Paris and the Social Revolution Part 22

The above ill.u.s.trations of the students' irritability are the proverbial straws that show which way the wind blows, and they might be multiplied indefinitely.

There is no possible doubt of the student's growing disgust with the corruption and hypocrisy of the present republic,-this nominal democracy that is in reality a plutocracy,-nor of his slowly crystallising resolution to have either something better than a republic or a better republic; and, in the long run, he always gets what he wants. The student strength is out of all proportion to the student numbers. Let the students take their old place in the streets of the _Quartier_ to-morrow-5,000 or 500 strong-with a real rallying cry, and thrills of joy and shudders of apprehension will traverse the length and breadth of France.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE PANTHEON]

"_The Quarter knows that the student is its aristocracy,-an aristocracy that gives more than it gets, against whom the Carmagnole or the 'ca Ira' could not be sung, whose spirit is democratic and of the people._"

GILBERT PARKER.

Chapter XI

BOHEMIANS OF THE LATIN QUARTER

"_It took a rugged faith in the future to pa.s.s the evenings-without a fire-polis.h.i.+ng verses, after having painted all day long interminable registers._"-EMILE GOUDEAU, in Dix Ans de Boheme.

"_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 G.o.d. 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 spent With men that every virtue decks, And women models of their s.e.x, Society's true ornament,- Ere we dared wander, nights like this, Through wind and rain, and watch the Seine, And feel the Boulevard break again To 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 the _Quartier_ as a c.o.c.kney clings to the town for reasons gay or serious, trivial or weighty, fantastic or rational,-attachment to a lodging, a cafe, 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 pa.s.sion.

Finally, the _Quartier_ retains 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 the _Quartier_, where they are known, they can count on a modic.u.m of credit for a modic.u.m 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 his _Etapes d'un Refractaire_, "that at such an hour in the rue de l'Ecole de Medecine or at the head of the rue Monsieur-le-Prince an 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 the _Quartier_, 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 the _Quarter_ are either by choice or by necessity Bohemians. To the former cla.s.s (_Bohemes par got_) belongs my friend B--, whom for conveniences' sake we will call Berteil,-Gustave Berteil.

In a dingy hotel of the rue Racine, just off the _Quartier's_ highway, 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 Provencal 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 provincial _lycee_ affords, a close acquaintance with the old French drama, for which the _lycee_ would 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,-where he had his meals served him,-and his evenings (whatever the weather) to the auditoriums or stage entrances of the theatres and to the cafes where the _cabotins_ (actors) most do congregate.

His relations to the law were limited, so far as is known, to the _bona fide_ purchase 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 Cote d'Azur and there a.s.sist 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. Berteil _pere_ was mollified, if sadly disillusionised, by this ocular demonstration of pluck on the part of Berteil _fils_. 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 hotel garcon enters M.

Berteil's room, without rapping, to bring him his coffee and to inform him of the weather. If the garcon reports that it is really pleasant,-and the garcon 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 every _bouquineur_ and _bouquiniste_ greets him cordially as an old acquaintance. If the garcon's weather bulletin is unfavourable, he orders his _dejeuner_ and 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 cafes affected by the _cabotins_, with whom he pa.s.ses 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 the _amie_ of 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 fas.h.i.+on 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 the _Quartier_ has always had a sprinkling of brilliant, forceful personalities who have taken Bohemian vows without ever having had to consider the bread-and-b.u.t.ter question.

Such was the deceased artist Henri Pille (a.s.sociated 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 Blasphemes_. Bouchor, who now devotes almost all his time and energy to the elevation of the working people through reading clubs and the _Universites Populaires_, is regarded by many of his old a.s.sociates 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 ent.i.tle 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 Valles and the alternate aspirings and back-slidings of Paul Verlaine. In the early eighties, when he paraded the fantastic t.i.tle of _Roi 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 Andre 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 ill.u.s.trious Sapeck was the judge of last resort, and awarded the palm to the victor." It would take a 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 simple window curtain; and his adventures have been so extraordinary that this ludicrous incident, improbable as it sounds, does not defy belief.

[Ill.u.s.tration: JEAN RICHEPIN]

Richepin, Bouchor, and Paul Bourget, returning from "The Sherry Cobbler"

one night, halted under the arcade of the _Odeon_, named themselves _Les 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'Aurevilly and the mode of living of Balzac. "Bourget submitted himself," says Goudeau, "to a ferocious Balzacian regime. He dined very early, went to bed immediately after, and had himself called on the stroke of 3 A.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 litterateurs."

Bourget, who began thus as a Bohemian from necessity, has ended as a sn.o.b. He is a fair sample of the "_arrive_" who disavows his past, and

"_Looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees By 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 the _chevelure_ [long hair] is the most dangerous of concessions to the modern _bourgeoisie_.... 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 much _esprit_, but one has ceased to be a good fellow. Beware, then, of the tribunes and the poets who establish relations with the _garcons 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-s.h.i.+p 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 "_arrives_" of literature and the arts are ent.i.tled 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 a.s.sume, 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 hards.h.i.+p, 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 ba.n.a.l is particularly terrible in this,-that, if one returns to it after having been disgusted with it, it is to find it more _ba.n.a.l_ still, and to die of it."

Few of the Bohemians who have been intimately a.s.sociated with the Quarter during the last twenty-five or thirty years have been able to make s.h.i.+ft 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. Mallarme taught English in the _lycees_ nearly all his life, and conducted alone, during a short period, a journal ent.i.tled _La Derniere Mode_. Verlaine was long an employee of the _Hotel de Ville_, had periods of teaching, and even tried his hand at farming.

Edmond Haraucourt,[72] Camille St. Croix, Leon 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 of _L'Au Dela_, who set up as a cobbler in 1896 in the rue du Sommerard, close by the Cluny Museum.[73]