MONTMARTRE AND “LA VACHE ENRAGÉE”
“La Gloire _marches before the_ Vache Enragée. _Follow her then,
try to catch up with her: there is honour even for those who
fall by the way._”
ADOLPHE WILLETTE, in Le Calvaire de la Vache Enragée.
“_Whatever scorn, whatever disgrace he may bring upon himself,
it is none the less true that the poor and obscure artist is
often worth more than the conquerors of the world; and there are
nobler hearts under the mansards where only three chairs, a bed,
a table, and a_ grisette _are to be found, than in the_ gémonies
dorées _and the_ abreuvoirs _of domestic ambition._”
ALFRED DE MUSSET, in Preface of Comédies et Proverbes.
“Ils feront de ta corne acérée une épée,
Ils feront de ton crâne une coupe sculptée,
Où nous boirons ton sang avivé de levains.
Ils feront de ton cuir des bottes de sept lieues
Pour courir au pays des illusions bleues
Ou vers l’âpre idéal des rouges lendemains.”
PAUL MARROT, in a poem to the Vache Enragée.
“_A la Vache Enragée, à Montmartre. Mademoiselle:—
“All those who have not known you are like untempered metals.
“Accept, I pray, my best wishes._
“E. FRÉMIET.”
“VIVE LA VACHE ENRAGÉE!
“_Son ami_,
“ALPHONSE DAUDET.”
The official restoration at the Carnival of 1896 of the historic but
long unobserved fête of the _Bœuf Gras_ (Fat Ox) was the signal for the
creation of the fête of the _Vache Enragée_ (Famished Cow) for that
year’s _Mi-carême_ by the denizens of Montmartre.
“Over against the _Bœuf Gras_, father of the golden calf,
emblem of the wealth and prosperity of the _bourgeoisie_,”
said the committee of organisation in its public manifesto,
“the painters, poets, and _chansonniers_ of the Mont des
Martyrs have prepared for the pleasure and edification of the
Parisians a spectacle which they call the Cavalcade of the
_Vache Enragée_ (or the _Vachalcade_), intended to present the
picture, sometimes poignant, of their struggles, their
sufferings, their ideals, their chasings after phantoms, their
unrealised dreams, their often illusory hopes.”
This brand-new cavalcade consisted of a large number of pedestrians
masquerading as ducks, geese, rabbits, frogs, camels, donkeys, cats,
pigs, and giraffes (the French words for all of which have well-defined
metaphorical meanings), and as chimeras, Pierrots and Pierrettes; and a
score or more of fantastic floats (designed by Montmartre artists of
repute), the subtle and piquant symbolism of which was all Greek to the
foreign tourists who chanced to see them and not too intelligible to
many Parisians who fancied they knew their Paris and their French. The
floats were entitled (to mention only those whose significance is fairly
obvious) _Pegasus Seized by the Sheriffs_, _The Anti-Landlord League_,
_The Wrestlers of Thought_, _The Temple of the Golden Calf_, _La Vache
Enragée through the Ages_, _Feeding of la Vache Enragée_, _Drawing the
Teeth of la Vache Enragée_, _A la Belle Etoile_,[81] and _Ma Tante_.[82]
The design for this last, by M. Grün, is given herewith.
Judges were satirically represented as side-whiskered café garçons; the
victims of _la misère en habit noir_, as street pavers, attired in
frayed frock-coats, wind-traversed shoes, and weather-beaten “plug”
hats; and _Les Jeunes_,[83] as small boys, in dunce-caps, playing on
drums.
[Illustration: GRÜN’S DESIGN FOR FLOAT IN CAVALCADE OF LA VACHE ENRAGÉE]
The street parade lasted from mid-day to sunset. It was preceded by a
theatrical representation for the benefit of destitute artists, which
included appropriate skits by the Montmartre playwrights Xanrof and
Courtéline, an address by the Montmartre socialist poet-deputy Clovis
Hugues, and rapid platform drawing by the Montmartre caricaturists, Pal
and Grün; and it was followed by bonfires and open-air dancing, and by a
masked ball at the _Moulin Rouge_, in the course of which a lottery was
drawn, whose principal prizes were sketches by Montmartre artists, among
them Faverot, Willette, Henri Pille, Roedel, Léandre, and Puvis de
Chavannes. The occasion was further signalised by the publication of a
magazine, _La Vache Enragée_, under the editorship of Willette.
The distinctive feature of the second and last[84] fête of the _Vache
Enragée_ (1897) was a musical poem, entitled “_Le Couronnement de la
Muse de Montmartre_,” by the Montmartre composer Gustave Charpentier,
now thrice famous as the author of _Louise_, in which Labour, figured by
one Mlle. Stumpp (a working-girl, who had been elected by ballot the
Montmartre Muse), was crowned by Beauty, figured by Cléo de Mérode.
Charpentier interpreted his cantata as follows:—
“The Muse is the plebeian virgin, the virtuous young
working-girl, the daughter of the people, administering a
formidable slap in the face to the _pères la pudeur_,[85]
showing these drivellers of another epoch, these dotards whose
sentiments are false, unnatural, and bourgeois, that it is
possible to achieve the beautiful in taking for a queen an
_ouvrière_, a _rosière_ even, of Montmartre, region of ideals
too young for their too old ideas.”
This Montmartre fête of the _Vache Enragée_ is unique among the fêtes of
the whole world, I fancy, in that it is at once a bold apotheosis of the
racking poverty of the artistic career and a defiant, masterful sneer at
the smugness of commercial Philistinism.[86] “It is a defence of _la
misère_ you are making,” said Zola in a communication to its
organisers,—“a defence of _la misère_; and, to my thinking, you are
right in making this defence.” Cyrano, a knight of the _vache enragée_,
who would have found himself delightfully at home in the Montmartre
cavalcade, made a similar defence, according to Rostand, some centuries
ago:—
“_Moi, c’est moralement que j’ai mes élégances.
Je ne m’attife pas ainsi qu’un freluquet,
Mais je suis plus soigné si je suis moins coquet.
Je ne sortirais pas avec, par négligence,
Un affront pas très-bien lavé, la conscience
Jaune encore de sommeil dans le coin de son œil,
Un honneur chiffoné, des scrupules en deuil.
Mais je marche sans rien sur moi qui ne reluise,
Empanaché d’indépendance et de franchise;
Ce n’est pas une taille avantageuse, c’est
Mon âme que je cambre ainsi qu’en un corset,
Et tout couvert d’exploits qu’en rubans je m’attache,
Retroussant mon esprit ainsi qu’une moustache,
Je fais en traversant les groupes et les ronds,
Sonner les vérités comme des éperons._”
The device, _Vache Enragée_, cavalierly adopted as their catchword by
the painters, sculptors, poets, and musicians of Montmartre, was taken
directly from the title of a Montmartre romance by Emile Goudeau, who
was named on that account honorary president of the festival; but the
phrase had long been current in French conversation and literature to
designate the poverty of the _prolétariat artistique et littéraire_.
Thus, the great Daudet wrote regarding one of the characters of
_Jack_:—
“Then commenced for him this terrible ordeal of the _vache
enragée_, which either breaks you at once or bronzes you
forever.
“He became one of the ten thousand poor devils, famished and
proud, who rise in Paris every morning giddy with hunger and
ambitious dreams, nibble surreptitiously a sou loaf, which
they keep hidden away in the bottoms of their pockets, blacken
their clothes with penfuls of ink, whiten their shirt collars
with billiard chalk, and warm themselves over the registers of
the libraries and churches.... Art is such a wizard! It
creates a sun which shines for all, like Nature’s sun; and
those who approach it, even the poor, even the ill-favoured,
even the grotesque, carry away a little of its warmth and its
radiance. This celestial flame, imprudently ravished, which
the unsuccessful guard in the depths of their eyes, renders
them redoubtable sometimes, oftenest ridiculous; but their
existence gains from it a grandiose serenity, a contemptuous
indifference to misfortune, and a grace in suffering that
other kinds of poverty do not know.”
The Montmartre _Vache Enragée_, you see, is the same old Latin Quarter
_Misère_ under another label, the “Bohemian road by which every man who
enters the arts without other means of existence than art itself will be
forced to travel, ... the training school of the artistic profession,
the preface to the Academy, the _Hôtel-Dieu_, or the Morgue.”[87]
Over the stony and thorny route of the _Vache Enragée_ a large part of
the literary, artistic, and musical celebrities of France have at one
time or another passed.
Millet painting signs at Cherbourg and hasty portraits for the soldiers
at Havre—_Vache Enragée_!
Barye forced to go about as a pedler in order to vend his now priceless
statuettes—_Vache Enragée_!
Hector Berlioz, ridiculed for wanting the courage to put a bullet
through his brain, accepting newspaper work to live, failing to write a
symphony the theme of which came to him in a dream, because he would not
have money enough to bring it out if it were written—_Vache Enragée_!
Audran and Charles Lecocq (who took prizes, the one in composition, the
other in fugue, at the _Conservatoire_ and the Niedermeyer School
respectively) writing opéra bouffe to keep the wolf from the
door—_Vache Enragée_!
Albert Glatigny, out on a hunt for funds to bury the dead mistress of a
friend, swimming the Seine (though he was a poor swimmer and it was late
autumn) because he could not pay the small bridge toll which was then
exacted—_Vache Enragée_!
The saturnine De Nerval and the brilliant Gauthier chasing dinners, the
first in back alley-ways and the second in the salon of the Princesse
Mathilde—_Vache Enragée_!
_Vache Enragée_, also, young Balzac living on a few sous a day and
writing the inevitable five-act drama in an icy garret, because his
father, who had intended the boy for the law, had said to him,
“There are people who have a vocation for dying in the hospital,” and
his mother, “It seems that monsieur has a taste for misery!”
_Vache Enragée_—young Daudet arriving in Paris, after an over-long
fast, shod only with rubbers (as he has narrated in _Trente Ans_ and _Le
Petit Chose_), and existing there on his share of the seventy-five
francs a month his brother Ernest earned!
And _Vache Enragée_—young Zola stifling in a “room under the roof where
one was forced to perform a series of acrobatic feats to sit down—on
the bed”; living several days on bread soaked in olive oil sent to him
from the Midi, and pitifully imploring the editors of _Le Travail_ (a
little Latin Quarter review) to print for him a poem written in the
style of De Musset!
_Vache Enragée_ again—Eugène Boudin sighing in his journal: “There are
moments hard to bear when on every side you see the impossibility of
getting a little money. There is a poor old mother who entreats, there
is the rent to pay, there is the necessity of clothes, of brushes, of
canvases, which you finally have to get along without. Petty economy and
the worry that accompanies it kill you by inches.”
_Vache Enragée_, in short, the privations of all those for whom liberty
is a necessity, and beauty a religion, and with whom a glowing faith in
art more than atones for the absence of bread, of fire, and of clothes!
Winter before last a painter, fifty-three years of age, well known in
art circles, was detected extracting money out of a church poor-box with
the aid of a glue-smeared stick. This revolting sort of infidelity to
the hard fare of the _Vache Enragée_ is, it need hardly be said, a rare
occurrence; but it is not rare for men to be forced to familiarity with
the _Vache Enragée_ after they have become famous.
Glatigny never got entirely free of poverty, and it was of disease
produced by hunger and exposure that both he and his wife died.
[Illustration: A LA MUSE DE MONTMARTRE.
_O Muse de Montmartre, ouvrière aux doigts fins
Qui saurait broder d’or l’azur des Séraphins
Et qui daignez sourire aux larmes des poètes,
Salut! Salut! pour t’applaudir nos mains sont prêtes._
_Te voici parmi nous, vagues chercheurs de rien,
L’un sculpteur, l’autre peintre, un tel musicien,
Guettant un idéal parmi les âpres cimes,
Songeurs des formes et des rhythmes et des rimes.
Te voici parmi nous! Tes levres de corail
Nous chantent le couplet sublime du travail._
EMILE GOUDEAU.
THE REAL MONTMARTRE
_La rue Mont-Cénis_]
At the height of his fame the critic Gustave Planche was often without
money enough to go to the barber-shop,—if Vallès is to be
believed,—and occupied an attic at twenty-five francs a month. He
never earned more than four thousand francs a year, and rarely as much
as three thousand francs,—a sum which was destitution, nothing more nor
less, for a person whose vocation forced him into the world and whose
inability to walk necessitated a perpetual outlay for carriage hire.
In a striking passage of his novel, _La Faiseuse de Gloire_, Paul Brulat
writes: “An old man approached the desk timidly, and stammered something
in a low voice. The editor, annoyed at being interrupted, repelled him
with cruel words. ‘Oh, say now, won’t you ever stop coming here
begging?’ The old man moved off with a senile shake of the head. He bore
a great name in literature. He was called Villiers de l’Isle-Adam.”
Henry Becque, whose _Corbeaux_ was refused by ten theatres before it was
accepted by the _Théâtre Français_, “lived on a seventh floor, under the
roof,” says his friend and admirer, Henri Bauer. “The furnishings of his
single room were an iron bed, an unpainted table, and three
straw-bottomed chairs.” And this was long after Becque’s masterpieces
had been given a hearing, at a time when he was regarded by a large and
influential group of his contemporaries as the greatest French dramatist
the last half of the nineteenth century had produced.
Berlioz, Millet, Verlaine, and Hégésippe Moreau ate of the _Vache
Enragée_, more or less regularly, all their lives. So have many other
artistic natures, not the least worthy and not the least celebrated.
Franz Servais, after having given fifteen years of labour, at untold
sacrifice, to the creation and perfection of his opera, _L’Apollonide_,
won the support of the Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar only to have his patron
die just as the preparations for the production of the opera were
complete and to die himself a few days after. In a letter to a friend,
Servais has related how on one occasion, when everything looked dark, he
missed an almost certain order from a musical publisher for want of
presentable shoes: “I was unable to keep the appointment. At the last
moment I perceived that my best shoes were all broken open. They gaped
at the ends like carps’ noses. You can imagine the face of the good
editor, his regret for having offered me a little money, and how he
would have torn up the contract! I must wait for better luck.”
Franz Servais took himself too tragically in letting a good thing escape
him simply because he had holes in his shoes. But Servais, though
identified with Paris, was a Belgian, not a Frenchman, by birth, and was
not a _Montmartrois_.
With a remunerative offer as an incentive, your typical _Montmartrois_
would not have taken more than fifteen minutes to beg, borrow, or steal,
hire or buy on the strength of the offer itself or of a supposititious
heritage, the necessary shoes, and would have celebrated the happy
outcome with his friends the very same night. Resourcefulness is a
salient trait of the Bohemian wherever he may be found, and of none more
than of the Bohemian of Montmartre. His contrivances for making the pot
boil are legion.
In a tight place, he utilises the erudition, of which he is ordinarily
more than half ashamed, in teaching foreigners French, working on
cyclopedias or dictionaries, and giving lessons in the “three Rs,” for a
few sous a day, to the children of his _concièrge_. He gives lessons
just as readily in dancing, fencing, sparring, and _savate_.
If his talents are literary, he contributes to diet and fashion
journals, writes advertisements or puffs for trade organs, sings songs
of his own composition in the streets, or prints original poetry on
slips and sells it in the cafés. He reads and writes letters at so much
a piece for illiterate neighbours, supplies street singers (at a nominal
price) with words for their songs, makes almost presentable (by editing)
the productions of snobs, and constructs for _feuilletonistes_ romances
which said _feuilletonistes_ sign. He writes indifferently theses for
students, brochures for pamphleteers, placards and palaver for strolling
showmen, prospectuses for charlatans, anniversary rhymes for husbands or
wives, god-parents or god-children, toasts for empty-pated banqueters,
and funeral speeches or elegies for unimaginative mourners. If his gift
is musical, he plays in night orchestras. If his gift is artistic, he
poses as a model for his companions of the chisel and brush who chance
to be in funds, copies old masters at ten to fifteen francs a picture,
designs posters and daubs scenery for the fêtes of the faubourgs,
colours crude religious prints for the provincial market, paints
workingmen’s children in their first communion regalia, and makes
portraits for fond widows and widowers—between demise and burial—of
their dear deceased. If his health is particularly robust, he figures
the cured patient in quack doctors’ waiting-rooms.
He may, quite regardless of his bent, hawk toys in the street on fête
days, play the races (under sealed orders) for a friend too busy to
attend, fish tadpoles in the suburbs for the reptiles of menageries,
help out a small shopkeeper with his book-keeping, back envelopes for a
big bazaar, perform the duties of a valet under the euphuistic title of
secretary, and advertise wares by demanding them insistently where they
are not kept. He may even make himself a printer’s, house painter’s,
mason’s, blacksmith’s, or carpenter’s assistant, a market porter, or a
_déménageur_ (mover). In all these contingencies, however, the immediate
need having been satisfied, he takes up again his normal autonomous
existence. He has not bound himself to lasting servitude. He has not
sold his soul, and it is a rare thing that he is seriously demoralised
by his half-humorous concessions. On the other hand, he has touched life
at new points, deepened his sentiments, broadened his human sympathies,
and lifted his horizon without lowering his ideal.
“Implacable sausage!” cries the author of _Le Dimanche d’un Jeune Homme
Pauvre_. “We do not give sufficient credit to the influence of the hog
on literature! I know men of letters _en route_ for the Academy who ate
kilometres of _boudin_ [blood pudding] during the hard years of their
novitiate.” This is merely a highly concrete way of saying that the
French Bohemian is much less exercised over the savouriness of food than
over its staying power. The problem he has to solve oftenest is not how
most to tickle his palate, but how to give his system the maximum of
bracing at the minimum of expense. To the solution of this problem, the
_Montmartrois_ brings an address that is amazing. So long as he can keep
in the good graces of his _restaurateur_ or of his butcher, baker,
grocer, and sausage-man by painting handsome portraits of them and of
their families or by flooding them with inscribed copies of his poems,
the equation is a simple one, and all goes easily enough. But when the
inevitable day of reckoning comes for him, when credit is withdrawn, and
all relations with these well-nigh indispensable individuals are
incontinently snapped; when, furthermore, he has dined with his friend
the interne, J——, at the hospital table with his friend the sergeant,
K——, in the sub-officers’ mess, and with his former classmates, the
Baron Y—— and the leather merchant X——, in their homes, and when he
has made the round of the _cénacles_ at which he is welcome for the
verses he recites, the stories he tells, or the songs he sings,—then
the simple equation becomes an affected quadratic one, and a lugubrious
change comes over the spirit of his dreams. Then bread and _boudin_,
bread and cheese, bread and a sou’s worth of the meat kept for dogs, or
bread helped down with a glass of _vin ordinaire_ at the corner
wine-shop, are the most that he can hope to obtain, unless, like Zola,
he takes to snaring sparrows on the house-top, and roasting them,
spitted on a curtain rod, by way of a brochette.
If the bread and cheese and the bread and wine also fail, if the
_boudin_ has to be put into the category of the unattainable along with
beefsteak, and if the sparrows are coy, he may join the cats, dogs, and
rag-pickers in exploring the garbage boxes at the break of morning; but
he usually prefers—perhaps because he does not easily accommodate
himself to early rising—some less direct, more diplomatic proceeding,
such as tasting the stock of the market and street venders with the
fastidious air of an intending buyer. Thus, walking up to a barrow of
strawberries: “Your strawberries look good. How do you sell them?” “Four
sous a pound.” “May I taste them?” “Certainly.”
He munches and savours two or three berries attentively, as if almost
convinced of their merit, puts his hand into his pocket and draws out
his purse as if to order, but, tasting another berry as he does so,
makes a wry face, and ejaculates, “No, no, they’ll never do at all:
they’re too sour,” and moves on to another barrow.
Berry by berry, slowly, but surely, he amasses a meal, as the miser
amasses his hoard; and, if he has the luck to get a sou’s worth of bread
with which to punctuate his butter, cheese, and fruit tastings, the
result is not half a gastronomic failure. Happy, however, the taster
whose crisis of penury coincides with the opening of the “Ham Fair”!
Picking petty quarrels for the sake of the substantial festivity that is
likely to accompany the making up and betting on its eating capacity are
other favourite ways for penniless hunger to satisfy itself.
Catulle Mendès, who made the acquaintance of the _Vache Enragée_ during
the brief period when his family were unsympathetic with his aims, tells
of a poet, presumably himself, who after thirty-six hours of abstinence
succeeded in breaking his fast by making a gingerbread bet:—
“The poet eyed the sweets wistfully, eyed them long.... He was
just going away, I know not where, in the direction of the
river perhaps, when he heard his name called. It was some one
he scarcely knew, a young man also, not a poet, met somewhere
by chance.
“‘How hard you look at that gingerbread!’ he said. The poet
replied with gravity, ‘It is because I adore it.’
“‘Really?’
“‘Yes, to distraction. There are days when I could eat a
franc’s worth at a sitting.’
“‘You’re joking. I bet you the franc you can’t eat as many as
you say.’
“‘I take you up,’ cried the _Parnassien_, with starveling
enthusiasm; and he precipitated himself upon the stall, and
devoured the gingerbreads,—would have eaten of them for still
greater, for enormous, sums,—taking pains to choose the pieces
without almonds, which were poorer in quality, but which were
bigger for the price. It was thus that he did not die of
hunger.”
It is said that Ibsen in his early days of poverty before the
publication of _Brand_ made it an invariable rule to take a long walk at
noon, whether he had the money for a meal or not, in order not to lose
caste—and hence credit—with his landlady by revealing that he could
not dine as often as every day. Similarly the Montmartre Bohemian
displays a fine pathetico-humorous ingenuity in making others believe he
has eaten when he has not, and even—supreme prestidigitation!—in
making himself believe it: as when he passes the day in bed or puts his
watch back to cheat his appetite; when he takes his _déjeuner_ in the
middle of the afternoon, not only to get a dinner at the price of a
_déjeuner_, but to afford himself the illusion of having both; or when
he makes the Heaven-sent _apéritif_ that should precede or the
gratuitous cigar that should follow a dinner, stand him in the stead of
the dinner itself.
His so-called affectations and poses—bizarre accoutrement and
outlandish speech—are, in the last analysis, so many devices for cheap
living, so many expedients for disguising the completeness of his
destitution from his fellows and from himself, so many talismans for
metamorphosing a hard necessity into an idiosyncrasy of genius, or so
many modes of whistling, so to speak, to keep up his courage. Thus
Goudeau, under the stress of exceptional ill-hap, consecrated himself
solemnly to playing practical jokes in a _phalanstère_; and the rotund
and rippling Raoul Ponchon flaunted a splendid Breton costume at the
very time he had nothing better than a wash-house to sleep in.
[Illustration: MONTMARTRE TYPES]
If the _Montmartrois_ carries his hat in his hand with a distrait,
philosophical air, it is certain that the last piece of head-gear
Providence has vouchsafed him is either too large or too small for his
head. If he speaks feelingly of his old aunt, he is referring
indubitably to the pawn-shop, whose quotations are of far more moment to
him than are those of the Bourse. If you detect him in a railway
station, waiting more than half an hour for a train, it is that the
shelter of the café has been, for some reason or other, temporarily
denied him. And, if he appears more than half a mile from his lodging in
dressing-gown and slippers, with a salad or a bunch of radishes under
his arm, it is either because dressing-gown and slippers are, for the
nonce, the sum of his wardrobe or because he has put on the
dressing-gown to match compulsory slippers or the slippers to match a
compulsory dressing-gown. You may be sure he has carried the salad or
radishes ever since he set out, and that he will renew them when they
have become too withered to serve his deceitful end.
[Illustration: THE REAL MONTMARTRE
_La rue St. Vincent, known as “the lovers’ walk”_]
He carries his burdens buoyantly, as the best type of old man carries
his years, and, making hard necessity pass for a joke, extracts no end
of amusement from his vicissitudes, caps himself with a Merry Andrew’s
bonnet, and “drapes himself,” to use a phrase of Maurice Barrès, “with
irony in order not to appear stark naked before men.”
A young couple, who had long been habitués of a certain restaurant in
the rue Lepic, entered one night equipped with violin and guitar, made
profound obeisance to the assembled company, and announced that they had
got to earn their dinner on the spot that night, if they had one. With
their instruments and voices they proceeded to earn it, amid their own
and their whilom comrades’ jests and laughter. After a fortnight of this
unenviable, if mirthful, prominence, their fortunes mended; and they
dropped contentedly back into their obscurity as ordinary diners, the
richer for an invigorating experience. Three handsome, long-haired,
bearded fellows of the rue Menessier have taken Paris by storm this very
summer with their mandolin and guitar music in the open air.
A Montmartre Bohemian, who is at once a superior musician and a species
of Hercules, having made himself provisionally a _déménageur_, amused
himself mightily at his work, confounding the petty bourgeois he served,
by playing their pianos. The natural though totally unforeseen result of
his somewhat impudent facetiousness was an opportunity to give lessons,
which floated him back into the musical current.
Another _Montmartrois_ (Raoul Pouchon, I think), wearied with walking
the streets the night after he had been evicted from his lodging,
revenged himself by baiting with sugar all the street curs of his
district, and introducing them at two o’clock in the morning into the
stairway of his evictor’s house.
Sometimes, perhaps, these merry Montmartre shifts come near
transgressing the bounds which separate fun from lawlessness. The
_déménagement à la cloche de bois_,[88] the nailing of one’s emptied
trunk to the floor to impress one’s _concièrge_ with its weight, the
paying of one’s rent by abstracting the clothes of one’s landlord and
putting them in pawn, and the grateful acceptance of the _pâté_, chop,
or sausage brought in by one’s pilfering dog, as if one were Elijah and
one’s _Toutou_ were a raven of the wild, can hardly be defended by any
of the recognised bourgeois codes. But even these flagrant escapades
proceed less from malice than from mischief, and even these fall
strangely in line with equity in nine cases out of ten.
On its Bohemian side, Montmartre is a second and, to the thinking of
many, a greater and more brilliant _Quartier Latin_.
Here abound the literary and artistic restaurants, cafés, _bouillons_,
_crèmeries_, and cabarets which have always conferred a peculiar charm
on Paris. Here, as well as in the Latin Quarter (and more numerous and
varied, perhaps, here than there), are the modern counterparts of the
_Treille d’Or_, the _Pomme de Pin_, the _Radis Couronné_, the _Pressoir
d’Or_, the _Ceinture qui Craque_, the _Deux Torches_, and the _Trois
Entonnoirs_ of the time of Cyrano; the _Procope_, _de Valois_, _de Foy_,
_du Caveau_, and _Mécanique_ of the time of Louis XVI.; the _Viot_,
_Bléry_, _Flicoteaux_, _de Buci_, and _de la Rotonde_ of the Restoration
and Louis Philippe; the _Molière_, _Voltaire_, _L’Orient_, “_Sherry
Cobbler_,” and _Bobino_ of the last empire. And here they have been long
enough to have already developed their legends and _esprit de corps_.
In the _Brasseries des Martyrs_ and _Fontaine_, _Cabarets de
Ramponneau_, _de la Grande Pinte_, _du Plus Grand Bock_, and _de la
Place Belhomme_, and the _Cafés Jean Goujon_, _Laplace_, _de la Nouvelle
Athénée_, and _Du Rat Mort_,[89] poets and painters, now grizzled,
chattered and revelled before the grey hairs came. Dinochaux, of the
_Café Dinochaux_ (rue Bréda), who nourished several of his patrons
gratis for years, and bestowed credit unsolicited on any one who showed
himself worthy in literature or art, has taken his place in history
alongside of Ragueneau, the keeper of the _Rôtisserie des Poètes_ of
_Cyrano_.
You recall Ragueneau, the quaint saint, it is to be hoped. If not, here
is a scrap of dialogue to evoke him:—
“CYRANO. _Bercés par ta voix.
Ne vois-tu pas comme ils s’empiffrent?_
“RAGUENEAU. _Je le vois....
Sans regarder, de peur que cela ne les trouble;
Et dire ainsi mes vers me donne un plaisir double,
Puisque je satisfais un doux faible que j’ai,
Tout en laissant manger ceux qui n’ont pas mangé._
“CYRANO (lui frappant sur l’épaule). _Toi, tu me plais!_”
The cook at Marguéry’s, being asked once upon a time what he thought of
the _Vache Enragée_, replied: “_Mon dieu, de la vache enragée! Je crois
qu’on pourrait en faire un plat mangeable avec beaucoup de bonne humeur
et des petites femmes autour._”
At Montmartre the sagacious chef’s words are daily verified. At
Montmartre, if nowhere else in the world, the _Vache Enragée_ is a
“_plat mangeable_.”
The line of boulevards extending from the Place de Clichy to the Place
d’Anvers which strikes American tourists, who visit it for Montmartre,
as a vulgar hodge-podge of Coney Island, the Bowery, the Broadway of the
Tenderloin, and South Fifth Avenue, with a dash of, say, a Boston “Pop”
concert on a Harvard night, is no more the real Montmartre than Paris is
the real France. The real Montmartre is the abrupt hill known as “The
Butte,” just north of said boulevards[90] and included between
them,—the rue Marcadet, the rue de Clignancourt, and the avenue de St.
Ouen, a section of which the gigantic Byzantine cathedral of the _Sacré
Cœur_, the _Moulin de la Galette_, until recently an unsophisticated
popular ball, and the _cimetière de Montmartre_ (the second cemetery of
Paris) are the salient features.
This real Montmartre (the Montmartre of the Butte) contains a tiny local
cemetery (long disused), a tiny twelfth-century parochial church (St.
Pierre), a tiny district theatre, a tiny village plaza (Place du Tertre)
with the customary trees, benches, and aged, ruminating idlers, a tiny
public park (Square St. Pierre), two gaunt, grey windmills, and several
sleepy wine-shops, over which sleepy publicans preside. Here are five,
six, and seven story city buildings, to be sure, but here are also
(particularly on the northern slope) ancient garden-girdled mansions
reminiscent of the epoch when the whole district was open country;
sculptured gate-posts, crumbling, but stately, and rusty iron gates
opening on symmetrical avenues; small one-and-a-half-story tile-roofed
and straw-thatched dwellings, also garden-girdled, clutching with the
grip of the Swiss chalet the steep hillsides; narrow streets and winding
lanes, and worn stone stairways where the hill’s incline forbids streets
and lanes; high, erratic, heavily buttressed stone walls, bulging with
age, over which houses also bulging with age (from the windows of which
a Paul might be let down in a basket) beetle as if to fall; diminutive
fruit orchards and vegetable gardens; and diminutive barnyards,
cluttered with chicken-coops, dove-cotes, pig-pens, and rabbit-cages,
which advertise cows’ and goats’ milk, compost, and young pigs for sale.
Here cats and dogs and hens roam multitudinous and unmolested, birds
sing in the shrubbery, and chanticleer proclaims the dawn.
[Illustration: THE REAL MONTMARTRE
“_One would believe himself more than two hundred miles from
Paris._”]
In sum, the Butte, the real Montmartre, seems at first view to be
one-half country village and one-half large provincial town. In the rue
St. Vincent, the rue Mont-Cénis, the rue des Saules, rue de la
Fontaine-du-But, rue de la Borne, rue St. Rustique, rue Norvins, and rue
de l’Abreuvoir, where one is scarcely a twenty minutes’ walk from the
Grands-Boulevards, one would believe himself more than two hundred miles
from the metropolis,—so different are these streets from the average
metropolitan ways,—were it not for the constant outlooks on Paris
spread out beneath one, for the large proportion of Angoras among the
ubiquitous cats, and the phenomenal _savoir-vivre_, good-nature, and
friendliness of the dogs; were it not for an indefinable coquetry,
tell-tale of Parisianism, about the little garden-girdled houses and a
hundred artistic whimsicalities, such as are represented by a windmill
studio and a tram-car dwelling; were it not also that certain vistas are
closed by the flippant entrance to the _Moulin de la Galette_, that
sundry glimpses of studio interiors are vouchsafed, and that silhouettes
of long-haired, capering artists and of artists’ models loom up fitfully
against the sky; and were there not a sort of vagabond humour in the
very atmosphere that accords ill with provincial straight-lacedness.
As the Butte wears the general aspect of a provincial community, so it
has the provincial community’s spirit of neighbourliness; but, as its
provincial aspect is enlivened by coquetry and mirth, so its provincial
neighbourliness is happily modified by being shorn of the meddling
spirit. The _Montmartrois_ is not indifferent to the welfare of his
fellow-_Montmartrois_; but he minds his own business, which the
neighbourly provincial rarely, if ever, does. He is as willing as the
most naïve countryman to lend a helping hand upon occasion; but, the
occasion passed, he speedily effaces himself. He does not feel entitled
to enter into your intimacy, to summer and winter with you, so to say,
because he has done you a casual good turn.
When I entered Montmartre, as most fellows enter it, with my _lares and
penates_ enthroned on a hand-cart, and experienced the difficulty other
fellows, thus encumbered, have experienced in scaling the Butte, a
butcher’s boy and an artist who was sketching in the street were prompt
to put their shoulders to the wheel (to the tail-board, to be strictly
accurate); but they did not by the same token cross-question me
regarding my antecedents and intentions, as countrymen, in the same
circumstances, would have done. They gracefully accepted my invitation
to a social glass at an adjacent wine-shop, then went their ways to
their respective tasks; and that was the end of it.
The Butte, then, the real Montmartre, is in Paris, but not of it, and
yet, of necessity, perpetually conscious of it,—a community which is
and which is not a provincial town, which has an _esprit de corps_ not
inconsistent with independence, a unity not destructive of variety, and
a sociability admirably accordant with a seemly privacy; while the
_Montmartrois_ sees Paris without being blinded by it, touches Paris
without being crushed by it, and is stimulated by Paris without losing
his identity therein.
“_J’ vis en philosophe et p’tê’t’ bien
Qu’étant presqu’heureux avec rien,
J’ai su résoudre un grav’ problème,
A mon septième_,”
sings a _chansonnier_ of Montmartre. And it is indeed this ability to
“be almost happy with nothing,” this fairy-godmother power to transform
by a simple flourish a pumpkin into a coach, a dowdy into a fair
princess, and a cabbage into a rose, this talent, amounting to genius,
for squeezing so very much more out of life than there really is in it,
that lifts completely out of the commonplace the life of Montmartre.
For four hundred to five hundred francs a year, monsieur and madame,—as
in the Latin Quarter every Jack has his Jill, so on the Butte every
_Montmartrois_ has his _Montmartroise_,—monsieur and madame may have a
_logement_,[91] consisting of two or three rooms and a kitchen with
peerless views of Paris and the valley of the Seine; and in the shops of
the _brocanteurs_ they may procure antique furnishings of real beauty
and durability, not, alas! for the proverbial song, but for less than
the bourgeois pay for their ugly, up-to-date flimflams.
Prices are dearer at Montmartre than in several other parts of Paris.
Nevertheless, there is no district where, day in and day out, there is
so much genuine poetry and so much honest zest in living.
Louise France,[92] a dramatic artist of vigorous talent, who has been
associated with nearly all the important literary movements of
Montmartre, is said to have welcomed a party of friends to her modest
_logement_ one day with, “_Maintenant, en guise d’apéritif, je vais vous
offrir une vue splendide sur Paris: c’est tout ce que je possède_.”
Good Madame France is a thorough _Montmartroise_, and the incident is
admirably representative of the jocund humour of the Butte. The
_Montmartrois_ will not only regale himself with a view from a window in
lieu of an _apéritif_, but he will merrily substitute a _chanson_ for a
roast, console himself with a kiss for the absence of the dessert, and
warm himself, as my friend L——, who has not had a fire for three
winters, expresses it, with sunsets and tobacco smoke,—his own, if
possible.
During the periods of moving (namely, the 1st to the 15th of January,
April, July, and October) the essential domesticity of the Butte is
amply and amusingly revealed, and the complete congruity of domesticity
and the arts is graphically demonstrated.
Chiffonniers lord it over model-thrones, paint brushes peep over the
rims of soup-kettles or hide their heads in coal-scuttles, manikins
fraternise with hat-trees and colour-boxes with stew-pans, stretchers
snuggle up to pillows, pastels and aquarelles lie cheek by jowl with
dish-towels and table-cloths, brooms pay court to easels, palettes make
eyes at feather dusters, and impressionistic landscapes dazzle mirrors.
Monsieur, aided by a chum, tugs a precariously loaded hand-cart,[93] or,
if the distance to be traversed makes the hand-cart unnecessary or a
lack of funds makes it impossible, he staggers, sweats, and swears under
the weight of trunks, chests, bureaus, and wardrobes; and madame,
bareheaded, in wrapper and slippers, proffers highly unwelcome caution
and advice while carrying the company coffee-cups or the parlour lamp.
Like most other localities that partake of the idyllic, Montmartre is
most idyllic in the spring. Then painters work at their easels in its
streets, while their mesdames, who have followed them forth with
camp-chairs, sew and chatter in the nearest shade. Then its poplars and
limes are the same crisp, inviting green as the salads that pass in the
hand-barrows. Then its myriad lilac, horse-chestnut, and acacia clusters
are thyrsi awaiting the rhythmic wavings of the bacchanals, and then its
circumambient fragrance would inflame a Hippolyta’s blood, trouble a
Vestal’s vows, and make a Diana’s senses reel. Then, too, models, posing
in court-yards and back gardens for the supernal effects of sunlight on
flesh, are like great pink-and-purple-dappled exotic blooms escaped from
Shelley’s pages.
The spirit of nature that with soft music is bursting the bonds of
winter, and the spirit of the artist, spontaneous, impulsive,
capricious, and free, are in absolute accord. One breathes contempt for
prudery and custom with the very air. Nature’s upward-rushing sap and
the artist’s careering fancy alike defy repression.
“_Tout être a le droit d’être libre_,” the splendid throbbing lyric
climax of Charpentier’s Montmartre opera, _Louise_, had here its origin.
“TOUT ÊTRE A LE DROIT D’ÊTRE LIBRE!”—the careless attire, unconstrained
mien, and the _sans-gêne_ of the lovers of Montmartre proclaim it.
“TOUT ÊTRE A LE DROIT D’ÊTRE LIBRE!” the Montmartre winds and birds and
rivulets sing.
“_Et que faudrait-il faire?_
* * * * *
_Calculer, avoir peur, être blême,
Préférer faire une visite qu’un poème,
Rédiger des placets, se faire-présenter?
Non, merci! non, merci! non, merci! mais chanter,
Rêver, rire, passer, être seul, être libre,
Avoir l’œil qui regarde bien, la voix qui vibre,
Mettre, quand il vous plaît, son feutre de travers,
Pour un oui, pour un non, se battre—ou faire un vers!
Travailler sans souci de gloire ou de fortune,
A tel voyage, auquel on pense, dans la lune._”[94]
[Illustration: A Montmartre Carrousel]