THOSE WHO STARVE
“_Whoever throws himself into the streets of a great city, into
the mêlée of rapacities and ambitions, with a pen for a weapon,
takes_ ‘La Misère’ _for a flag._”—JEAN RICHEPIN, in Les Etapes
d’un Réfractaire.
“_You have the stuff of three poets in you; but, before you
become known, you run the risk of dying six times of hunger, if
you count on the income from your poetry for the means to live._”
Etienne Lousteau to Lucien de Rubempré, in BALZAC’s Illusions
Perdues.
“_Cressot died of want the day want forsook him. He died because
his body, habituated to suffering, was not able to accept
well-being._”
JULES VALLÈS.
Fifty odd years ago, in a volume of short stories,—little read in
France nowadays, and quite unknown, I fancy, elsewhere,—_Le Roman de
Toutes les Femmes_, Henry Mürger, author of the universally known and
loved _La Vie de Bohème_, narrated, under the title “_La Biographie d’un
Inconnu_,” the life history of a young sculptor who died of “the malady
to which science does not dare to give its true name, _la misère_.”
Joseph D——, born in a provincial town of poor, hard-working,
respectable parents, manifested a strong vocation for sculpture from his
early boyhood. His father having decided to put him to the carpenter’s
trade, Joseph, who had no notion of becoming a mechanic, went secretly
to the Free School of Design. The professor of the school procured him a
place as pupil with a government architect, which his father, under the
impression that carpentry and architecture were very much the same
thing, allowed him to accept. Joseph made such progress that he paid his
way at the end of a month, and at the end of six months earned his seven
or eight francs a day. But he was getting no nearer to sculpture by this
work; and he left the architect’s office, in the face of his father’s
opposition, and entered a sculptor’s atelier for study, paying a month
in advance for his teaching. He took part in a competition for admission
to the _Beaux-Arts_, and failed. Having no money with which to pay for
lessons, he was forced to leave the atelier, but was received—about the
only bit of good luck in his whole career—by the great master, Rude. He
lodged at this time in the rue du Cherche-Midi, over a cow stable, where
he was warmed only by what heat ascended through a hole in the floor.
Finding he could not pay for the models and materials necessary to enter
the _Salon_ competitions, he assisted for a year, without entirely
neglecting his studies, a noted ornament-worker, and put by enough to
enable him to pursue his art studies to good advantage. Working by
night in a cold workshop, he contracted a sickness which confined him to
his bed for a time, and which swept away all his savings. As soon as he
was well again, he went back to work for his first employer (the
architect), designing ornaments whose execution was intrusted to others.
He thus gained a little pile—about 1,200 francs—with which to compete
for the _Salon_. It was stolen by a roof-worker who, while repairing an
adjacent building, had seen him counting it.
This “mischance”—to go on in Mürger’s own language—“was a terrible
blow to Joseph. ‘There are some people who have no luck,’ he said, ‘who
would lose with all the trumps of the pack in their hands.’ ‘Never
mind,’ he resumed, brightening, ‘I will attempt the assault of the
Louvre[74] with what little I have left. I will enter there with plaster
instead of bronze or marble.’”
All his courage had returned. He tried making fanciful statuettes, which
he could prepare without the expense of hiring models; but he had little
success in selling them.
“_La Misère_ returned, and knocked at his door. She entered,
terrible and pitiless, like a vanquished foe whose turn has
come to triumph, and who uses without mercy the right of
reprisal. Joseph’s destitution reached such a point that, when
one of his friends invited him to dinner, he answered naïvely,
‘I’m afraid it will put me out: it’s not my day.’ For tobacco
he smoked walnut leaves, which he gathered in the forest of
Verrières, then dried, and chopped up fine.
“His sole hope was the coming _Salon_. In a room without a
fire,”—the odorous days of the calorific cow stable must have
seemed a paradise in retrospect,—“in a Siberian temperature,
he worked during three consecutive months on a Saint Antoine,
for he had been forced to renounce his group of Galatea, the
too costly execution of which he had deferred to better times.
Clay, in spite of its moderate cost, was too dear for his
empty purse, this same purse which had held almost a fortune;
for, by a strange irony, the thief who had taken his money had
left him his purse. He dug his clay himself, therefore, in
some fields of the _banlieue_. A rag-picker of the rue
Mouffetard whom he had met, I know not where, gave him
sittings at five sous an hour; and three-quarters of the time
the worthy man invented angelic ruses to avoid being paid.
“The date set for sending to the _Salon_ was near. It was time
to think of taking the plaster cast of the statue. Michelli,
Fontaine, and the other moulders who worked for the artists,
when they saw Joseph’s destitution, were unwilling to venture
credit. All he could obtain from one of them was the
furnishing of the necessary plaster. Aided by several friends,
Joseph took the cast of his statue himself. The operation
lasted two days, and turned out well.
“It was the eve of the day on which the jury was to begin its
sittings and on which the works to be passed upon must be at
the Louvre, by midnight at the very latest. During the night
it came on cold, and Joseph, to minimise the action of the
frost upon his statue, the still damp plaster of which had not
acquired the solidity which dryness gives, wrapped his only
blanket about it, and piled up on it, as a cuirass of warmth
against the darts of the cold, all his clothing, playing thus,
towards Saint Antoine, the rôle of Saint Martin.
“The next forenoon two or three friends came to aid Joseph in
transporting his statue to the Louvre. The wagon arrived four
hours too late. Nor was this all. At this point, fatality
intervened in the person of an absurd _concièrge_, who
declared that he would let nothing leave Joseph’s room before
the back rent was paid. The artists explained to the
_concièrge_ that a statue was not a piece of furniture, and
that the law did not permit him to hold it back. He would not
listen to reason, and, stony in his stubbornness, demanded a
written permit from the landlord. They hurried to Passy, where
the landlord lived, and did not find him. He would not be in
before dinner. They returned at the dinner hour. He had just
gone out. It was already eight o’clock in the evening. They
decided to apply to a justice of the peace. The justice turned
them over to the commissary of police, who began by sustaining
the _concièrge_, but who decided, on Joseph’s representations
of the injury that would be done him if he were made to miss
the _Salon_, to authorise the removal of the statue. It was
then eleven o’clock. They had barely an hour to get to the
Louvre. A dangerous coating of thin ice rendered the streets
impracticable. Vehicles could only advance at a walk. The
artists needed three hours at least, and they had only one.
Furthermore, repairs which were being made on the sewers
forced them to take the longest route. In crossing the
Pont-Neuf, Joseph and his friends heard it strike the
half-hour.
“‘It’s half-past eleven,’ said Joseph, who was sweating great
drops in spite of the fact that the thermometer marked a
north-pole temperature.
“‘It’s half-past twelve,’ volunteered a young man who detached
himself from a band of painters who were returning with their
pictures because they had arrived at the Louvre too late. They
were making the best of it, and were singing gaily,
‘_Allons-nous-en, gens de la noce! etc._’
“Joseph and his friends retraced their steps.
“A little later Joseph exposed his Saint Antoine and a
statuette of Marguerite at the _Exposition du Bazar Bonne
Nouvelle_ (corresponding to the modern _Salon des Réfusés_),
and sold the two to the Museum of Compiègne for 150 francs.
“This paltry sum enabled him to drag himself about some
time,—a year almost. Then he entered the hospital through the
intervention of an interne, for he had no characterised
malady. He died there of exhaustion at the end of three
months....
“Joseph D—— died at the age of twenty-three, without rancour
or recrimination against the art that had killed him, as a
brave soldier falls on the field of battle, saluting his
flag.”
If I have reproduced here with much fulness this old story of Mürger’s,
it is because Joseph D—— stands to the Bohemians of the _Quartier_ as
a kind of saint, _Saint Joseph de la Dèche_,[75] patron of poor artists,
and because the half-century during which civilisation is supposed to
have been advancing with enormous strides has made no appreciable
difference in the hardships of the needy artist or in the bravery with
which he faces them. Parents are still too often dull-witted, narrow,
and unsympathetic where their offspring are concerned. Rents are still
hard to pay, and art materials and models, food, clothes, and fuel hard
to be had just when they are most needed. Luck is as capricious, the
_concièrge_ as officious, winter as brutal, warmth as coy, and death as
chary of reprieves as ever. Joseph D—— is as strictly up to date as if
he had been born in 1881 and died in 1904. One hesitates to depict the
slow starvation of one’s acquaintances and friends, even under assumed
names; and the fateful career of Mürger’s Joseph is so perfectly typical
of the careers of the poor devils of artists in the _Quartier_ of the
present period that there is no necessity of depicting it.
Quite as terrible, though far less romantic than the _misère_ of the
Bohemian artist and littérateur, is the “_misère en habit noir_”—the
nomenclature is Balzac’s—of the patientless doctor, the briefless
barrister, and the unemployed or underpaid teacher and professor.
Your poet, your painter, or your sculptor, is, as a rule, a careless,
jolly dog, who has something of the genuine vagabond or adventurer in
him. He cannot tolerate anything that is cut and dried, not even
prosperity; and he would be infinitely bored by life if its elements of
uncertainty were quite eliminated. He prefers agreeable surprises to
disagreeable surprises, of course; but he prefers disagreeable surprises
to no surprises at all.
Dissimulation is not an indispensable part of his artistic baggage. He
may flaunt and vaunt his poverty, swear at it or make game of it, and be
none the less considered, at least in his _milieu_. He is excused from
playing the dismal farce of keeping up appearances. He may live in an
attic, clothe himself in tattered and seedy raiment, shirk the
bath-tub, ignore the very existence of the laundress and the barber, be
noisy and reckless, and defy all the canons of the social code without
stultifying himself or dishonouring his calling. Best of all, his life
is rarely a lonely one. He suffers, but he has the _camaraderie_ of
suffering; and this enables him to laugh or shout his misery away.
On the other hand, your so-called professional man—your physician, for
instance—must be more than decently lodged; be arrayed, at no matter
what hour of the day,—such is the Old World convention,—in a faultless
frock-coat and silk hat; be restrained, not to say dignified, in
demeanour; assume to be busy when he is weary unto death with
inaction,—and all this though hunger be consuming his very vitals.
He must button his suffering securely under his respectable black
waistcoat, and wear his professional complacence when his heart is torn
with sobs. If the reputable lodging or the reputable bearing fail him,
even for a little, he is lost irrevocably.
Four years ago or thereabouts a young physician, one Dr. Laporte, was
arraigned before a Paris court for criminal negligence in the practice
of his profession. The court condemned him to prison, in spite of the
testimony of an eminent specialist in his favour, but with the
palliative of the _Loi Bérenger_.[76]
The condemnation was based on these facts: Summoned to an emergency case
already compromised by lay treatment, and not possessing the surgical
instrument which it called for, Dr. Laporte cast around for a makeshift
tool. He used unsuccessfully the only thing in any way adapted to his
purpose that he discovered in the patient’s house; and then, finding his
efforts futile, and foreseeing the fatal issue, which was not slow to
arrive, he withdrew, saying there was nothing more to be done.
The reasons for the attachment of clemency to the sentence were these:
the evidence showed conclusively that he had had no patients for days
and perhaps weeks; that he had no money to keep in proper repair the
instruments he owned, to say nothing of buying the instrument in
question; and that he had not eaten a morsel of food for a full day
previous to the emergency visit, and was a prey to the giddiness of
hunger at the moment he made his deplorable attempt.
“The police investigation,” said the presiding judge to the
culprit while the trial was in progress, “shows you as
nervous, excitable, unbalanced, passing quickly from a state
of exaltation to a state of the most profound depression.”
What wonder!
[Illustration: THE LOUVRE]
“_They are logical in their insane heroism, they utter neither
cries nor plaints, they endure passively the obscure and
rigorous destiny which they allot themselves. They die for the
most part, decimated by the malady to which science does not
dare to give its true name_, ‘la misère.’”
HENRY MÜRGER, Introduction to La Vie de Bohème.