Là: vivre à coups de fouet!--passer
En fiacre, en correctionnelle;
Repasser à la ritournelle,
Se dépasser, et trépasser!--
--Non, petit, il faut commencer
Par être grand--simple ficelle--
Pauvre: remuer l'or à la pelle;
Obscur: un nom à tout casser!...
Le coller chez les mastroquets,
Et l'apprendre à des perroquets
Qui le chantent ou qui le sifflent--
--Musique!--C'est le paradis
Des mahomets ou des houris,
Des dieux souteneurs qui se giflent!
People, at least some of them, think more highly of his Breton subjects
than of the Parisian, but I can not see that he loses force on leaving
the sea-board; for example, his "Frère et Sœur Jumeaux" seems to me
"by the same hand" and rather better than his "Roscoff." His language
does not need any particular subject matter, or prefer one to another.
"Mannequin idéal, tête-de-turc du leurre," "Fille de marbre, en rut!",
"Je voudrais être chien à une fille publique" are all, with a constant
emission of equally vigorous phrases, to be found in the city poems. At
his weakest he is touched with the style of his time, i.e., he falls
into a phrase _à la Hugo_,--but seldom. And he is conscious of the will
to break from this manner, and is the first, I think, to satirize it, or
at least the first to hurl anything as apt and violent as "garde
nationale épique" or "inventeur de la larme écrite" at the
Romantico-rhetorico and the sentimento-romantico of Hugo and Lamartine.
His nearest kinships in our period are to Gautier and Laforgue, though
it is Villon whom most by life and temperament he must be said to
resemble.
Laforgue was, for four or five years, "reader" to the ex-Kaiser's mama;
he escaped and died of _la misère._ Corbière had, I believe, but one
level of poverty.
Un beau jour--quel métier!--je faisais, comme ça
Ma croisière.--Métier!....--Enfin. Elle passa.
--Elle qui,--La Passante! Elle, avec son ombrelle!
Vrai valet de bourreau, je la frôlai....--mais Elle
Me regarda tout bas, souriant en dessous,
Et--me tendit sa main, et....
m'a donné deux sous.