BOHEMIANS OF THE LATIN QUARTER
“_It took a rugged faith in the future to pass the
evenings—without a fire—polishing verses, after having painted
all day long interminable registers._”—EMILE GOUDEAU, in Dix Ans
de Bohème.
“_If an artist obeys the motive which may be called the natural
need of work, he deserves indulgence, perhaps, more than ever. He
obeys then neither ambition nor want. He obeys his heart: it were
easy to believe that he obeys God. Who can know why a man who is
neither vain nor in want of money decides to write?_”—ALFRED DE
MUSSET.
_“How much of priceless life were spent
With men that every virtue decks,
And women models of their sex,
Society’s true ornament,—
Ere we dared wander, nights like this,
Through wind and rain, and watch the Seine,
And feel the Boulevard break again
To warmth and light and bliss!”_
ROBERT BROWNING.
_“Say I’m weary, say I’m sad,
Say that health and wealth have missed me,
Say I’m growing old; but add—Jenny kissed me.”_
LEIGH HUNT.
The persons organically connected with the University of Paris—the
students and the professors—are only the nucleus, the rallying-point,
so to speak, of the intellectual population of the Latin Quarter. About
them, and quite as numerous as the thousands the university at any one
time enrolls, are gathered those students in the largest sense of the
word—painters, sculptors, architects, poets, novelists, critics,
journalists, historians, philosophers, philologists, scientists,
inventors, and bibliophiles—who need the help of lectures, museums,
laboratories, and libraries in their daily tasks, or who, dependent on
that indefinable something called atmosphere for productiveness, can
hardly conceive being at their scholarly or artistic best anywhere in
the world but in this particular corner of it which has given them their
training and inspiration.
About the university as a centre are also grouped those alumni who,
quite independently of their callings, cling to the _Quartier_ as a
cockney clings to the town for reasons gay or serious, trivial or
weighty, fantastic or rational,—attachment to a lodging, a café, a
club, a restaurant, to the Luxembourg Gardens or the quays of the Seine,
to book-stalls or shops of antiquities, to a chum or a mistress,—from
any of the various motives of habit, taste, sentiment, or passion.
Finally, the _Quartier_ retains those alumni who, cut off (whether by
the achievement of a degree or the failure to achieve one) from the
convenient parental remittances, are dismayed by the risks of a
penniless plunge into the great, unfamiliar world. In the _Quartier_,
where they are known, they can count on a modicum of credit for a
modicum of time from tailors, _restaurateurs_, and landlords, and on the
unusurious loans of a little knot of friends. “One knows,” wrote
Richepin, apropos of this matter, in his _Etapes d’un Réfractaire_,
“that at such an hour in the rue de l’Ecole de Médecine or at the head
of the rue Monsieur-le-Prince an easy-chair holds out its arms to him,
a tobacco pouch opens its heart to him, a friend lets him bellow his
verses. These are so many consolations. What do I say? They are so many
resources,—sometimes the only ones.”
In the _Quartier_, with these resources, a fellow will not starve in one
month or two, as he might elsewhere. Besides, if the worst comes to the
worst, there is the familiar and friendly Seine near by and the sweet,
clean “Doric little morgue,” where he is bound to feel at home and where
he will be speedily recognised.
A good proportion of these post-graduate denizens of the _Quarter_ are
either by choice or by necessity Bohemians. To the former class
(_Bohèmes par goût_) belongs my friend B——, whom for conveniences’ sake
we will call Berteil,—Gustave Berteil.
In a dingy hôtel of the rue Racine, just off the _Quartier’s_ highway,
the Boulevard St. Michel, in a room which costs perhaps forty francs a
month, perhaps forty-five, and which has nothing about it to distinguish
it from the room of a student who arrived in Paris yesterday, except for
a shelf of original and other editions of the elder French dramatists,
M. Berteil (Gustave Berteil, simple Gustave to his friends), bachelor,
aged forty-three, has lived continuously ever since his salad days.
Twenty-three years ago Gustave came up to Paris from a Provençal town,
where his father was a wealthy notary, to prepare himself, in pursuance
of the paternal desire, for admission to the bar. He was equipped with
so much knowledge of life as the average provincial youth has at twenty,
so much book knowledge as the average provincial _lycée_ affords, a
close acquaintance with the old French drama, for which the _lycée_
would have shuddered to be held accountable, and a consuming desire to
write for the contemporary stage.
During as many years as are ordinarily required for taking a degree in
law, Gustave devoted the pleasant days to foraging for old dramatists in
the book-stalls and along the quays, the rainy days to play-writing and
to perusing, repairing, and fondling his yellowed, tattered, worm-eaten
acquisitions in his room,—where he had his meals served him,—and his
evenings (whatever the weather) to the auditoriums or stage entrances of
the theatres and to the cafés where the _cabotins_ (actors) most do
congregate.
His relations to the law were limited, so far as is known, to the _bona
fide_ purchase of expensive legal text books, which he invariably
bartered, after a decent interval, for editions of his favourites,—a
device, less ingenious than ingenuous, for at once quieting his
conscience and obtaining larger remittances from home.
When the time came for Gustave (supposed young advocate) to return to
the Côte d’Azur and there assist his father in handling testaments and
deeds, he made a clean breast of it by post.
Thereupon the father cut off the son’s allowance, thinking thus “to
starve the rascal,” as he bluntly expressed it, “into submission.” He
very nearly succeeded in the starving part of his programme, as he
discovered to his genuine horror,—for he was at bottom not a bad
papa,—when, at the end of an anxious year without tidings from the boy,
he came to Paris and found his novel prodigal out at heels and elbows,
hollowed in at stomach, and rickety at the knees; with absolutely
nothing quite intact in fact about his person or surroundings—except
the shelf of old dramatists, which would easily have procured him food
and fuel. Berteil _père_ was mollified, if sadly disillusionised, by
this ocular demonstration of pluck on the part of Berteil _fils_. He
settled on his unnatural offspring an allowance of 2,500 francs a year,
to be trebled whenever he should abandon Bohemia for legitimate
business, and left him to live his own life in his own way.
This way has not turned out to be greatly different from the way of
Gustave’s nominal student days, and for at least ten years it has not
varied from one year to another by the value of a hair.
Every morning at ten, winter and summer, the hôtel garçon enters M.
Berteil’s room, without rapping, to bring him his coffee and to inform
him of the weather. If the garçon reports that it is really
pleasant,—and the garçon knows from long experience, you may be sure,
what M. Berteil considers really pleasant,—M. Berteil spends the day
book-hunting on the quays, where every _bouquineur_ and _bouquiniste_
greets him cordially as an old acquaintance. If the garçon’s weather
bulletin is unfavourable, he orders his _déjeuner_ and dinner sent up to
his room, and spends the day in the society of his old dramatists and
such of his friends, whose name is legion, as may chance to call. He
still haunts, evenings, as he did in the beginning, the cafés affected
by the _cabotins_, with whom he passes for the most brilliant
conversationalist on theatrical matters in or out of the “profession.”
But he abjured long ago theatre auditoriums and stage entrances, the
latter because he can now meet histrionic celebrities on an equal
footing, the former because he holds modern plays trash and modern
methods of interpreting old plays tinsel. He also put away long ago his
youthful, disquieting ambition to write for the contemporary stage,
because he despaired of matching the old dramatists in their manner and
disdained the manner of the new.
When he receives his monthly remittance of fr. 208.35, he gives the odd
centimes to the first street beggar he meets,—for luck,—and
consecrates fifty francs at once to a dinner with one or two of his
intimates and the _amie_ of his law-student (?) days, who, still fair,
though “fat and forty,” is the prosperous proprietress of a little
stationery shop in his street. The balance of the remittance amply
suffices him to live thirty days more in his modest fashion and to add a
new specimen or two to his collection of books.
I do not know of a person whose life is organised more rationally,—I
would say scientically if Gustave did not abhor the word science and all
its derivatives; and, in the teeth of the adage which warns us to call
no man happy till he dies, I do not hesitate to say that Gustave Berteil
is happy, and has been happy from the day of his reconciliation with his
sire. Indeed, if I were asked to name the happiest man of my
acquaintance, I should answer, “Gustave Berteil,” without a moment’s
pause.
Gustave, like the majority of the Bohemians from choice, was a Bohemian
by necessity for a time; but the _Quartier_ has always had a sprinkling
of brilliant, forceful personalities who have taken Bohemian vows
without ever having had to consider the bread-and-butter question.
Such was the deceased artist Henri Pille (associated in his latter days
with Montmartre), whose appearance implied utter poverty, but who is
said to have had landed property in a southern province which made the
fluctuations of the picture market a matter of little concern to him.
Such is, or, perhaps, was, the poet Maurice Bouchor, to whom Richepin
dedicated his virile volume, _Les Blasphèmes_. Bouchor, who now devotes
almost all his time and energy to the elevation of the working people
through reading clubs and the _Universités Populaires_, is regarded by
many of his old associates as a renegade from Bohemia. He is confessedly
a renegade from many of its livelier and noisier pleasures, as his age
and his gentle nature entitle him to be. But he still lives less
pretentiously than his means permit, is still “thinking his own
thoughts, following the leadings of his own heart, and holding to the
realities of life where-ever they conflict with its conventions,” and so
has not entirely forfeited his claim, it is to be hoped, to be ranked
with the Bohemians of the Quarter.
Such also is Jean Richepin, in spite of his sumptuous establishment on
the Right Bank, a sort of Parisian Menelik, whose barbaric costumes and
audacious exploits have entered as completely into the legendary lore of
the Quarter as the explosive inconsistencies of Jules Vallès and the
alternate aspirings and back-slidings of Paul Verlaine. In the early
eighties, when he paraded the fantastic title of _Roi des Truands_ (King
of the Vagrants), Richepin wore a talismanic bracelet and a
curiously-shaped hat, as badges of his rank. “There was even,” says his
fellow-Bohemian, Emile Goudeau, “an epic struggle between Jean Richepin
and the poor but great caricaturist André Gill [a Bohemian by necessity]
as to which of the two would root out of the hatteries of Paris the most
bizarre head-dress. Now Gill and now Richepin had the advantage. The
illustrious Sapeck was the judge of last resort, and awarded the palm to
the victor.” It would take a long chapter to describe the costumes
which have played a part in Richepin’s numerous and strange avatars. At
one time, if the narrative of a friend can be trusted, he remained in
hiding for almost a fortnight because his wardrobe was reduced to a
simple window curtain; and his adventures have been so extraordinary
that this ludicrous incident, improbable as it sounds, does not defy
belief.
[Illustration: JEAN RICHEPIN]
Richepin, Bouchor, and Paul Bourget, returning from “The Sherry Cobbler”
one night, halted under the arcade of the _Odéon_, named themselves _Les
Vivants_, and solemnly pledged each other eternal aid and fidelity. This
was the period when Bourget’s ambition was poetry, when he wore
pantaloons of water green, and imitated the miraculous cravats of Barbey
d’Aurévilly and the mode of living of Balzac. “Bourget submitted
himself,” says Goudeau, “to a ferocious Balzacian régime. He dined very
early, went to bed immediately after, and had himself called on the
stroke of 3 A.M..... The poet-recluse then drank two or three bowls of
black coffee, like Balzac, and, like Balzac, worked until seven. Then he
slept again for an hour, rose, for good this time, and applied himself
to the bread-winning activities which poverty imposes on young
littérateurs.”
Bourget, who began thus as a Bohemian from necessity, has ended as a
snob. He is a fair sample of the “_arrivé_” who disavows his past, and
“_Looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees
By which he did ascend._”
“I shall be adjudged severe, perhaps,” says the poet and
socialist deputy Clovis Hugues; “but I am of those who think
that the sacrifice of the _chevelure_ [long hair] is the most
dangerous of concessions to the modern _bourgeoisie_.... In
literature there is an affinity between the sudden
disappearance of the familiar mane and the forsaking of the
good comrades of the days of want. The transformation
effected, one may still have much _esprit_, but one has ceased
to be a good fellow. Beware, then, of the tribunes and the
poets who establish relations with the _garçons coiffeurs!_”
I do not know that Bourget ever had any “_chevelure_” to leave in the
hands of the Delilah of bourgeois respectability, but it would seem that
he had sacrificed on the altar of his parvenu-ship the sincere
soulfulness of which the “_chevelure_” as well as another thing may be
the visible symbol, since he apparently has no sympathy or helping hand
for his younger painter brother who is bravely struggling up to
recognition against heavy odds.
Even the conceited “_arrivés_” of literature and the arts are entitled
to a certain respect, especially when they have “arrived,” as has
Bourget, by force of genuine talent and persistent work. However
ridiculous the pretentious airs they assume, they are not cravens. They
have left Bohemia, but they have left it with colours flying, with all
the honours of war. As much cannot be said for the recreants,—called
the “_soumis_” or, still more expressively, the “_moutons_,”—who have
forsaken Bohemia, without the excuse of having “arrived,” from sheer
pusillanimity, because they found its paths of hardship, struggle, and
sacrifice too rugged in comparison with the easy highways of
bourgeoisdom. Towards these one’s dominating sentiment can hardly be
other than pity or contempt,—contempt, if they take greedily to the
flesh-pots without regret at selling their souls to Mammon; pity, if
they do regret.
Richepin, who knows this Bohemian world so well, has characterised the
two varieties of “_moutons_.” Of the first (the unconscious “_moutons_,”
so to speak) he says, “Having returned to the paternal roast, married
their little cousins, and established themselves notaries in towns of
thirty thousand inhabitants, they have the self-satisfaction of
rehearsing before the fire their poor-artist adventures with the
magniloquence of a traveller who describes a tiger hunt”; and of the
others (the conscious “_moutons_”), “Wretchedly sad in the existence
into which they have entered against their wishes, in the intellectual
tombs to which they have consigned themselves, they slowly atrophy. The
banal is particularly terrible in this,—that, if one returns to it
after having been disgusted with it, it is to find it more _banal_
still, and to die of it.”
Few of the Bohemians who have been intimately associated with the
Quarter during the last twenty-five or thirty years have been able to
make shift with their literature or their art alone. In order to keep
body and soul together, most have been constrained to resort to
compromises which are humiliating and disillusionising, but which are
not necessarily demoralising, and which stop a long way this side of
absolute surrender. Mallarmé taught English in the _lycées_ nearly all
his life, and conducted alone, during a short period, a journal entitled
_La Dernière Mode_. Verlaine was long an employee of the _Hôtel de
Ville_, had periods of teaching, and even tried his hand at farming.
Edmond Haraucourt,[72] Camille St. Croix, Léon Dierx, Emile Goudeau,
Canqueteau, and Trimouillat have been at one time or another petty
functionaries. Nearly all have dabbled in journalism. The happiest
compromise, however, the most independent form of dependence, so to say,
has been hit upon by Jacques Le Lorrain, poet and author of _L’Au Delà_,
who set up as a cobbler in 1896 in the rue du Sommerard, close by the
Cluny Museum.[73]
It is no infrequent thing for the loyal Bohemian to “arrive” too late
to profit by his success because his spirit has been imbittered or his
constitution ruined by the hardships he has undergone.
“The maimed heart, the heart poniarded in this mute struggle
for life,” says Jules Vallès in his _Réfractaires_, “cannot be
taken out of the chest and replaced by another. There are no
wooden hearts in the market. It remains there, bleeding, the
poniard at its centre. Rich one day, famous, perhaps, these
victims of obscure combats may perfume their sores if they
will, sponge up the blood, wipe away their tears; memory will
tear open the wounds, strip off the bandages. A word, a
song,—joyous or sad,—will be enough to raise in these sick
souls the phantom of the past.”
Jehan Rictus more recently, in his terrible _Soliloques du Pauvre_, has
expressed the same thought in another fashion:—
_“Même si qu’un jour j’ tornais au riche
Par un effet de vot’ Bonté,
Ce jour-là j’ f’rai mett’e une affiche,
On cherche à vendre un cœur gâté.”_
The following poem embodies the experience of a Latin Quarter Bohemian
whose hard-won victory came too late because his health was gone:—
I
_Do you remember, Marguerite,
How first we met in the Latin Quarter?
I was a poet, far from gay,
And you, well, you were—somebody’s daughter.
You dropped a glove upon the curb,—
Say, was it Fate or yourself who willed it?
I picked it up, a natural thing,
Laid it within the hand that had filled it.
“Merci, monsieur,” was all you said;
But, somehow, I knew from your tone, as you said it,
That, if I kept the hand awhile,
It would not count to my discredit.
So, hand in hand, we strolled and we chatted,
Happy as pups whose heads have been patted.
We drank a bock on the Saint Michel;
And, when we parted, I knew you so well
That I even dropped the “Mademoiselle.”
Do you remember I whispered low,
As I gazed in your eyes, so dark, so sweet,
“A bientôt, Marguerite,
Au revoir and à bientôt”?_
II
_Do you remember, Marguerite,
How we rubbed along in the Latin Quarter?
I Roland, the poet, almost gay,
And you, my mistress and—somebody’s daughter?
There were only a bed and a chair or two
In our tiny chamber under the mansard;
But our thoughts were simple, our hearts were true,
Something in each to the other answered.
Fresh youth was there, and love was there,
My hopes were strong, your face was fair;
And we lived and loved as devoted a pair
As ever old Paris sheltered.
In a worn béret and a faded blouse,
I scribbled for fame. You kept the house,—
That is, as much as there was to keep.
You must, sometimes, have suffered in silence then,—
It was, oh, so little I earned with my pen!—
But you never allowed me to see you weep.
And whenever I left for an hour or so,
My Marguerite, do you remember?
Over and over you made me repeat,
As if you’d a dread I’d get lost in the street,
“A bientôt, Marguerite,
Au revoir and à bientôt.”_
[Illustration: THE TAVERNE DU PANTHÉON ON MARDIGRAS]
III
_For ten long years, my Marguerite,
Heart has beaten to heart in the Latin Quarter,
The heart of the poet, almost gay,
The heart of the mistress, the—somebody’s daughter.
We’ve held to each other through thick and through thin,
As the years have gone out and the years have come in;
And we’ve always held to the Latin Quarter.
Now fame has come and my pen earns more,
We have furnishings choice and books in store.
What a change it is from the days of yore!
The starving days when we lived on air!
No more we climb to the hundredth stair;
We have plenty to eat and plenty to wear;
Whenever we wish, we can have a fire.
Once that was the acme of our desire.
We’re as snug and slick as the parvenus;
But it’s come too late for me and for you,
This luck that we prayed for when days were blue.
My work is done in the Latin Quarter.
God bless you, my dear, for your love for me!
Bless God for my love for—somebody’s daughter!_
IV
_It’s over, over, Marguerite,
The fair, fair life in the Latin Quarter.
I’m dying, dearest; and, when I’m dead,
You’ll be once more just—somebody’s daughter.
But you’ll not be driven to work for bread,
Or worse than work in the Latin Quarter.
Thank God for that! You can hold up your head:
So you’ve funds, it’s enough to be—somebody’s daughter.
All that is mine will be yours, of course,—
The world has been kind these last glad years,—
Don’t be foolish, I beg of you, over my corse,_
_Just give what is natural,—a few real tears.
Be a good girl, don’t yield to regret
For the thing that is gone. What is must be.
You were born for love, don’t you dare to forget!
Make some poor devil happy, as you’ve made me!
It’s the very last thing I shall ask, I ween;
For I feel the whirr of Death’s sickle keen....
I know not what this death may mean,
For I scarcely credit what churchmen tell
Of a future heaven and a future hell.
Without any future all is well,
If the life that is past has been loving and true,
As the life has been that we have to review;
But my heart is breaking at leaving you.
Well, just because it’s my habit so,
And because it makes it more natural to go,
I’ll say, quite as if we were likely to meet
“A bientôt, Marguerite,
Au revoir and à bientôt.”_
[Illustration: THE INSTITUTE]