blue-white sparkle of electricity like pendant diamonds—made the Quarter seem fuller of life than ever. These fall days make the little ouvrières trip along from their work with rosy cheeks, and put happiness and ambition into one’s very soul.
A GROUP OF NEW STUDIOS
Soon the winterwill come, with all the boys back from their country haunts, and Céleste and Mimi from Ostende. How gay it will be—this Quartier Latin then! How gay it always is in winter—and then the rainy season. Ah! but one can not have everything. Thus it was that Lachaume and Isat talking, when suddenly a spectre passed—a spectre of a man, his face silent, white, and pinched—drawn like a mummy’s.
A SCULPTOR’S MODEL
He stopped andsupported his shrunken frame wearily on his crutches, and leaned against a neighboring wall. He made no sound—simply gazed vacantly, with the timidity of some animal, at the door of the small kitchen aglow with the light from the grill. He made no effort to approach the door; only leaned against the gray wall and peered at it patiently.
“A beggar,” I said to Lachaume; “poor devil!”
“Ah! old Pochard—yes, poor devil, and once one of the handsomest men in Paris.”
“What wrecked him?” I asked.
“What I’m drinking now, mon ami.”
“Absinthe?”
“Yes—absinthe! He looks older than I do, does he not?” continued Lachaume, lighting a fresh cigarette, “and yet I’m twenty years his senior. You see, I sip mine—he drank his by the goblet,” and my friend leaned forward and poured the contents of the carafe in a tiny tricklingstream over the sugar lying in its perforated spoon.
BOY MODEL
“Ah! those weregreat days when Pochard was the life of the Bullier,” he went on; “I remember the night he won ten thousand francs from the Russian. It didn’t last long; Camille Leroux had her share of it—nothing ever lasted long with Camille. He was once courrier to an Austrian Baron, I remember. The old fellow used to frequent the Quarter in summer, years ago—it was his hobby. Pochard was a great favorite in those days, and the Baron liked to go about in the Quarter with him, and of course Pochard was in his glory. He would persuade the old nobleman to prolong his vacation here. Once the Baron stayed through the winter and fell ill, and a little couturière in the rue de Rennes, whom the old fellow fell in love with, nursed him. Hedied the summer following, at Vienna, and left her quite a little property near Amiens. He was a good old Baron, a charitable old fellow among the needy, and a good bohemian besides; and he did much for Pochard, but he could not keep him sober!”
BOUGUEREAU AT WORK
“After the old man’sdeath,” my friend continued, “Pochard drifted from bad to worse, and finally out of the Quarter, somewhere into misery on the other side of the Seine. No one heard of him for a few years, until he was again recognized as being the same Pochard returned again to the Quarter. He was hobbling about on crutches just as you see him there. And now, do you know what he does? Get up from where you are sitting,” said Lachaume, “and look into the back kitchen. Is he not standing there by the door—they are handing him a small bundle?”
“Yes,” said I, “something wrapped in newspaper.”
“Do you know what is in it?—the carcass of the chicken you have just finished, and which the garçon carried away. Pochardsaw you eating it half an hour ago as he passed. It was for that he was waiting.”
“To eat?” I asked.
“No, to sell,” Lachaume replied, “together with the other bones he is able to collect—for soup in some poorest resort down by the river, where the boatmen and the gamins go. The few sous he gets will buy Pochard a big glass, a lump of sugar, and a spoon; into the goblet, in some equally dirty ‘boîte,’ they will pour him out his green treasure of absinthe. Then Pochard will forget the day—perhaps he will dream of the Austrian Baron—and try and forget Camille Leroux. Poor devil!”
GEROME
Marguerite Girardet, the model, also told me between poses in the studio the other day of just such a “pauvre homme” she once knew. “When he was young,” she said, “he won a second prize at the Conservatoire, and afterward played first violin at the Comique. Now he plays in front of the cafés, like the rest, and sometimes poses for the head of an old man!
A. MICHELENA
“Many grow old so young,” she continued; “I knew a little model once witha beautiful figure, absolutely comme un bijou—pretty, too, and had she been a sensible girl, as I often told her, she could still have earned her ten francs a day posing; but she wanted to dine all the time with this and that one, and pose too, and in three months all her fine ‘svelte’ lines that made her a valuable model among the sculptors were gone. You see, I have posed all my life in the studios, and I am over thirty now, and you know I work hard, but I have kept my fine lines—because I go to bed early and eat and drink little. Then I have much to do at home; my husband and I for years have had a comfortable home; we take a great deal of pride in it, and it keeps me very busy to keep everything in order, for I pose very early some mornings and then go back and get déjeuner, and then back to pose again.
A SCULPTOR’S STUDIO
“In the summer,”she went on, “we take a little place outside of Paris for a month, down the Seine, where my husband brings his work with him; he is a repairer of fans and objets d’art. You should come in and see us some time; it is quite nearwhere you painted last summer. Ah yes,” she exclaimed, as she drew her pink toes under her, “I love the country! Last year I posed nearly two months for Monsieur Z., the painter—en plein air; my skin was not as white as it is now, I can tell you—I was absolutely like an Indian!
FRÉMIET
“Once”—and Marguerite smiled at the memory of it—“I went to England to pose for a painter well known there. It was an important tableau, and I stayed there six months. It was a horrible place to me—I was always cold—the fog was so thick one could hardly see in winter mornings going to the studio. Besides, I could get nothing good to eat! He was a celebrated painter, a ‘Sir,’ and lived withhis family in a big stone house with a garden. We had tea and cakes at five in the studio—always tea, tea, tea!—I can tell you I used to long for a good bottle of Madame Giraud’s vin ordinaire, and a poulet. So I left and came back to Paris. Ah! quelle place! that Angleterre! J’étais toujours, toujours triste là! In Paris I make a good living; ten francs a day—that’s not bad, is it? and my time is taken often a year ahead. I like to pose for the painters—the studios are cleaner than those of the sculptor’s. Some of the sculptors’ studios are so dirty—clay and dust over everything! Did you see Fabien’s studio the other day when I posed for him? You thought it dirty? Tiens!—you should have seen it last year when he was working on the big group for the Exposition! It is clean now compared with what it was. You see, I go to my work in the plainest of clothes—a cheap print dress and everything of the simplest I can make, for in half an hour, left in those studios, they would be fit only for the blanchisseuse—the wax and dust are in and over everything!There is no time to change when one has not the time to go home at mid-day.”
JEAN PAUL LAURENS
And so I learned much of the good sense and many of the economies in the life of this most celebrated model. You can see her superb figure wrought in marble and bronze by some of the most famous of modern French sculptors all over Paris.
There is another type of model you will see, too—one who rang my bell one sunny morning in response to a note written by my good friend, the sculptor, for whom this little Parisienne posed.
She came without her hat—this “vrai type”—about seventeen years of age—with exquisite features, her blue eyes shining under a wealth of delicate blonde hair arranged in the prettiest of fashions—a little white bow tied jauntily at her throat, and her exquisitely delicate, strong young figure clothed in a simple black dress. She had about her such a frank, childlike air! Yes, she posed for so and so, and so and so, but not many; she liked it better than being in a shop; and it was far more independent, for one could go aboutand see one’s friends—and there were many of her girl friends living on the same street where this chic demoiselle lived.
At noon my drawing was finished. As she sat buttoning her boots, she looked up at me innocently, slipped her five francs for the morning’s work in her reticule, and said:
“I live with mama, and mama never gives me any money to spend on myself. This is Sunday and a holiday, so I shall go with Henriette and her brother to Vincennes. It is delicious there under the trees.”
OLD MAN MODEL
It would have beenquite impossible for me to have gone with them—I was not even invited; but this very serious and good little Parisienne, who posed for the figure with quite the same unconsciousness as she would have handed you your change over the counter of some stuffy little shop, went to Vincennes with Henriette and her brother, where they had a beautiful day—scrambling up the paths and listening to the band—all at the enormous expense of the artist; and this was how this good little Parisienne managed to save five francs in a single day!
There are old-men models who knock at your studio too, and who are celebrated for their tangled gray locks, which they immediately uncover as you open your door. These unkempt-looking Father Times and Methuselahs prowl about the staircases of the different ateliers daily. So do little children—mostly Italians and all filthily dirty; swarthy, black-eyed, gypsy-looking girls and boys of from twelve to fifteen years of age, and Italian mothers holding small children—itinerant madonnas. These are the poorer class of models—the riff-raff of the Quarter—who get anywhere from a few sous to a few francs for a séance.
And there are four-footed models, too, for I know a kindly old horse who has served in many a studio and who has carried a score of the famous generals of the world and Jeanne d’Arcs to battle—in many a modern public square.
Chacun son métier!