THE REVOLUTIONARY SPIRIT
IN THE LATIN QUARTER OF TO-DAY
_“Each Jack with his Jill.”_
BEN JONSON.
_“What is love? ‘Tis not hereafter;
Present mirth hath present laughter;
What’s to come is still unsure:
In delay there lies no plenty;
Then come kiss me, sweet-and-twenty;
Youth’s a stuff will not endure.”_
SHAKESPEARE.
_“It once might have been, once only:
We lodged in a street together,
You, a sparrow on the house-top lonely,
I, a lone she-bird of his feather.”_
ROBERT BROWNING.
_“The rôle of a pretty woman is more serious than we think.”_
MONTESQUIEU (Lettres Persanes).
_“I was twenty, age when the heart all illumined with poesy
guards religiously the subtile vibrations of the beautiful and
the just; the sweet human season in which one yearns to have a
thousand mouths to bite to bleeding—during an eternity—the bare
pink bosoms of the beautiful chimeras that go singing
by.”_—CLOVIS HUGUES.
“_I shall eternally hide my deepest emotions under the mask of_
insouciance _and the perruque of irony._”
JULES VALLÈS, in Jacques Vingtras—Le Bachelier.
[Illustration: A CAVEAU OF THE LATIN QUARTER]
A great deal has been said of late years about the change which has
taken place in the _Pays Latin_ and in the student character. The “old
boys” tell us, with sneering superiority or quavering regret, that the
_Quartier Latin_ is no longer what it was. Some evoke the revels and the
_grisettes_ depicted in Louis Huart’s _Physiologie de l’Etudiant_,
Musset’s _Mimi Pinson_, and Mürger’s _La Vie de Bohème_, and others the
rebellious souls of the student martyrs of 1789, 1830, 1848, and 1871.
According to the former, the contemporary student is a morose, prudent,
selfish, woman-hating, digging prig, with no higher dreams than
pettifogging politics and bourgeois comfort, and the _étudiante_ a
scheming, avaricious adventuress. According to the latter, he is
snobbish, extravagant, and dissipated, a brainless spendthrift, gambler,
debauchee, and drunkard, and his amorette, aside from differences of
sex, his perfect counterpart.
There is truth in these somewhat conflicting charges, since both these
types of student do exist. The curious thing is that similar complaints
have been made by the alumni out in the world for almost as long as
there have been alumni. It is not easy to go back far enough into the
history of the _Quartier Latin_ to escape caustic aspersions on its
ignoble present and fond reversions to its fine and proper past.
If there is one period that is vaunted to-day above another as the
golden age of the Latin Quarter, it is the period portrayed in the
writings of Mürger, De Musset, and Nestor Roqueplan,—period when “_le
vin était spirituel et la folie philosophique_”; period of innumerable
drolleries and of two revolutions; and yet each of these three writers,
even the happy-hearted Mürger, had recourse to that necessary, if
puerile, vanishing point of the perspective of thought,—an anterior
golden age.
A person who did not know their authorship would take the opening
chapters of De Musset’s _Confession d’un Enfant du Siècle_ to have been
written in this year of grace 1904 by a disgruntled university alumnus,
who was casting longing, lingering looks behind him to De Musset’s time.
As, for instance, this passage: “The ways of the students and the
artists—ways so fresh, so beautiful, so full of buoyant
youthfulness—felt the effects of the universal change. Men, in
separating from women, had muttered a word which wounds unto
death,—disdain. They plunged into wine, and ran after courtesans. The
students and the artists did likewise. They treated love as they treated
glory and religion: it was a hoary illusion. They haunted low places.
The _grisette_ so imaginative, so _romanesque_, so sweet and tender in
love, found herself left behind her counter. She was poor, and she was
no more lovable; she must have hats and gowns; she sold herself. O
shame! The young man who should have loved her, whom she would have
loved, he who formerly escorted her to the forests of Verrières and
Romainville, to the dances on the greensward, to the suppers in the
shady coverts, he who came to chat by the lamp in the back shop during
the long winter evenings, he who shared the morsel of bread steeped in
the sweat of her brow and her poor but sublime love,—he, this very man
who had deserted her, found her, during some night of orgy, within the
_lupanar_, pale and livid, utterly lost, with hunger on her lips and
prostitution in her heart.”
A sight-seeing visitor to the highways of the _Quartier_ is apt to feel
that the grumbling of the elders is well grounded. The conventional,
imperturbable, faultlessly attired _fils à papa_, and the over-dressed,
over-breezy, blondined young (?) women he observes on the café terraces
and in the public places, seem to have little or nothing in common with
the students and _grisettes_ of poetry and romance he is out for to see.
The _Quartier Latin_ has changed along with the rest of the world, of
course, in the last thirty eventful years. The humiliating memory of the
Franco-Prussian war and the failure of the Third Republic to fulfil its
promises of social equality and freedom have necessarily rendered the
student somewhat more reflective; the analytic fearlessness of science
has made him more relentlessly introspective; the growing fierceness of
the struggle for existence occasioned by the overcrowding of the
professions and the obligatory military service has forced him, in his
own despite, to be somewhat more practical; the phenomenal expansion of
industry, commerce, and finance, and their disillusionising tendencies,
have not, in the nature of things, left him entirely untainted; and the
equally phenomenal spread of luxury has instilled some absurd and
deplorable sybaritic notions into his head.
There has been a net loss in the _Quartier_—and where has there not
been?—in picturesqueness and spontaneity. But the vapouring cads and
the stolid “digs” who call down the wrath of the elders are not
representative: they are at the extremes of the student body. Taken all
in all, the student has changed less than the big world about him, not
only during the last thirty years, but even during the centuries which
have elapsed since he came to his class with a bundle of straw under his
arm for a seat and his professor lectured _sub Jove_, liable to the
interruptions of passing washerwomen and street porters.
He has changed less; and such changes as he has undergone are, for the
most part, superficial. His love of laughter, his love of liberty, and
his love of love have not been lost. They manifest themselves a little
differently, that is all.
His love of liberty is not, for the moment, manifested, as it was in the
beginning, when Rutebœuf and Villon played the highwayman and Clément
Marot was king of the Bassoche, by forcing the doors of the bourgeois
and beating the watch; nor, as it was in 1789, 1830, 1848, and 1871, by
mounting the barricade, though there is never a certainty that he will
not mount a barricade to-morrow. His love of laughter does not often
lead him to the pillaging of taverns and workshops nowadays, as it did
the roistering blade of the time of Louis XI., nor to the metamorphosing
of himself into a juggler, tumbler, clown, or mountebank. And his love
of love rarely blossoms into such dainty idyls as are recounted of the
period of the Restoration and Louis Philippe. Perhaps, if the truth were
known, it was rarely they so blossomed even then.
The ragged doublets, begging wallets, and pallets of straw have gone
forever, as have the street classes exposed to the inclemency of the
weather, of which they were the fitting accompaniment. The stiff, ugly
fashions of this superlatively ugly age—the cut-away and frock coats,
the “plug” and Derby hats, and the close-cropped hair—have, in a
measure, replaced the felts _à la_ Rubens and flowing ties and the wavy
locks, velvet jackets, and blouses and tasselled Basque _bérets_ of
Romanticism. Among the _étudiantes_ the simple muslin caps and chintz,
muslin, and gingham frocks have fled alarmed before modish hats and
tailor-made gowns. The _cancan_, a pitiably tame _cancan_, is danced—in
public—only to satisfy the curiosity of sensation-seeking tourists.
But, allowing for differences of customs and costumes, for the
unavoidable concessions to the more insistent claims of the spirit of
the age, the _Quartier Latin_ is still the same old _Quartier_.
There are numbers who still “live by the grace of God, eat when they
can,” not when they would, and “sell their books to the old book dealer
for a meal or an evening at the cabaret.” Poverty still stalks through
the _Pays Latin_, and is still bravely cuffed or blithely bluffed out of
countenance there. The student demand for rooms ranging from fifteen to
thirty francs a month, and the lively, almost fierce student patronage
of the _crèmeries_, _bouillons_, and little wine-shops (where an _à la
carte_ expenditure of 18 sous verges on extravagance), and of the _prix
fixe_ restaurants at 22 and 25 sous, are eloquent of a wide-spread
scarcity of funds.
“Flicoteaux exists, and will exist,” wrote Balzac in
_Illusions Perdues_, “as long as the student shall wish to
live. He eats there,—nothing more, nothing less; but he eats
there, as he works, with a sombre or joyous activity,
according to his circumstances and his character.”
One cannot have lived in the _Quartier_ long and not have had student
friends who had more than a passing acquaintance with hunger and for
whom a fire in winter was a festival event. In his mansard, where the
student is doomed to freeze in winter and broil in summer, or in his
stuffy, windowless _cabinet_, where he is doomed to suffocate the year
round, are enough outward signs of destitution to rive the heart of the
most hardened professional charity visitor; and yet, ten to one, this
poor devil of a “Jack” has his “Jill,” for the _grisette_ exists.
Yes, countless Jeremiads to the contrary notwithstanding, the _grisette_
exists; under another name or, rather, under several other names,—there
are words that defy strict definition; but she exists; changed somewhat,
as the student himself is changed somewhat, but unchanged, as he is
unchanged, in her love of laughter, her love of liberty, and her love of
love. Gracious, graceful, and tender as ever; ignorant and clever,
superstitious and sagacious, selfish and self-sacrificing, garrulous
and reticent, cruel and kind-hearted, outspoken and deceitful,
conscientious and unscrupulous, generous and avaricious, and so forth
_ad infinitum_; inconsequent, inconsistent, capricious, contradictory,
bewitching bundle of opposites; best of comrades and sincerest, because
ficklest, of mistresses; adorable, ever-changing, and unchangeable
_grisette_!
Greedy of dress, the dance, and the theatre, she will sacrifice them all
at the beck of a real affection. Indifferent to fortune when it comes
her way, she will go without eating to have her fortune told her. She
will ruin a nabob without a twinge, and share her last crust with the
poor. She is true to nothing but her latest impulse. She fears nothing
but being bored.
Jack nibbles scant bread and cheese, goes without wine and a fire, pawns
his overcoat, his watch, and his best hat to provide Jill with a silk
petticoat or a new hat. Jill refuses a carriage and pair for love of
Jack, and makes merry, coquettish shift, for his sake, with “a ribbon
and a rag”; and she will be as ready to go with him to the barricade
to-morrow (for she dearly loves a scrimmage) as she is to go with him to
a banquet or a ball to-night.
Thanks to Jack (this latter-day Abélard) and almost as much to Jill
(this latter-day Héloïse), to their unaffected sentimentalities and
innocent deviltries, the _Quartier_ has a luminous atmosphere of gayety
and poesy, is, in a word, an adequate emblem of “the folly of youth that
amuses itself breaking window-panes, and which is, nevertheless,
priceless beside the wisdom of age that mends them.”
Note the student’s street masking, dancing, and singing, and his
manifold extravagances at the time of the Carnival, the _Mi-carême_, and
the _Quatorze Juillet_, and on special outdoor festival occasions of his
own. Watch his pranks and listen to his magpie chatter in his
restaurants, cafés, and _brasseries_,—not the big, gaudy establishments
of the “_Boul’ Mich_,” where he apes the _chic_ of the bourgeois with
whose purse he comes into direct and, for him, disastrous competition,
and where, for the matter of that, the bourgeois often outnumbers him;
but in the dingy resorts of the back and side streets, where he is quite
his harum-scarum self, where he is free to shout, sing, caper, and guy
to his heart’s content, play combs and tin horns, and applaud with
beer-mugs and canes, use floors for chairs, chairs for hobby-horses,
tables for floors and chairs, and sandwiches for missiles, and dance his
Mariette upon his shoulder or dandle her upon his knee; and where he can
vary the monotony of his dominoes and _manille_ by throwing a somersault
or executing a pigeon-wing or by a turn at _savate_, leap-frog, or
puss-in-the-corner. Follow him into the meetings of his bizarre clubs
and sodalities; to the spots where he dances for the love of
dancing,—_not_ the _Bullier_, where, except for rare occasions, he
merely forms part of a show; to his midnight suppers and
masquerades,—_Bal des Internes_, _Bal des Quat’z’ Arts_, _Bal Julien_,
and others quite as characteristic because less renowned: in all these
places and situations he displays a faculty for impromptu larking, for
fabricating jocund pandemoniums at short notice, that prove him no
degenerate son of his father and no mean perpetuator of the mirthful
prowess of his grandsires and great-grandsires.
Go with him and his Finette, his Blanchette, his Rosette, his
Louisette, or his Juliette, for a Sunday picnic at Bois-Meudon or
Joinville-le-Pont, and share with them—if your wind is sufficient and
your Anglo-Saxon dignity can bear it—their more than infantile or
lamb-like gambols over the meadows and under the trees. Keep with him,
if you can be so privileged, his or her Saint’s Day. Celebrate with him
the _Fête des Rois_, the _Jour de l’An_, and the _Réveillon_. Rejoice
with him at the successful passing of his “exams” or condole with him
for being plucked. Help him empty the pannier and the cask received from
home. Enter into the spirit of his yarns, toasts, _gaudrioles_, and
_chansons_ on these occasions; into the spirit of his betrayal of
sentiment and play of wit, of his gallantry and persiflage, his repartee
and poetry, his exaggerations and fantasies; of his _pas-seuls_ and
_pas-à-quatres_, his revivals of _cancan_ (not the tame variety),
_bourrée_, and _chahut_, his imitations of fandangos and jigs, his
ceremonious travesties of saraband and minuet, and his impulsive
launching of _danses inédits_. Enjoy with him his accompaniments on
glasses and symphonies on plates, his sallies and his salads, his coffee
and his antics, his _pâtés_ and his mummeries, his horse-play and his
wine. Under their spell you will be convinced, if you have any relish
for life in you, that for graces of fellowship, refinements of revelry,
and subtleties of tomfoolery the student of the _Quartier_ has not his
peer upon the planet.
The memory of Mürger and the cult of merriment under misfortune which
his immortal _Vie de Bohème_ symbolises is faithfully cherished. His
anniversary is observed every summer about the time of St. Jean by a
pilgrimage to his monument in the Luxembourg and a banquet at an average
price of fifteen sous in some indulgent cabaret or café. A recent menu
was as follows: bread, wine, blood pudding, fried potatoes, almond
cakes, cigars for the students and flowers for the _étudiantes_. One
year a thoughtless board of managers committed the indiscretion of
elevating the price of the Mürger banquet to something over a franc,
whereat the whole _Quartier_ was thrown into a veritable tumult of
protest.
The real student cafes and cabarets[67]—which I would not name nor
locate for a kingdom, since their obscurity is the one thing that saves
them from being spoiled—are the lineal descendants and, _mutatis
mutandis_, the worthy successors of the cafés and cabarets of the
students’ fathers and grandfathers and of the taverns of his remote
forbears.
There the ancient custom of charcoaling or chalking the walls with
skits, epigrams, and caricatures, is kept up.[68]
There long-haired, unkempt poets mount on tables and counters, glass in
hand, and flaunt their new-born epics, tragedies, and ballads, or loll
in dreamful, languishing poses and intone their elegies and idyls, as
did Rutebœuf, Villon, Gringoire, and Cyrano de Bergerac in their
respective epochs; Molière, Boileau, Racine, and Crébillon, in the
seventeenth century, at the “_Mouton Blanc_”; as did only yesterday
Mérat, Anatole France, Léon Vallade, and Leconte de Lisle at the _Café
Voltaire_; De Banville, Mürger, Daudet, and Paul Arène at the _Café de
l’Europe_; Coppée, Mendès, Rollinat, Mallarmé, Bourget (who began as a
poet), Bouchor, Richepin, and Villiers de l’Isle-Adam at “The Sherry
Cobbler”; and as did all the versifiers of a generation at the _Café
Bobino_ (adjoining the famous little theatre of the same name), “which
was,” says Daudet, “the holy of holies for everybody who rhymed,
painted, and trod the boards in the _Quartier Latin_.”
There they fête the victories of their respective poetic sects—_Roman_,
_Instrumentiste_, _Magique_, _Magnifique_, _Déliquescent_, _Incohérent_,
or _Néo-Décadent_, as the case may be, just as the Romanticists in their
time, and the Parnassians, Décadents, and Symbolists in their times,
fêted their victories at the _Café Procope_. There they burn incense—as
it was burned erstwhile at the _Soirées_ and _Petits Soupers Procope_ to
Hugo, Baudelaire, and Verlaine—to their divinities who have
consented—oh, monstrous condescension!—to foregather with them.
There, too, they blend becomingly philosophy and disputation with good
cheer, as did D’Alembert, Voltaire, Condorcet, Diderot, and Rousseau in
this same all-absorbent Procope; Corot, Gérôme, Français, Jules Breton,
Baudry, Harpignies, Garnier, Falguière, André Theuriet, and Edmond About
at the _Café de Fleurus_; and Thérion, the original of the Elysée Mérant
of Daudet’s _Rois en Exil_, Wallon, the original of Colline in Mürger’s
_Vie de Bohème_, and Barbey d’Aurévilly, as famous for his
lace-embroidered neckties and red-banded white trousers as for his
caustic wit, at the _Café Tabourey_.
The student’s lyric gift and _penchant_ for good fellowship find further
vent in little cellar (_caveau_), back-room, or upper-room
_café-concerts_[69] of his own founding, at which, in a congenial
atmosphere of tobacco and beer, he sings and recites to sympathetic
listeners _chansons_ and monologues of his own composition, and at which
he permits the _étudiante_, who almost invariably fancies herself
predestined to a brilliant career on the operatic stage, to dispense, by
way of interlude, the popular _risqué_ and sentimental songs of the day.
The editorial staffs of the ephemeral literary journals and reviews
(_revues des jeunes_ and _journaux littéraires_) are so many mutual
admiration societies whose business meetings—there is so little
business to be done—are very apt to be banquets or _soirées
littéraires_. In fact, more than one sheet of the _Quartier_ has no
other business office than the back room of the cabaret its editors
frequent.
These amateur publications (in which, for the matter of that, nearly
every one who counts in French literature has made his début) are not
burdened with modesty. Witness the closing paragraph of the leading
editorial of the first, last, and only number of the _Royal-Bohème_:—
“Our aim is to demand charity of those who, having
intelligence and heart, will not see in us a band of useless
beggars; our hope, to more than repay our benefactors with the
fruits of our thoughts and the flowers of our dreams.”
For a naïve and concrete statement of the revolutionist’s pet formula,
“From every one according to his ability and to every one according to
his need,” or as an example of what would be called, in good American,
“unmitigated nerve,” the above would be hard to match.
An anonymous writer has defined the Bohemian as “a person who sees with
his own eyes, hears with his own ears, thinks his own thoughts, follows
the lead of his own heart, and holds to the realities of life wherever
they conflict with its conventions.” The typical Bohemian student of
Paris is a Bohemian of this sort. He loves his comfort as well as
another fellow, but he is not ready to sell his soul for it. Material
well-being at the price of submission—moral, social, or political—he
will none of. Practical considerations do not count with him when
they antagonise his ideals.
[Illustration: A LATIN QUARTER TYPE]
In his monumental _Illusions Perdues_, Balzac describes at length a
Latin Quarter _cénacle_ of nine persons, of which his hero, the poet
Lucien de Rubempré, became a member. Among other things, he says:—
“In this cold mansard the finest dreams of sentiment were
realised. Here brothers, all equally strong in different
regions of knowledge, enlightened each other in good faith,
telling one another everything, even their base thoughts,—all
of an immense instruction, and all tested in the crucible of
want.” Something of the beautiful earnestness of these ideal
and idealised Bohemians of Balzac has laid hold on the
Bohemian student of to-day. Like the members of this mansard
_cénacle_, he is seeking conscientiously and eagerly for a
comprehensive formula of life.
“The student is thinking,” writes an actual student, in answer
to the charges of materialism, dilettanteism, and subserviency
brought against the student body. “His thought is fermenting,
trying its force, preparing the future. The present hour is
grave, an hour of transition. In literature, in art, in
politics, something new is desired, expected, sought after.
Everywhere is chaos. Everywhere opposing elements clash. A
general synthesis or an exclusive choice from which harmony
may spring is called for. What are the laws of this synthesis,
what is the criterion of this choice? These are the questions
which, anxiously, without ceasing, and, perhaps, in spite of
himself, the contemporary youth is asking.”
There have been brief seasons when the whole university world—students
and faculties alike—has been afflicted with intellectual snobbishness,
indifference, discouragement, disillusion, fatigue, and even despair.
The present has its share of disillusion and discouragement, but it is
primarily a period of search. In the faculties, alongside of those
figure-heads—in which faculties always and everywhere have been
rich—who cling tenaciously to whatever is ancient, respectable, and
commonplace, are men who are looking up and out.[70] M. Lavisse, for
instance, with his recurring emphasis on the necessity of a closer union
of the university with the people, is a sort of second (and a more
scientific) Michelet; and M. Lavisse has several colleagues who are
little, if any, behind him in large suggestiveness. The thought-stirring
influence of the disinterested, investigating zeal of Pasteur (and his
successors, Roux and Duclaux) and of Berthelot is also profound. A
provincial professor, M. Hervé, has recently been disciplined for
unblushing anti-patriotism.
The _Collège Libre des Sciences Sociales_ (subsidised by the state) and
the _Ecole des Hautes Etudes Sociales_ have flung their doors wide open
to socialism. Furthermore, this once descried doctrine has a hold on the
university itself. Just what the following of socialism is among the
students, it is not possible, in the complete absence of reliable
statistics, to determine; but it is safe to say that it is large and
fervent, since student socialists appear in convincing force at every
important socialistic demonstration.
At the last anniversary of the “Bloody Week” of the Commune, in
Père-la-Chaise I chanced upon two students wearing red eglantines in
their buttonholes, with whom I had taken my meals for several weeks
previous without having been given the slightest intimation that they
were interested in social or political problems, to say nothing of being
socialists. The talk that resulted from this chance meeting revealed to
me that they were actively affiliated with an important socialistic
organisation, and that their convictions had marched fearlessly and far.
There are many such unproclaimed and unsuspected socialists in the
Quarter.
Anarchy also—that is, the philosophical type of anarchy so much in
favour in certain literary and artistic and even in certain scientific
groups—has an indefinite and fluctuating but extensive student
penumbra.
No, the student’s noble aspirations have not all forsaken him. He
abhors, as he has always abhorred, the prudish, the prudent, the
politic, the hypocritical, and the mean. He has not become hopelessly
subservient any more than he has become hopelessly morbid or hopelessly
unsentimental. He can still resent dictation, as he can still laugh and
love. If he truckles to his professors in the matter of Greek and Latin
roots, it is that Greek and Latin roots are subjects of supreme
indifference to him. When his honest thinking and his deeper emotions
are concerned, he is as recalcitrant as ever. He recognises no
authority, neither president nor prelate, general nor judge, nothing but
his own sense of truth and right.
He is thinking. What is more, he is ready to accept the logical
consequences of his thinking. When the time comes that these
consequences tally with action, he will act. He has the same imperious
need to act that he has to romp and to love. He looks to action—direct
action, street action—for redress of wrong. He cannot help it: it is
his nature. Intensity is the primal law of his being and will out,
though he is merely telling a story, playing a joke, kissing a cheek, or
singing a song. He is not fifty, and he is French. He has the Quixotism,
the fine rashness, the sublime foolhardiness, of his years and of his
race.
With a mobility impossible for the Teuton or Anglo-Saxon to understand,
but which may be, notwithstanding, the highest form of self-control, he
passes from vigorous frolic to vigorous work and _vice versa_
instantaneously. For him it is no farther from a laugh or a kiss to a
barricade than it is from a laugh to a kiss; and why should it be, when
the laugh, the kiss, and the barricade are (as they are with him),
co-ordinate assertions of liberty? “Frivolous as a pistol bullet,” he
flashes to his mark. Given the impact of provocation, he does not know
what veering or wabbling means.
Some contemporary—De Vogüé, I think—has said, “The student always
rules those who think they are ruling him,” in which he resembles a
womanly woman; “and, when the critical moment comes, he resumes his
liberty of action.”
If he has not been on a barricade in thirty years, it is because
neither Boulangism, Dreyfusism,[71] Déroulèdism, nor anti-Combeism,
though he played some part in each, won, or deserved to win, his full
allegiance. He has not taken the traditional chip off his shoulder,
however, nor given any one permission to tread on his toes. On the
contrary, he has shown flashes of his old temper, even in the tranquil
third of a century just passed, often enough to leave no doubt of its
persistence. It is only a little more than twenty years since the
_Quartier_ was in an uproar by reason of a slanderous article on the
students published in the _Cri du Peuple_ the day after the death of
Jules Vallès.
It is only a round fifteen years since the students, taking into their
own hands the punishment of the _souteneurs_ of the _Quartier_, ducked a
number of them in the frog-pond of the Luxembourg.
It is only ten years since the students set all Paris and all France by
the ears because the government had interfered—unwarrantably, as they
believed—with the immemorial usages of the _Quat’z’ Arts_ ball. The
_Quartier_ was flooded with soldiers, blood was shed, and there was one
life lost. The students carried their point. Parliament intervened, and
the proceedings begun in the courts against the organisers of the ball
were dropped. What the consequences might otherwise have been no one can
tell; but it is almost certain they would have been not local, but
national.
It is only six or seven years since it took a strong force of police to
defend against the wrath of the students the director of the _Ecole des
Arts Décoratifs_, whose offence was nothing more heinous than favouring
the sale, under school auspices, of the drawing materials, by dealing in
which a medical student had hitherto earned the money to pursue his
studies; and this state of things lasted several days. And only a little
over two years ago the students protested as vigorously against the
condemnation of Tailhade for his incendiary article in _Le Libertaire_
as they had against the condemnation of Richepin for his _Chansons des
Gueux_ a quarter of a century before.
It was in a café of the Left Bank that French volunteers for
the Boer war were recruited; and it was most of all from the
students, when Kruger came to Paris, that the ministry feared
the anti-British demonstrations that might bring international
complications,—demonstrations which it craftily diverted by allowing
the student pro-Boer enthusiasm the fullest scope.
The persecution of the Russian students by the Russian government
aroused among the students of Paris no little sympathy, which was given
expression in indignation meetings. It was probably quite as much the
dread of the student displeasure as of the anarchist bomb that kept the
czar on his last visit to France from entering Paris.
The above illustrations of the students’ irritability are the proverbial
straws that show which way the wind blows, and they might be multiplied
indefinitely.
There is no possible doubt of the student’s growing disgust with the
corruption and hypocrisy of the present republic,—this nominal
democracy that is in reality a plutocracy,—nor of his slowly
crystallising resolution to have either something better than a republic
or a better republic; and, in the long run, he always gets what he
wants. The student strength is out of all proportion to the student
numbers. Let the students take their old place in the streets of the
_Quartier_ to-morrow—5,000 or 500 strong—with a real rallying cry, and
thrills of joy and shudders of apprehension will traverse the length and
breadth of France.
[Illustration: THE PANTHEON]
* * * * *
“_The Quarter knows that the student is its aristocracy,—an
aristocracy that gives more than it gets, against whom the
Carmagnole or the ‘Ça Ira’ could not be sung, whose spirit is
democratic and of the people._”
GILBERT PARKER.
* * * * *