Paris and the Social Revolution Part 25

"As his father was not rich, Louis M-- was unwilling to appeal to him, and suffered without complaining.

"One day, however, he confessed his desperate situation to Mme. C--, a friend of his family, who inhabits a comfortable apartment, rue --. Mme. C-- promised to see what she could do for him. In the midst of a conversation with her yesterday he drew a revolver from his pocket, and before she could catch his arm fired a bullet into his heart.

"Death was instantaneous."

Emile Goudeau, in his _Dix Ans de Boheme_, tells of the picturesque suicide of a young Latin Quarter poet of his acquaintance:-

"D--, arrayed in a new suit and with his hands full of bouquets, went up to the cas.h.i.+er's desk and graciously adorned the counter and corsage of the cas.h.i.+er. Then, turning to a medical student, he said to him nonchalantly, 'My dear fellow, I have made a bet that the little point of the heart is _here_ between these two ribs'; and he designated a spot on his vest. 'Not at all,' corrected the other, 'it is lower down.

_There!_' 'I have lost then,' D-- replied.

"He called a cab, and ordered the _cocher_ to drive him to the Arc de Triomphe.

"When the _cocher_ arrived at the head of the Champs Elysees, and opened the cab door, there was only a corpse upon the cus.h.i.+ons. D-- had shot himself full in the heart."

The last season I pa.s.sed on the Left Bank of the Seine, the _Quartier_ was deeply moved by the death of one of its faithful devotees, the poet Rene Leclerc (_nom-de plume_, Robert de la Villoyo), who poisoned himself with cyanide of pota.s.sium.

Leclerc was thirty-two at the time of his death. He had inhabited the _Quartier_ for more than a decade. He had come thither to study medicine in accordance with the wishes of his bourgeois parents; and he had stayed on after all thought of practising as a physician had left him, in order to pursue the literature which had become his pa.s.sion.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Suicide of the Latin Quarter]

With the funds which his family provided he lived neither too well nor too ill, working steadily, but gaining little, slowly developing a very real, if not very robust, talent. He completed two romances, contributed more or less regularly to _La Plume_ and the minor reviews and literary weeklies of the Left Bank, which are the easier to enter since contributors are paid nothing at all or very little, and placed an occasional poem and _chronique_ in the daily press. Indeed, everything went well with him up to the moment when his family, disgruntled at his persistency in holding to so unprofitable a calling, deprived him of his income. Then he set out bravely to earn his living with his pen. He besieged editors with copy, but succeeded in placing but few articles; and, when he did place them, he was more often than not kept waiting for his pay, and sometimes defrauded out of it altogether. He tried in vain to find a publisher for either of his two ma.n.u.script romances. He did difficult and ill-paid hack-work, collaborating on a translation into French of the Norwegian Strindberg and on an adaptation into French verse of the _Mandragore_ of Machiavelli; and he undertook-oh, the bitter pill!-the task of writing a volume on the _Cote d'Ivoire_, of which he was as ignorant as he was of the borders of the supposit.i.tious ca.n.a.ls of the planet Mars. Even this concession to mercantilism-beyond which it is not surprising he was unwilling to go-did not suffice to procure him a living. He ran behind two quarters on his rent, and was threatened with eviction. If not actually dest.i.tute, he was on the verge of dest.i.tution. And yet to those who were familiar with Rene Leclerc's proud and sensitive spirit it seems more likely that it was disgust with his lot rather than terror before the approach of want which drove him to kill himself. It was because he held his art so high that he was unwilling to survive its debas.e.m.e.nt. He had made concessions that he regarded as enormous,-compromised his ideal, vulgarised his taste, and prost.i.tuted (at least so it seemed to him) his talent. It was too much.

His last act-could a dying gesture well be finer?-was to reduce to ashes the hateful ma.n.u.script of the _Cote d'Ivoire_ and all his other writings that he held unworthy.

And journalists were found contemptible enough to censure him, to call him coward, because he was too fastidious to stoop to their own corrupt, degrading practices, even to save his life.

Among the works he left, as having his affection and which by one of those ironies so common with the law went to his unappreciative family (who might have saved him), was a collection of sweet and delicate poems, ent.i.tled _La Guirlande de Marie_, dedicated to her who had shared his prosperity and remained the faithful friend of his adversity.

Here are a few stanzas (from a poem of this collection) inscribed to Henry Murger, in which he sings the praises of the Bohemia by which he died:-

_Les gais amoureux et les amoureuses Ont depuis des ans, Murger, deserte La mansarde etroite ou leurs voix rieuses Narguaient le bon sens-et la pauvrete!_

_L'amour, aujourd'hui, s'est fait plus morose; Schaunard est rentier, Colline est bourgeois, Les lauriers coupes, et mortes les roses, Ils ont desappris les chemins du bois._

_Rodolphe et Mimi, Marcel et Musette, Dans leurs lits bien clos sont endormis; Mais, vivante encor, leur chanson coquette Eveille en nos vers des refrains amis;_

_Nos reves, vois-tu, sont restes les memes: Roses du matin, rires du printemps, Chateaux en Espagne ou parcs en Boheme Irreels ou vrais,-comme de ton temps!_

_Nous marchons leur pas, nous aussi, sans treve.

Vers quel but lointain? Nous n'en savons rien; Baste! Il faut toujours que route s'acheve.

Quand nous y serons, nous le verrons bien._

_Peu d'argent en poche, et point de bagages, Nul regret d'antan pour nous chagriner, Nous sommes pares pour les longs voyages, Libres: rien a perdre, et tout a gagner!_

And here is a portion of a poem, "_Le Sabot de Noel_," that is a sort of playful prayer:-

_Mets dans mon sabot de Noel Le jeune espoir qui nous fait libre, Mets le desir profond de vivre Et la fleur qui fleurit au ciel._

_Mets le succes dans les efforts, Le travail sans souci ni doute, Et comme etoile sur ma route L'orgueil simple qui fait les forts._

Poor boy! It was this very "_orgueil simple_" that was his sad undoing.

"If the artist," says Balzac in a memorable pa.s.sage of his _Cousine Bette_, "does not hurl himself into his work, like Curtius into the gulf, without reflecting, and if, in this crater, he does not dig like a miner buried under a land-slide, ... his work perishes in the atelier, where production becomes impossible; and he a.s.sists at the suicide of his talent."

Rene Leclerc, though no mere dawdler, as the twelve sizable ma.n.u.scripts he left behind him prove, was not endowed with either the mental or the physical endurance to perform the Herculean labour which Balzac both preached and practised. No more was Louis M-- nor D--; no more was the brilliant Gerard de Nerval, who was found one winter morning in the rue de la Vieille Lanterne hanging from a window-bar, nor the precocious Escousse and Lebras, who at nineteen and sixteen respectively killed themselves because a first phenomenal success with a drama was followed by failures; no more was Chatterton in England. Few artists are. With most of them ample time for revery is a prerequisite condition of production. And yet the record seems to show that suicides are relatively rare among poets and artists.

Perhaps this is because the record does not occupy itself with the poets and artists, the Louis M--s and the D--s, who are not known as such to the world at large. Or, perhaps, it is because so many die in the hospital, like Gilbert, Malfilatre, Hegesippe Moreau, and the Joseph D-- of Murger's tale; and so many others are claimed by Charenton, like Jules Jouy, Toulouse de Lautrec, and Andre Gill (for bedlam is another Bohemian resort), that suicide has no need to a.s.sert its rights.

In any event, two cardinal qualities of the artistic temperament are distinctly hostile to self-destruction; namely, faith in the sure emergence and supremacy of genius, and a Hamlet-like irresolution that prefers pouring out woes on paper to ending them by an energetic trigger-pull.

The despair of the victims of the _misere en habit noir_, who are less able to sustain themselves by faith and who are more capable of decisive action, is, like their dress, much blacker and more austere; and suicides are far commoner among them.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE PONT DU CARROUSEL AT NIGHT]

CHAPTER XIV

FREAKS AND "FUMISTES"

"_If there is a fill of tobacco among the crew, for G.o.d's sake pa.s.s it round and let us have a pipe before we go._"-ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

"_'Lord, my dear,' returned he, with the utmost good humour, 'you seem immensely chagrined; but, hang me, when the world laughs at me, I laugh at all the world, and so we are even.'_"

OLIVER GOLDSMITH, Beau Tibbs at Home.

"_Stupeur du badaud, gaite du trottin, Le masque a Sardou, la gueule a Voltaire, La tigna.s.se en pleurs sur maigres vertebres Et la requimpette au revers fleuri D'horribles bouquets pris a la poubelle, Ainsi se ballade a travers Paris Du brillant Montmartre au Quartier-Latin Bibi-la-Puree, le pouilleux celebre, Prince des cra.s.seux et des Purotains._"

JEHAN RICTUS.

"_Much good might be sucked from these beggars._"-CHARLES LAMB.

"Mieux vaut goujat debout qu'empereur enterre."-EMILE GOUDEAU.

The dislike of and contempt for the bourgeois felt by the Bohemian students and the other Bohemians who have elected to reside in the _Quartier Latin_ pale into insignificance before the absolute detestation of the bourgeois displayed by the _Quartier's chevaliers d'industrie_, the hangers-on and camp-followers of its litterateurs and artists, who bear about the same relation to their princ.i.p.als that a side-show bears to a circus or the capering monkey to the hand-organ and its grinder.

As the lackey of the n.o.bleman often holds himself above the commoner far more than does the n.o.bleman himself, and as he will rather put up with poor living and poor wages in the service of an indigent aristocrat than demean himself by serving in the households of tradesmen, so these ne'er-do-wells of the _Quartier Latin_-ragged retainers of the threadbare gentry of arts and letters, pinched flunkeys of the straightened lords of thought, seedy clients of needy Latin patricians, tatterdemalion cup-bearers to tattered Parna.s.sians, supernumeraries to the protagonists in the melodrama of cultured poverty, chorus to the soloists of the _Learned Beggars' Opera_-would be humiliated and miserable outside of the atmosphere of letters. They would rather be door-keepers, to paraphrase a familiar text, in the house of the intellectual _elite_ than to dwell in the tents of vulgarity.

If there is more comedy and less tragedy in the existences of these satellites than in the existences of their controlling luminaries, it is not because their physical hards.h.i.+ps are fewer,-for, parasites, sycophants, trencher-friends, pick-thanks, and toad-eaters though they be, theirs is but sorry hap,-but because they are mostly ambitionless or feeble-minded and so not as susceptible to the mental torture of disenchantment.

They "carry the half of their mattresses in their hair," after the fas.h.i.+on of the nephew of Rameau described by Diderot. They don the cast-off garments and retail the worn-out epigrams of their _fetiches_, who are amused by and therefore endlessly indulgent of them. They strut and smirk and rant like children masquerading in the attic frippery of their elders, make as clever displays of superficial knowledge as the most up-to-date members of the most up-to-date women's clubs, and revert constantly to a previous connection with the university which is not always imaginary. As individuals, these pseudo-connoisseurs and savants come and go in the _Quartier Latin_: the cla.s.s goes on forever.

There are plenty of persons still living in the Latin Quarter who knew the originals of the eccentric _Quartier_ types immortalised by Jules Valles in his phenomenal _Refractaires_.

Fontan-Crusoe, a genuine bachelor of arts, who slept one hundred and eleven consecutive nights under a tree near the fortifications, spent for nourishment from three to five sous a day which he earned by selling in the street his two princ.i.p.al works, _Le Spectre Noir: Elegie_ and _Un Galop a travers l'Es.p.a.ce_.