Paris and the Social Revolution Part 24

"His sole hope was the coming _Salon_. 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, this same 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 the _banlieue_. 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 the _Salon_ was near. It was time to think of taking the plaster cast of the statue. Mich.e.l.li, Fontaine, and the other moulders who worked for the artists, when they saw Joseph's dest.i.tution, were unwilling to venture credit. All he could obtain from one of them was the furnis.h.i.+ng 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 pa.s.sed 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 cuira.s.s of warmth against the darts of the cold, all his clothing, playing thus, towards Saint Antoine, the role 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 absurd _concierge_, who declared that he would let nothing leave Joseph's room before the back rent was paid. The artists explained to the _concierge_ that 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 Pa.s.sy, where the landlord lived, and did not find him. He would not be in before dinner. They returned at 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 the _concierge_, but who decided, on Joseph's representations of the injury that would be done him if he were made to miss the _Salon_, 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 the _Exposition du Bazar Bonne Nouvelle_ (corresponding to the modern _Salon des Refuses_), and sold the two to the Museum of Compiegne 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 Murger's, it is because Joseph D-- stands to the Bohemians of the _Quartier_ as a kind of saint, _Saint Joseph de la Deche_,[75] patron 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 hards.h.i.+ps 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, the _concierge_ as 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 a.s.sumed names; and the fateful career of Murger's Joseph is so perfectly typical of the careers of the poor devils of artists in the _Quartier_ of the present period that there is no necessity of depicting it.

Quite as terrible, though far less romantic than the _misere_ of the Bohemian artist and litterateur, is the "_misere 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 his _milieu_. He is excused from playing the dismal farce of keeping up appearances. He may live in an attic, clothe himself in tattered and seedy raiment, s.h.i.+rk 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 the _camaraderie_ of 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; a.s.sume to be busy when he is weary unto death with inaction,-and all this though hunger be consuming his very vitals.

He must b.u.t.ton 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 the _Loi Berenger_.[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 makes.h.i.+ft 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 of buying 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, pa.s.sing quickly from a state of exaltation to a state of the most profound depression."

What wonder!

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

"_They are logical in their insane heroism, they utter neither cries nor plaints, they endure pa.s.sively 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 misere.'"

HENRY MuRGER, Introduction to La Vie de Boheme.

CHAPTER XIII

THOSE WHO KILL THEMSELVES

"_This world's been too many for me._"

Mr. Tulliver, in GEORGE ELIOT'S Mill on the Floss.

"_Et j'ai grand peur a tout moment De voir mourir d'epuis.e.m.e.nt L'ami d'enfance, Que pour moins de solennite J'appelle ici le Chat Botte, Mais qu'on nomme aussi l'esperance._"

ANDRe GILL.

"_Tu veux choisir ta mort; Va sache bien mourir sans crainte niaise: La lachete, c'est le travail sans pain, Le suicide lent des ruines et des fournaises.

Ne tremble pas, sois fort, de ton dedain, Et fais greve a la vie, enfant sans pain!_"

FRANCIS VIELe-GRIFFIN.

"_I have an education._

"_'Now you are armed for the battle,' said my professor, in bidding me adieu. 'Who triumphs at college enters victorious into_ la carriere' [career].

"_What_ carriere?

"_A former cla.s.smate of my father's, who was pa.s.sing through Nantes and stopped off to see him, told him that one of their fellow-cla.s.smates, he who had won all the prizes, had been found dead-mangled and b.l.o.o.d.y-at the bottom of a_ carriere _[quarry]

of stone, into which he had cast himself after having been three days without food._

"_It is not into this_ 'carriere' _I must enter, I take it,-at least, not head first._"-JULES VALLeS, in Jacques Vingtras-Le Bachelier.

"_First came the silent gazers; next, A screen of gla.s.s we're thankful for; Last, the sight's self, the sermon's text, The three men who did most abhor Their life in Paris yesterday, So killed themselves: and now, enthroned Each on his copper couch, they lay Fronting me, waiting to be owned.

I thought, and think, their sin's atoned._"

ROBERT BROWNING.

A recent morning paper contained the following item in its column of "Crimes and Casualties":-

"LA LITTeRATURE QUI TUE.

"Enamoured of art and persuaded that he would quickly win a name in Paris, Louis M--, a young man of twenty-five, left some six months ago the little provincial city where he was born.

"Like Balzac's hero, Lucien de Rubempre, who entered the Latin Quarter with two hundred and forty francs in money and the ma.n.u.scripts of _L'Archer de Charles IX._ and _Les Marguerites_, this young provincial arrived in Paris with a light purse and the bulky ma.n.u.script of a drama in five acts, which he expected to get performed immediately. Unfortunately, the purse was quickly emptied, and the drama was refused by all the theatre managers.