Paris and the Social Revolution Part 27

REFLECHISSEZ, CHERS CITOYENS VOUS SAVEZ QUE VOS eLUS VOUS TROMPENT, VOUS ONT TROMPeS, VOUS TROMPERONT-ET POURTANT VOUS ALLEZ VOTER.... VOTEZ DONC POUR MOI! NOMMEZ L'ANE! ON N'EST PAS PLUS BeTE QUE VOUS.]

"Erect on his hind legs, ears to the wind, craning forward, over-topping proudly the parti-colored vehicle,-the vehicle in the form of an urn,-his head planted between the traditional gla.s.s of water and the presidential bell, he pa.s.sed in the midst of hisses and bravos and jests.

"The jacka.s.s beheld Paris, and Paris beheld him.

"Paris! The Paris that votes, the rout, the people sovereign every four years,-the people simpleton enough to believe that sovereignty consists in naming its masters....

"Slowly the jacka.s.s went through the streets. As he advanced, the walls were covered with placards by members of his committee, while others distributed his proclamation to the crowd:-

"'Reflect, dear fellow-citizens. You know that your deputies deceive you, have deceived you, will deceive you; and yet you vote. Vote for me then! Vote for the jacka.s.s! Elect the jacka.s.s! It is impossible to be more stupid than you.'

"This frankness, a trifle brutal, was not to everybody's taste.

"'They are insulting us,' bellowed some. 'They are ridiculing universal suffrage,' protested others more justly. Some one shook his fist at the jacka.s.s furiously, and said, '_Sale Juif!_' (Dirty Jew), but a laugh burst out, and spread sonorous. The candidate was acclaimed. Bravely the elector made fun of himself and of his representatives. Hats and canes were waved. Ladies threw flowers. The jacka.s.s pa.s.sed.

"He descended from the heights of Montmartre, going towards the _Quartier Latin_. He crossed the Grands-Boulevards, the Croissant,[80] where is cooked, without salt, the _ordinaire_ served by the gazettes. He saw the _halles_ (markets) where the starving glean in the heaps of garbage, the quays where electors elect lodgings under the bridges.

"Heart and brain! Paris! Democracy!...

"The jacka.s.s arrived before the Senate.

"He skirted the palace, whence the guard emerged hurriedly. He followed, on the outside, alas! the too-green gardens. Then came the Boulevard St. Michel. On the terraces of the cafes the youth of the _Quartier_ clapped their hands. The crowd, constantly growing, s.n.a.t.c.hed out of each other's hands the jacka.s.s's proclamations. The students harnessed themselves to the car, a professor pushed the wheels; but it struck three, and the police appeared.

"Since ten o'clock that morning, from post to commissariat, the telegraph and the telephone had signalled the strange pa.s.sage of the subversive animal. The order was issued: 'Arrest the jacka.s.s!' And now the police sergeants barred the route of the candidate.

"Near the Place St. Michel, the faithful committee of _Nul_ was ordered by the armed force to conduct its candidate to the nearest police station. Naturally, the committee paid no attention, and kept on its way. The car crossed the Seine, and soon it halted before the _Palais de Justice_.

"The police, re-enforced, surrounded the white jacka.s.s, the impa.s.sive jacka.s.s. The candidate was arrested at the gate of this _Palais de Justice_, whence deputies, defaulters, _panamistes_, all the big thieves, go out free.

"In the midst of the surging crowd the car swayed as if about to capsize. The police, a brigadier at their head, had seized the shafts and donned the straps. The committee insisted no more: they helped harness the _sergents de ville_.

"Thus the white jacka.s.s was abandoned by his warmest partisans. Like any other vulgar politician, the animal had come to a bad end. The police towed him, authority guided his route. _From this moment Nul was only an official candidate._ His friends acknowledged him no more. The door of the prefecture opened wide, and the jacka.s.s entered quite as if he were entering his own stall."

What has all this starving and self-killing and freakishness and practical joking of the _Quartier_ Bohemians to do with revolution? Much every way.

Jules Valles (all his life a Latin Quarter Bohemian), whom Richepin has characterised as "the most curious and the most complete of the _decla.s.ses_ of the pen"; of whom his intimate friend Gill said, "He would be the tenderest, the most _spirituel_, the most charming, and the most eloquent fellow in the world, were it not for the mania which possesses him to believe himself at ease only in the smoke of battles or the bawlings of the faubourgs"; who presented himself at the elections of 1869 as "_le candidat de la misere_," and put at the head of his second volume of _Jacques Vingtras_ (_Le Bachelier_), "_A ceux qui nourris de Grec et de Latin sont morts de faim, je dedie ce livre_,"-Jules Valles (and who should know better than Valles?) said, not long before the Commune was declared:-

"In this life there is a danger. _Misere_ without a flag conducts to the _misere_ that has a flag, and makes of the scattered _refractaires_ an army which counts in its ranks less sons of the people than sons of the _bourgeoisie_. Behold them bearing down upon us, pale, mute, emaciated, beating the charge with the bones of their martyrs upon the drum of the _revoltes_, and waving as a standard, at the point of a sword, the blood-stained s.h.i.+rt of the last of their suicides!...

"These _decla.s.ses_ must find places, or they will have revenge; and this is why so much absinthe runs down their throats and so much blood upon the paving-stones. They become drunkards or rebels."

And again, in the introduction to his _Refractaires_, he says, "Give me three hundred of these men, any sort of a flag, toss me down there before the regiments in a raking fire, and you shall see what short work I will make of the gunners at the head of my _refractaires_!"

Every convulsion Paris has undergone has proved the truth of Valles'

mordant sentences. What was the Commune, indeed, but the joint self-a.s.sertion of the _decla.s.ses_?

"_Decla.s.ses_," wrote Richepin of the leaders of the Commune shortly after its suppression, "from the unrecognised general, Cluseret, to the unappreciated caricaturist, Pilotell; from the intelligent deputy, Milliere, to the lunatic, Allix; from the great painter, Courbet, to the ex-monk, Panille, and _tutti quanti_; _decla.s.ses_ of politics, like Delescluze and Pyat, of journalism and of literature, like Valles, Vermesch, Vermorel, Grousset, Vesinier, Maroleau; of the army, like Rossel, of the workshop, like a.s.si, of the _bra.s.serie_, like Rigault, of lower still, like Johamard."

Not all these starving, suiciding, freakish, jesting Latin Quarter Bohemians are conscious socialists and anarchists, though there is a good proportion of them who are,-a greater proportion probably than among the students proper, by as much as their situations are more precarious; but they nearly all hold vaguely subversive humanitarian views, and they are all, even the Bohemians by choice, _refractaires_ and _revoltes_. Like the Thelemites of Rabelais, they all recognise but the one law which is no law,-"_Fay ce que vouldras._"

Their way of living is a species of the _propagande par l'exemple_ from which it is a quick and easy step to the _propagande par le fait_. Given a crisis, _refractaire_, _revolte_, and _revolutionnaire_ spell very much the same thing. They are all ripe for disorder.

The victims of the _misere en habit noir_-the poor doctors, teachers, lawyers, petty functionaries, and clerks-are, in the nature of the case, more submissive to their fate than the free-living freaks, litterateurs, and artists; but there are evidences that they, too, are beginning to think of stepping over the bounds within which patience is a virtue.

M. Paul Webre, one of a group of young men of means and education-evolutionists, not revolutionists-who have pursued the laboratory method of studying the conditions, the psychology, and the relations to society of various employments, has given the following testimony to the expectant, if unaggressive, att.i.tude of the small clerks:-

"My relatively frail health forbidding me work in a factory, I sought a place as a clerk. After twenty ineffectual applications I succeeded in crossing the threshold of an insurance company. I earn there 100 francs a month, on which I manage to live without resorting to my income. I carry with me in the morning a lunch of bread, cheese, and a slice of ham or sausage, and I talk with my comrades of the office. Some are married. These are the most unfortunate; but they reflect that, if they quit their meagre situations, there are innumerable persons in the streets ready to vie with each other to obtain them, and they cling to them for dear life.

Nevertheless, their hatred is brooding. While taking cold bites during the hour of respite which the avaricious administration accords us, we pa.s.s our chiefs in review, and compare their profits with our own. The director has a salary of 100,000 francs, the president is several times a millionaire; while we, _morbleu_! Oh, the monotonous days! the repulsive work! the ominous end of the month! and the certainty of plodding along for twenty years in the same fas.h.i.+on, only to be sent away at last without resource! It is poverty in the frayed frock-coat, the worst poverty. I have tried to organise the discontented, but they have a terror of compromising themselves and of making themselves marks for the Company's blows. So, bending over their doc.u.ments, they spy the growlings in the street, ready to descend there, in their turn, when the revolution a.s.serts itself. The atmosphere in which these petty clerks stagnate is saturated with bitterness, with rancours, with regrets, with deceived ambitions. Terrible eruptions are being prepared therein. And I cry to the capitalists: 'Take care! Transform these enemies into friends, these anarchists into conservators! Share your profits with them. Throw them a honey-cake while there is still time.'"

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE SECOND-HAND BOOK MARKET OF THE LATIN QUARTER]

"_Put a man in the street with a coat that is too large on his back, pantaloons that are too short, without a collar, without a s.h.i.+rt, without stockings, without a sou, had he the genius of Machiavelli, of Talleyrand, he would fall into the gutter._"-JULES VALLeS.

CHAPTER XV

MONTMARTRE AND "LA VACHE ENRAGeE"

"La Gloire _marches before the_ Vache Enragee. _Follow her then, try to catch up with her: there is honour even for those who fall by the way._"

ADOLPHE WILLETTE, in Le Calvaire de la Vache Enragee.

"_Whatever scorn, whatever disgrace he may bring upon himself, it is none the less true that the poor and obscure artist is often worth more than the conquerors of the world; and there are n.o.bler hearts under the mansards where only three chairs, a bed, a table, and a_ grisette _are to be found, than in the_ gemonies dorees _and the_ abreuvoirs _of domestic ambition._"

ALFRED DE MUSSET, in Preface of Comedies et Proverbes.

"Ils feront de ta corne aceree une epee, Ils feront de ton crane une coupe sculptee, Ou nous boirons ton sang avive de levains.

Ils feront de ton cuir des bottes de sept lieues Pour courir au pays des illusions bleues Ou vers l'apre ideal des rouges lendemains."

PAUL MARROT, in a poem to the Vache Enragee.

"_A la Vache Enragee, a Montmartre. Mademoiselle:- "All those who have not known you are like untempered metals.

"Accept, I pray, my best wishes._

"E. FReMIET."