Paris and the Social Revolution Part 28

"VIVE LA VACHE ENRAGeE!

"_Son ami_,

"ALPHONSE DAUDET."

The official restoration at the Carnival of 1896 of the historic but long un.o.bserved fete of the _Buf Gras_ (Fat Ox) was the signal for the creation of the fete of the _Vache Enragee_ (Famished Cow) for that year's _Mi-careme_ by the denizens of Montmartre.

"Over against the _Buf Gras_, father of the golden calf, emblem of the wealth and prosperity of the _bourgeoisie_,"

said the committee of organisation in its public manifesto, "the painters, poets, and _chansonniers_ of the Mont des Martyrs have prepared for the pleasure and edification of the Parisians a spectacle which they call the Cavalcade of the _Vache Enragee_ (or the _Vachalcade_), intended to present the picture, sometimes poignant, of their struggles, their sufferings, their ideals, their chasings after phantoms, their unrealised dreams, their often illusory hopes."

This brand-new cavalcade consisted of a large number of pedestrians masquerading as ducks, geese, rabbits, frogs, camels, donkeys, cats, pigs, and giraffes (the French words for all of which have well-defined metaphorical meanings), and as chimeras, Pierrots and Pierrettes; and a score or more of fantastic floats (designed by Montmartre artists of repute), the subtle and piquant symbolism of which was all Greek to the foreign tourists who chanced to see them and not too intelligible to many Parisians who fancied they knew their Paris and their French. The floats were ent.i.tled (to mention only those whose significance is fairly obvious) _Pegasus Seized by the Sheriffs_, _The Anti-Landlord League_, _The Wrestlers of Thought_, _The Temple of the Golden Calf_, _La Vache Enragee through the Ages_, _Feeding of la Vache Enragee_, _Drawing the Teeth of la Vache Enragee_, _A la Belle Etoile_,[81] and _Ma Tante_.[82]

The design for this last, by M. Grun, is given herewith.

Judges were satirically represented as side-whiskered cafe garcons; the victims of _la misere en habit noir_, as street pavers, attired in frayed frock-coats, wind-traversed shoes, and weather-beaten "plug"

hats; and _Les Jeunes_,[83] as small boys, in dunce-caps, playing on drums.

[Ill.u.s.tration: GRuN'S DESIGN FOR FLOAT IN CAVALCADE OF LA VACHE ENRAGeE]

The street parade lasted from mid-day to sunset. It was preceded by a theatrical representation for the benefit of dest.i.tute artists, which included appropriate skits by the Montmartre playwrights Xanrof and Courteline, an address by the Montmartre socialist poet-deputy Clovis Hugues, and rapid platform drawing by the Montmartre caricaturists, Pal and Grun; and it was followed by bonfires and open-air dancing, and by a masked ball at the _Moulin Rouge_, in the course of which a lottery was drawn, whose princ.i.p.al prizes were sketches by Montmartre artists, among them Faverot, Willette, Henri Pille, Roedel, Leandre, and Puvis de Chavannes. The occasion was further signalised by the publication of a magazine, _La Vache Enragee_, under the editors.h.i.+p of Willette.

The distinctive feature of the second and last[84] fete of the _Vache Enragee_ (1897) was a musical poem, ent.i.tled "_Le Couronnement de la Muse de Montmartre_," by the Montmartre composer Gustave Charpentier, now thrice famous as the author of _Louise_, in which Labour, figured by one Mlle. Stumpp (a working-girl, who had been elected by ballot the Montmartre Muse), was crowned by Beauty, figured by Cleo de Merode.

Charpentier interpreted his cantata as follows:-

"The Muse is the plebeian virgin, the virtuous young working-girl, the daughter of the people, administering a formidable slap in the face to the _peres la pudeur_,[85]

showing these drivellers of another epoch, these dotards whose sentiments are false, unnatural, and bourgeois, that it is possible to achieve the beautiful in taking for a queen an _ouvriere_, a _rosiere_ even, of Montmartre, region of ideals too young for their too old ideas."

This Montmartre fete of the _Vache Enragee_ is unique among the fetes of the whole world, I fancy, in that it is at once a bold apotheosis of the racking poverty of the artistic career and a defiant, masterful sneer at the smugness of commercial Philistinism.[86] "It is a defence of _la misere_ you are making," said Zola in a communication to its organisers,-"a defence of _la misere_; and, to my thinking, you are right in making this defence." Cyrano, a knight of the _vache enragee_, who would have found himself delightfully at home in the Montmartre cavalcade, made a similar defence, according to Rostand, some centuries ago:-

"_Moi, c'est moralement que j'ai mes elegances.

Je ne m'attife pas ainsi qu'un freluquet, Mais je suis plus soigne si je suis moins coquet.

Je ne sortirais pas avec, par negligence, Un affront pas tres-bien lave, la conscience Jaune encore de sommeil dans le coin de son il, Un honneur chiffone, des scrupules en deuil.

Mais je marche sans rien sur moi qui ne reluise, Empanache d'independance et de franchise; Ce n'est pas une taille avantageuse, c'est Mon ame que je cambre ainsi qu'en un corset, Et tout couvert d'exploits qu'en rubans je m'attache, Retroussant mon esprit ainsi qu'une moustache, Je fais en traversant les groupes et les ronds, Sonner les verites comme des eperons._"

The device, _Vache Enragee_, cavalierly adopted as their catchword by the painters, sculptors, poets, and musicians of Montmartre, was taken directly from the t.i.tle of a Montmartre romance by Emile Goudeau, who was named on that account honorary president of the festival; but the phrase had long been current in French conversation and literature to designate the poverty of the _proletariat artistique et litteraire_.

Thus, the great Daudet wrote regarding one of the characters of _Jack_:-

"Then commenced for him this terrible ordeal of the _vache enragee_, which either breaks you at once or bronzes you forever.

"He became one of the ten thousand poor devils, famished and proud, who rise in Paris every morning giddy with hunger and ambitious dreams, nibble surrept.i.tiously a sou loaf, which they keep hidden away in the bottoms of their pockets, blacken their clothes with penfuls of ink, whiten their s.h.i.+rt collars with billiard chalk, and warm themselves over the registers of the libraries and churches.... Art is such a wizard! It creates a sun which s.h.i.+nes for all, like Nature's sun; and those who approach it, even the poor, even the ill-favoured, even the grotesque, carry away a little of its warmth and its radiance. This celestial flame, imprudently ravished, which the unsuccessful guard in the depths of their eyes, renders them redoubtable sometimes, oftenest ridiculous; but their existence gains from it a grandiose serenity, a contemptuous indifference to misfortune, and a grace in suffering that other kinds of poverty do not know."

The Montmartre _Vache Enragee_, you see, is the same old Latin Quarter _Misere_ under another label, the "Bohemian road by which every man who enters the arts without other means of existence than art itself will be forced to travel, ... the training school of the artistic profession, the preface to the Academy, the _Hotel-Dieu_, or the Morgue."[87]

Over the stony and th.o.r.n.y route of the _Vache Enragee_ a large part of the literary, artistic, and musical celebrities of France have at one time or another pa.s.sed.

Millet painting signs at Cherbourg and hasty portraits for the soldiers at Havre-_Vache Enragee_!

Barye forced to go about as a pedler in order to vend his now priceless statuettes-_Vache Enragee_!

Hector Berlioz, ridiculed for wanting the courage to put a bullet through his brain, accepting newspaper work to live, failing to write a symphony the theme of which came to him in a dream, because he would not have money enough to bring it out if it were written-_Vache Enragee_!

Audran and Charles Lecocq (who took prizes, the one in composition, the other in fugue, at the _Conservatoire_ and the Niedermeyer School respectively) writing opera bouffe to keep the wolf from the door-_Vache Enragee_!

Albert Glatigny, out on a hunt for funds to bury the dead mistress of a friend, swimming the Seine (though he was a poor swimmer and it was late autumn) because he could not pay the small bridge toll which was then exacted-_Vache Enragee_!

The saturnine De Nerval and the brilliant Gauthier chasing dinners, the first in back alley-ways and the second in the salon of the Princesse Mathilde-_Vache Enragee_!

_Vache Enragee_, also, young Balzac living on a few sous a day and writing the inevitable five-act drama in an icy garret, because his father, who had intended the boy for the law, had said to him, "There are people who have a vocation for dying in the hospital," and his mother, "It seems that monsieur has a taste for misery!"

_Vache Enragee_-young Daudet arriving in Paris, after an over-long fast, shod only with rubbers (as he has narrated in _Trente Ans_ and _Le Pet.i.t Chose_), and existing there on his share of the seventy-five francs a month his brother Ernest earned!

And _Vache Enragee_-young Zola stifling in a "room under the roof where one was forced to perform a series of acrobatic feats to sit down-on the bed"; living several days on bread soaked in olive oil sent to him from the Midi, and pitifully imploring the editors of _Le Travail_ (a little Latin Quarter review) to print for him a poem written in the style of De Musset!

_Vache Enragee_ again-Eugene Boudin sighing in his journal: "There are moments hard to bear when on every side you see the impossibility of getting a little money. There is a poor old mother who entreats, there is the rent to pay, there is the necessity of clothes, of brushes, of canvases, which you finally have to get along without. Petty economy and the worry that accompanies it kill you by inches."

_Vache Enragee_, in short, the privations of all those for whom liberty is a necessity, and beauty a religion, and with whom a glowing faith in art more than atones for the absence of bread, of fire, and of clothes!

Winter before last a painter, fifty-three years of age, well known in art circles, was detected extracting money out of a church poor-box with the aid of a glue-smeared stick. This revolting sort of infidelity to the hard fare of the _Vache Enragee_ is, it need hardly be said, a rare occurrence; but it is not rare for men to be forced to familiarity with the _Vache Enragee_ after they have become famous.

Glatigny never got entirely free of poverty, and it was of disease produced by hunger and exposure that both he and his wife died.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A LA MUSE DE MONTMARTRE.

_O Muse de Montmartre, ouvriere aux doigts fins Qui saurait broder d'or l'azur des Seraphins Et qui daignez sourire aux larmes des poetes, Salut! Salut! pour t'applaudir nos mains sont pretes._

_Te voici parmi nous, vagues chercheurs de rien, L'un sculpteur, l'autre peintre, un tel musicien, Guettant un ideal parmi les apres cimes, Songeurs des formes et des rhythmes et des rimes.

Te voici parmi nous! Tes levres de corail Nous chantent le couplet sublime du travail._

EMILE GOUDEAU.

THE REAL MONTMARTRE

_La rue Mont-Cenis_]

At the height of his fame the critic Gustave Planche was often without money enough to go to the barber-shop,-if Valles is to be believed,-and occupied an attic at twenty-five francs a month. He never earned more than four thousand francs a year, and rarely as much as three thousand francs,-a sum which was dest.i.tution, nothing more nor less, for a person whose vocation forced him into the world and whose inability to walk necessitated a perpetual outlay for carriage hire.

In a striking pa.s.sage of his novel, _La Faiseuse de Gloire_, Paul Brulat writes: "An old man approached the desk timidly, and stammered something in a low voice. The editor, annoyed at being interrupted, repelled him with cruel words. 'Oh, say now, won't you ever stop coming here begging?' The old man moved off with a senile shake of the head. He bore a great name in literature. He was called Villiers de l'Isle-Adam."

Henry Becque, whose _Corbeaux_ was refused by ten theatres before it was accepted by the _Theatre Francais_, "lived on a seventh floor, under the roof," says his friend and admirer, Henri Bauer. "The furnis.h.i.+ngs of his single room were an iron bed, an unpainted table, and three straw-bottomed chairs." And this was long after Becque's masterpieces had been given a hearing, at a time when he was regarded by a large and influential group of his contemporaries as the greatest French dramatist the last half of the nineteenth century had produced.

Berlioz, Millet, Verlaine, and Hegesippe Moreau ate of the _Vache Enragee_, more or less regularly, all their lives. So have many other artistic natures, not the least worthy and not the least celebrated.

Franz Servais, after having given fifteen years of labour, at untold sacrifice, to the creation and perfection of his opera, _L'Apollonide_, won the support of the Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar only to have his patron die just as the preparations for the production of the opera were complete and to die himself a few days after. In a letter to a friend, Servais has related how on one occasion, when everything looked dark, he missed an almost certain order from a musical publisher for want of presentable shoes: "I was unable to keep the appointment. At the last moment I perceived that my best shoes were all broken open. They gaped at the ends like carps' noses. You can imagine the face of the good editor, his regret for having offered me a little money, and how he would have torn up the contract! I must wait for better luck."

Franz Servais took himself too tragically in letting a good thing escape him simply because he had holes in his shoes. But Servais, though identified with Paris, was a Belgian, not a Frenchman, by birth, and was not a _Montmartrois_.

With a remunerative offer as an incentive, your typical _Montmartrois_ would not have taken more than fifteen minutes to beg, borrow, or steal, hire or buy on the strength of the offer itself or of a supposit.i.tious heritage, the necessary shoes, and would have celebrated the happy outcome with his friends the very same night. Resourcefulness is a salient trait of the Bohemian wherever he may be found, and of none more than of the Bohemian of Montmartre. His contrivances for making the pot boil are legion.

In a tight place, he utilises the erudition, of which he is ordinarily more than half ashamed, in teaching foreigners French, working on cyclopedias or dictionaries, and giving lessons in the "three Rs," for a few sous a day, to the children of his _concierge_. He gives lessons just as readily in dancing, fencing, sparring, and _savate_.