THOSE WHO KILL THEMSELVES
“_This world’s been too many for me._”
Mr. Tulliver, in GEORGE ELIOT’S Mill on the Floss.
“_Et j’ai grand peur à tout moment
De voir mourir d’épuisement
L’ami d’enfance,
Que pour moins de solennité
J’appelle ici le Chat Botté,
Mais qu’on nomme aussi l’espérance._”
ANDRÉ GILL.
“_Tu veux choisir ta mort;
Va sache bien mourir sans crainte niaise:
La lâcheté, c’est le travail sans pain,
Le suicide lent des ruines et des fournaises.
Ne tremble pas, sois fort, de ton dédain,
Et fais grève à la vie, enfant sans pain!_”
FRANCIS VIELÉ-GRIFFIN.
“_I have an education._
“_‘Now you are armed for the battle,’ said my professor, in
bidding me adieu. ‘Who triumphs at college enters victorious
into_ la carrière’ [career].
“_What_ carrière?
“_A former classmate of my father’s, who was passing through
Nantes and stopped off to see him, told him that one of their
fellow-classmates, he who had won all the prizes, had been found
dead—mangled and bloody—at the bottom of a_ carrière _[quarry]
of stone, into which he had cast himself after having been three
days without food._
“_It is not into this_ ‘carrière’ _I must enter, I take it,—at
least, not head first._”—JULES VALLÈS, in Jacques Vingtras—Le
Bachelier.
“_First came the silent gazers; next,
A screen of glass we’re thankful for;
Last, the sight’s self, the sermon’s text,
The three men who did most abhor
Their life in Paris yesterday,
So killed themselves: and now, enthroned
Each on his copper couch, they lay
Fronting me, waiting to be owned.
I thought, and think, their sin’s atoned._”
ROBERT BROWNING.
A recent morning paper contained the following item in its column of
“Crimes and Casualties”:—
“LA LITTÉRATURE QUI TUE.
“Enamoured of art and persuaded that he would quickly win a
name in Paris, Louis M——, a young man of twenty-five, left
some six months ago the little provincial city where he was
born.
“Like Balzac’s hero, Lucien de Rubempré, who entered the Latin
Quarter with two hundred and forty francs in money and the
manuscripts of _L’Archer de Charles IX._ and _Les
Marguerites_, this young provincial arrived in Paris with a
light purse and the bulky manuscript of a drama in five acts,
which he expected to get performed immediately. Unfortunately,
the purse was quickly emptied, and the drama was refused by
all the theatre managers.
“As his father was not rich, Louis M—— was unwilling to appeal
to him, and suffered without complaining.
“One day, however, he confessed his desperate situation to
Mme. C——, a friend of his family, who inhabits a comfortable
apartment, rue ——. Mme. C—— promised to see what she could do
for him. In the midst of a conversation with her yesterday he
drew a revolver from his pocket, and before she could catch
his arm fired a bullet into his heart.
“Death was instantaneous.”
Emile Goudeau, in his _Dix Ans de Bohème_, tells of the picturesque
suicide of a young Latin Quarter poet of his acquaintance:—
“D——, arrayed in a new suit and with his hands full of
bouquets, went up to the cashier’s desk and graciously adorned
the counter and corsage of the cashier. Then, turning to a
medical student, he said to him nonchalantly, ‘My dear fellow,
I have made a bet that the little point of the heart is _here_
between these two ribs’; and he designated a spot on his
vest. ‘Not at all,’ corrected the other, ‘it is lower down.
_There!_’ ‘I have lost then,’ D—— replied.
“He called a cab, and ordered the _cocher_ to drive him to the
Arc de Triomphe.
“When the _cocher_ arrived at the head of the Champs Elysées,
and opened the cab door, there was only a corpse upon the
cushions. D—— had shot himself full in the heart.”
The last season I passed on the Left Bank of the Seine, the _Quartier_
was deeply moved by the death of one of its faithful devotees, the poet
René Leclerc (_nom-de plume_, Robert de la Villoyo), who poisoned
himself with cyanide of potassium.
Leclerc was thirty-two at the time of his death. He had inhabited the
_Quartier_ for more than a decade. He had come thither to study medicine
in accordance with the wishes of his bourgeois parents; and he had
stayed on after all thought of practising as a physician had left him,
in order to pursue the literature which had become his passion.
[Illustration: Suicide of the Latin Quarter]
With the funds which his family provided he lived neither too well nor
too ill, working steadily, but gaining little, slowly developing a very
real, if not very robust, talent. He completed two romances, contributed
more or less regularly to _La Plume_ and the minor reviews and literary
weeklies of the Left Bank, which are the easier to enter since
contributors are paid nothing at all or very little, and placed an
occasional poem and _chronique_ in the daily press. Indeed, everything
went well with him up to the moment when his family, disgruntled at his
persistency in holding to so unprofitable a calling, deprived him of his
income. Then he set out bravely to earn his living with his pen. He
besieged editors with copy, but succeeded in placing but few articles;
and, when he did place them, he was more often than not kept waiting for
his pay, and sometimes defrauded out of it altogether. He tried in vain
to find a publisher for either of his two manuscript romances. He did
difficult and ill-paid hack-work, collaborating on a translation into
French of the Norwegian Strindberg and on an adaptation into French
verse of the _Mandragore_ of Machiavelli; and he undertook—oh, the
bitter pill!—the task of writing a volume on the _Côte d’Ivoire_, of
which he was as ignorant as he was of the borders of the supposititious
canals of the planet Mars. Even this concession to mercantilism—beyond
which it is not surprising he was unwilling to go—did not suffice to
procure him a living. He ran behind two quarters on his rent, and was
threatened with eviction. If not actually destitute, he was on the verge
of destitution. And yet to those who were familiar with René Leclerc’s
proud and sensitive spirit it seems more likely that it was disgust with
his lot rather than terror before the approach of want which drove him
to kill himself. It was because he held his art so high that he was
unwilling to survive its debasement. He had made concessions that he
regarded as enormous,—compromised his ideal, vulgarised his taste, and
prostituted (at least so it seemed to him) his talent. It was too much.
His last act-could a dying gesture well be finer?—was to reduce to
ashes the hateful manuscript of the _Côte d’Ivoire_ and all his other
writings that he held unworthy.
And journalists were found contemptible enough to censure him, to call
him coward, because he was too fastidious to stoop to their own corrupt,
degrading practices, even to save his life.
Among the works he left, as having his affection and which by one of
those ironies so common with the law went to his unappreciative family
(who might have saved him), was a collection of sweet and delicate
poems, entitled _La Guirlande de Marie_, dedicated to her who had shared
his prosperity and remained the faithful friend of his adversity.
Here are a few stanzas (from a poem of this collection) inscribed to
Henry Mürger, in which he sings the praises of the Bohemia by which he
died:—
_Les gais amoureux et les amoureuses
Ont depuis des ans, Mürger, déserté
La mansarde étroite où leurs voix rieuses
Narguaient le bon sens—et la pauvreté!_
_L’amour, aujourd’hui, s’est fait plus morose;
Schaunard est rentier, Colline est bourgeois,
Les lauriers coupés, et mortes les roses,
Ils ont désappris les chemins du bois._
_Rodolphe et Mimi, Marcel et Musette,
Dans leurs lits bien clos sont endormis;
Mais, vivante encor, leur chanson coquette
Eveille en nos vers des refrains amis;_
_Nos rèves, vois-tu, sont restés les mêmes:
Roses du matin, rires du printemps,
Châteaux en Espagne ou parcs en Bohème
Irréels ou vrais,—comme de ton temps!_
_Nous marchons leur pas, nous aussi, sans trève.
Vers quel but lointain? Nous n’en savons rien;
Baste! Il faut toujours que route s’achève.
Quand nous y serons, nous le verrons bien._
_Peu d’argent en poche, et point de bagages,
Nul regret d’antan pour nous chagriner,
Nous sommes parés pour les longs voyages,
Libres: rien à perdre, et tout à gagner!_
And here is a portion of a poem, “_Le Sabot de Noël_,” that is a sort of
playful prayer:—
_Mets dans mon sabot de Noël
Le jeune espoir qui nous fait libre,
Mets le désir profond de vivre
Et la fleur qui fleurit au ciel._
_Mets le succès dans les efforts,
Le travail sans souci ni doute,
Et comme étoile sur ma route
L’orgueil simple qui fait les forts._
Poor boy! It was this very “_orgueil simple_” that was his sad undoing.
“If the artist,” says Balzac in a memorable passage of his
_Cousine Bette_, “does not hurl himself into his work, like
Curtius into the gulf, without reflecting, and if, in this
crater, he does not dig like a miner buried under a
land-slide, ... his work perishes in the atelier, where
production becomes impossible; and he assists at the suicide
of his talent.”
René Leclerc, though no mere dawdler, as the twelve sizable manuscripts
he left behind him prove, was not endowed with either the mental or the
physical endurance to perform the Herculean labour which Balzac both
preached and practised. No more was Louis M—— nor D——; no more was
the brilliant Gérard de Nerval, who was found one winter morning in the
rue de la Vieille Lanterne hanging from a window-bar, nor the precocious
Escousse and Lebras, who at nineteen and sixteen respectively killed
themselves because a first phenomenal success with a drama was followed
by failures; no more was Chatterton in England. Few artists are. With
most of them ample time for revery is a prerequisite condition of
production. And yet the record seems to show that suicides are
relatively rare among poets and artists.
Perhaps this is because the record does not occupy itself with the poets
and artists, the Louis M——s and the D——s, who are not known as such
to the world at large. Or, perhaps, it is because so many die in the
hospital, like Gilbert, Malfilâtre, Hégésippe Moreau, and the Joseph
D—— of Mürger’s tale; and so many others are claimed by Charenton,
like Jules Jouy, Toulouse de Lautrec, and André Gill (for bedlam is
another Bohemian resort), that suicide has no need to assert its rights.
In any event, two cardinal qualities of the artistic temperament are
distinctly hostile to self-destruction; namely, faith in the sure
emergence and supremacy of genius, and a Hamlet-like irresolution that
prefers pouring out woes on paper to ending them by an energetic
trigger-pull.
The despair of the victims of the _misère en habit noir_, who are less
able to sustain themselves by faith and who are more capable of decisive
action, is, like their dress, much blacker and more austere; and
suicides are far commoner among them.
[Illustration: THE PONT DU CARROUSEL AT NIGHT]