CHAPTER XVI

LITERARY AND ARTISTIC CABARETS OF MONTMARTRE

“_We sang when the English dismembered the kingdom, we sang

during the civil war of the Armagnacs, during the ‘Ligue,’

during the Fronde, under the Régence; and it was to the sound of

the_ chansons _of Rivarol that the monarchy disappeared at the end

of the eighteenth century._”—DE JOUY.

“_The_ chanson _became history: it donned defiantly the Phrygian

bonnet, and marched in the forefront.... Men went singing to the

guillotine._” HENRI AVENEL.

“_It is certain that the_ chanson _is, like wine, a product of our

soil, a flower of_ la patrie.”—JULES CLARETIE.

“And I send these words to Paris with my love,

And I guess some chansonniers there will understand them.”

WALT WHITMAN.

The Bohemians of the _Quartier Latin_ who do not starve, commit suicide,

return to their parents to eat the fatted calf, become rich and famous

or alcoholic and insane, have one other resource left them,—a resource

beside which the proverbial jump out of the frying-pan into the fire is

the quintessence of discretion,—namely, emigration to Montmartre.

[Illustration: THE REAL MONTMARTRE

_Cabaret du Lapin Agile_]

Originally given over to windmills and plaster ovens, a suburb at the

time of the Great Revolution (when it went for a while by the name of

Mont-Marat), Montmartre did not become a part of Paris proper until

1859.

“I knew Montmartre,” says one of its ardent admirers,

“thirty-five years ago. It was a quarter like another, less

alive, in fact, than most others, except in the immediate

vicinity of the balls, _le Grand Turc_, _la Boule Noire_, etc.

“All of a sudden the Haussmannising empire bound it to Paris by

the Boulevard Magenta, and the picks of the workmen have had no

respite since.”

The Eighteenth Arrondissement, which corresponds roughly with

Montmartre, has nearly doubled in population since the Franco-Prussian

war, and is now a city of more than 225,000 souls.

“Travellers tell us,” wrote Aurélien Scholl in 1898, “that in

America cities spring up with incredible rapidity.... I know

only two localities in France which have undergone a similar

speedy transformation,—Royan[95] and Montmartre. It is not so

very long ago that we saw from the boulevards looking up the

rue Laffitte a verdant _butte_ with a few windmills whose arms

enlivened the perspective. There were hovels and tiny,

shabby-looking shops along the present boulevards (Clichy and

Rochechouart).

“Montmartre is to-day one of the finest cities of France. It

has three theatres, five or six _cafés-concerts_, a circus,

restaurants, and _brasseries_.... _La cigale_ sings there all

summer—and all winter.”

In the partial eyes of the loyal _Montmartrois_, Montmartre, “_Ville

Libre_,” literary and artistic Bohemia _par excellence_, is as much the

capital of Paris[96] as Paris is the capital of France. To them all the

rest of Paris, the Latin Quarter included, is merely Montmartre’s back

yard.

Montmartre, by reason of its surpassing view, has always been favoured

as a place of residence by detached writers and artists; and, after the

closing of the _Théâtre Bobino_ in the _Quartier Latin_, a perceptible

literary and artistic current thitherward set in. But it was the exodus

of the “_Hydropathes_” and “_Hirsutes_” of the _Quartier_ to the _Chat

Noir_ that marked (marked rather than caused) the real beginning of

Montmartre’s supremacy.

The _Cercle des Hydropathes_[97] owed its origin to one Charles Cros,

who, tiring of being relegated to an inglorious obscurity while Coquelin

_Cadet_ won laurels by the recitation of monologues, which he (Cros) had

written, decided to recite his monologues himself.

The first formal meeting of the _Hydropathes_ was held on a Friday of

October, 1878, in a small upper room of a Latin Quarter café, corner of

the rue Cujas and the Boulevard St. Michel. There were five persons

present. At the next meeting there were seventy-five, at the third one

hundred, at the fourth one hundred and fifty, and so on, until, driven

from café to café by the need of more room, they settled in a vacant

store, with an average attendance of three hundred to three hundred and

fifty twice a week.

Emile Goudeau presided,—as nearly, that is, as any one can be said to

preside in a Latin Quarter assembly. There was liberty to drink, smoke,

and woo the _grisette_. There were folly and tumult, confusion and fun;

violin, piano, and guitar music; singing in concert of riotous

roof-lifting refrains; recitations of novelties and the classics by

Villain, Leloir, Le Bargy, and Coquelin _Cadet_ of the _Comédie

Française_. Paul Mounet, also of the _Comédie_, arrayed in a blue blouse

and red neckerchief, interpreted _La Grève des Forgerons_ week in and

week out with telling effect. Maurice Rollinat sang his own songs and

those of Pierre Dupont, and recited selections from his _Névroses_ and

_Brandes_. Laurent Tailhade, Jean Moréas, Georges d’Esparbès, Louis

Marsolleau, Jean Ajalbert, André Gill, Léon Valade, Charles Monselet,

Paul Marrot, Edmond Haraucourt, Félicien Champsaur, Mac-Nab, Auguste

Vacquerie, Louis Tiercelin, Alphonse Allais, Jules Jouy, and a full

score more of poets and _chansonniers_ rendered their works. Bourget,

Coppée, Paul Arène, Luigi Loir, and Bastien-Lepage were frequent, though

for the most part passive, spectators. All degrees of talent, all shades

of politics, and all of the poetic schools were represented. Bernhardt

was proud to be known as a _Hydropathe_. Francisque Sarcey and Jules

Claretie visited the _Hydropathes_, and praised them in the press. The

police threatened to dissolve them, but wisely refrained.

The _Hirsutes_ differed from the _Hydropathes_ only in name and in the

fact that the name had an obvious significance.

It was the _Grand’ Pinte_ (a Louis XIII. cabaret of Montmartre,

frequented, but without mummery or fracas, by a band of painters and

poets) that gave Rodolphe Salis, an _ex-Hydropathe_, the idea of putting

the boisterous _Hydropathe_ performances into a picturesque setting and

inviting the paying public to attend. Salis, who was the son of a

prosperous man of affairs, was in Bohemia against his father’s wishes.

Half-artist and half-littérateur, he supported himself, when the

paternal purse-strings were tightened, by writing for the press and

painting _Viae Dolorosae_ at fourteen francs apiece. In making himself

“_gentilhomme-cabaretier_,” as he called it, this resourceful Salis had

hit upon a device for reconciling theory with practice, filial

submission with personal inclination, and Bohemia with business, which,

to say the least, was not commonplace.

Salis’ _Chat Noir_, “_Cabaret Moyen-Age fondé en 1114 par un fumiste_,”

was opened on the Boulevard de Rochechouart in December, 1881; and the

first number of its literary organ of the same name, illustrated by

Forain, Willette, Rochegrosse, Henri Pille, Rivière, and Steinlen, was

published the month following. The cabaret’s bizarre frescos,

contributed by the cleverest young artists of Paris, and its fantastic

furnishings of curios and antiques, which Salis had zealously collected

since his boyhood, have been described too many times to be dwelt upon

here. Suffice it to say, the juxtaposition of the beautiful with the

grotesque, the serious with the flippant, and the reverent with the

blasphemous, was so ingenious and piquant that attempts to imitate it

(for the most part unsuccessful) have been made all over the civilised

world.

[Illustration: AT ARISTIDE BRUANT’S

_Cabaret du Boulevard Rochechouart_]

In this suggestive setting nearly the entire _personnel_ of the

_Hydropathes_ and a number of poets and dramatists, not _Hydropathes_,

who have since become celebrities, among them Georges Courtéline and

Maurice Donnay, held witty carnival.

There was an even greater license of speech and act at the _Chat Noir_

than there had been among the _Hydropathes_. There were also more

all-night revels, more startling antitheses of the lively and severe,

and more practical joking. All this in spite of the fact (or, perhaps,

because of it) that the performers, almost without exception, affected

impassibility, maintaining a supernatural gravity while dispensing the

most side-splitting productions.

Salis’ attempt to serve both God and Mammon resulted, as such attempts

have usually resulted, advantageously for Mammon. Bohemia was reconciled

to business by being completely swallowed up by business. Salis, the

_gentilhomme-cabaretier_, waxed rich, and in waxing rich stooped to

methods of holding and dealing with his galaxy that have made his memory

the execration of the Butte. Nevertheless, Rodolphe Salis, all unworthy

Bohemian as his good fortune revealed him to be, gave Paris, as

impresario of the _Chat Noir_, a new manifestation of art and did more

than any one man towards establishing that modern republic of arts and

letters which is known as Montmartre.

The phenomenal success of the _Chat Noir_, whose fame from being

Parisian became European, naturally led to the opening of establishments

which copied one or more of its features. Montmartre was soon

honeycombed with _cabarets artistiques et littéraires._

Steinlen, Willette, De Feure, Roedel, Redon, Toulouse-Lautrec, Truchet,

Bellanger, Le Petit, Grün, and other artists of the Butte, especially

the first three, were kept busy decorating; and the most popular

monologists and _chansonniers_,—Dominique Bonnaud, Hugues Delorme,

Jacques Ferny, Jules Jouy, E. Girault, Eugène Lemercier, Camille

Marceau, Georges Millandy, Marcel Legay, Gaston Couté, Paul Delmet,

Théodore Botrel, Léon Durôcher, Vincent Hyspa, Yann Nibor, Maurice

Boukay, Charles Gallilée, Jehan Rictus, Octave Pradels, Victor Meusy,

Camille Roy, Gabriel Montoya, Edmond Teulet, Paul Briand, Xavier Privas,

Raoul Ponchon, Fragson, Lefèvre, Xanrof, Perducet, Dumestre, Montéhus,

Ivanof, Chatillon, Fursy, Canqueteau, and Trimouillat,—most of whom had

received a part of their training at the _Chat Noir_,—performed

regularly in two or three places on the same evening.

_La Grand’ Pinte_ (joint inspirer with the _Hydropathes_ of the _Chat

Noir_) became under the direction of another Salis—Gabriel—the

_cabaret artistique et littéraire, L’Ane Rouge_. Its next-door

neighbour, _Le Clou_, fitted itself out with a picturesque second-story

supper-room and an eccentric _caveau_, in which tourneys of poetry were

frequently given. _Le Café des Décadents_ (later _Café Duclerc_, where

the singers wore nooses about their necks), with its “_Bruxellois

Soupers_”; _Le Carillon_, with its “Assizes”; _Le Fraternistère_, with

its “_Guignol Social_” and its “_chansons et recréations

sociologiques_”; _Le Casino des Concièrges_, with its “_Soupers

Panamistes_”; _La Fourrière_ (The Pound), _La Roulotte_ (The Gypsy Van),

_Le Cabaret des Assassins_ (now _Le Lapin Agile_), _Le Cabaret des

Pommes-de-terre Frites_, _La Purée_, _La Purée Sociale_, and the

_Cabarets du Ciel, de l’Enfer_, and _du Néant_,—had each its little day

of notoriety; and the last three, though by all odds the flattest of the

lot, are still run for the benefit of country visitors.

_Le Conservatoire_ (whose specialty is the _Théâtre d’Ombres

Chinoises_—shadow pantomime—with which the subtle artist Henri Rivière

helped build up the vogue of Salis), _Le Cabaret des Quat’z’ Arts_, _Le

Cabaret des Arts_, _La Veine_, and _La Lune Rousse_ are the five closest

existing counterparts of the _Chat Noir_. Their decorations are highly

effective, and they employ most of the _Chat Noir_ celebrities who have

not, like Salis, passed over to the great majority.[98] But their

performances, while of high average merit, are totally lacking in the

elements of spontaneity and unexpectedness, which constituted the rare

and peculiar charm of the programmes of the _Chat Noir_ in its early and

unspoiled days; and their prices, which have increased in direct

proportion as intrinsic interest has decreased, are prohibitive for most

of the real Bohemians of Montmartre. The truth is, these cabarets have

long ceased to attract the _Montmartrois_, and are kept up as mere show

places for provincial and foreign tourists. It is only in their front

rooms, where prices are normal and no performances worth mentioning are

given—at the hour of the _apéritif_, that one may find any number of

truly representative _Montmartrois_.

At _La Boîte à Fursy_ (in the building to which the _Chat Noir_ repaired

when the complaints of its neighbours and the need of more room forced

it to quit its original home on the Boulevard de Rochechouart) and _Le

Tréteau de Tabarin_ (also under the management of Fursy) the prices are

still more prohibitive, so far as Bohemia is concerned, and the

audiences, by just so much the more, unrepresentative.

All these places have been practically abandoned by their former

patrons, and by the unprofessional singing, rhyming, reciting Bohemians

in general, for tiny, obscure cafés or wine-shops,[99] whose tininess

and obscurity are defences against sight-seeing invasion, and for

private ateliers, from which the uninvited may be readily ejected. Those

who, depressed by the professionalism, mercenary spirit, and monotony of

the best-known cabarets, declare that the spirit of Bohemianism has

abandoned the Butte, do not take into account these multitudinous

Bohemian conclaves, of which they are, in all probability, totally

ignorant.

One group, to which for two years the writer was privileged to belong,

included fifty members, whose ages ranged from twenty to seventy and

whose reputations ranged from zero to boulevard celebrity. It dined

every Tuesday evening at a really cheap and really Bohemian restaurant

of the rue de la Rochefoucauld, adjourned after dinner to the atelier of

a musician in the rue Bréda for literary and musical exercises mingled

with horse-play, and readjourned at midnight to the supper-room of an

adjacent café for unadulterated horse-play, without the slightest

literary or musical pretence.

In France the _chanson_ is second only to the press (if, indeed, it

really be second to anything) as a moulder of public opinion. It

instructs less than the press, perhaps, but it excites more.

“The _chanson_, like the bayonet,” says Jules Claretie, “is a

French weapon.... We are afraid of the _chanson_. It is a

dishevelled personage who tells the truth. We exile it, we

pursue it. M. Javert pursued not otherwise Fantine.... We are

afraid of it because it is necessarily, fatally, of the

opposition. It has no reason for existence, if it is not

factious.... From the _Mazarinades_ to the amusing _Chansons

Rosses_ of Fursy, the _chanson_ has administered fillips to the

powers. It is its lot. I add, it is its right.... _Vive la

chanson_! even the cruel _chanson_, when it is a sort of

Daumier!”

Only a small percentage of the songs heard in the _cabarets artistiques

et littéraires_ of Montmartre are frankly revolutionary or even “of the

opposition,” in the narrow partisan sense of that phrase; but they

nearly all “tell the truth to people,” they are nearly all satirical and

captious to the last degree—“of the opposition,” that is, in the

broader sense of the phrase. They assail all the existing

institutions,—army, state, church, property, and marriage,—not with

the direct invective which would put them at the censorship’s mercy, but

with the ridicule which in Paris, as in perhaps no other spot on the

globe, is more potent than invective, and before which the censorship,

though it turn pale and tear its hair with rage, is powerless.

Jules Jouy,[100] one of the bright particular stars of the _Chat Noir_

and of several of its successors and imitators, was at once a veritable

Gavroche for saucy wit and a fervent pleader for the poor. He was a

regular contributor to several socialistic sheets; and his _Chansons de

Bataille_—_La Terre_, _Les Enfants et les Mères_, _La Veuve_, _Fille

d’Ouvrier_, _Les Inconnus_, _La Grève Noire_, _Pâle Travailleur_,

_Victimes du Travail_, _Le Sang des Martyrs_, _La Carmagnole des

Meurts-de-Faim_, etc.—are superb examples of the chanson of social

revolt and reclamation.

The manager of the _Casino des Concièrges_, _Le Cabaret des

Pommes-de-terre Frites_, and _La Purée Sociale_, was an ancient

revolutionist, Maxime Lisbonne, who had distinguished himself on a

barricade of the Place du Panthéon during the Commune.

In the supper-rooms of the _Clou_ the anarchist poet Paul Paillette was

wont to recite his anarchist poems, and the _Clou_ is still a favourite

meeting-place for revolutionary groups.

At the _Quat’z’ Arts_ Marcel Legay varies his répertoire of sentimental

and patriotic ballads with the stirring revolutionary _chansons_ of

Maurice Boukay and J. B. Clément; Gaston Couté recites his subversive

“_Les Conscrits_” and “_Le Christ en Bois_”; Eugène Lemercier with

genial malice, Gaston Sécot with waggery, and Yon Lug with Chinese

imperturbability ridicule officialism in its every phase; Xavier Privas

(Prince of _Chansonniers_ by formal election), in his highly individual

and snappy fashion, renders—between two idyls—his fine socialistic

song _Les Résignés_ or exalts poverty with his _Noël_ or _Testament de

Pierrot_; and Jehan Rictus intones his heart-breaking _Soliloques du

Pauvre_.

The _Quat’z’ Arts_ has also had courses of Sunday afternoon lectures on

the _chanson_ by the socialist deputies Clovis Hugues and Maurice

Boukay.

The _Boîte à Fursy_, though catering palpably to the snobs, is shut up

nearly every season by an irate censorship, and this more often for

reasons of politics than from any consideration of public morality.

“I have been allowed this merit, and it is the sole one I

claim,” says Fursy, in the introduction to his _Chansons

Rosses_, “of never letting pass, or rarely letting pass, a

salient happening without singing it immediately, and

attempting to draw from it, in a refrain, the morality—or

immorality—which the worthy man called _Monsieur Tout-le-Monde_

assigns it in his talk. I do my utmost not to lose time, and to

serve actuality piping hot. I am really satisfied only when I

manage to sing, in the evening, couplets inspired by that

morning’s event; and I have had the luck almost always to

succeed.”

Even the _Cabarets du Ciel_, _de l’Enfer_, and _du Néant_—which, being

mainly dependent for their effects upon machinery, hardly belong at all

in the class of _cafés artistiques et littéraires_—have, lurking under

all their vulgar clap-trap, no small fund of pungent satire on religion

and the church.[101]

[Illustration: Buffalo]

Finally, there are at Montmartre a round half-dozen resorts, _cabarets

de la chanson d’argot_ (also called _cabarets brutaux_), of which

Bruant’s _Mirliton_, Alexandre’s _Cabaret Bruyant_, and “Buffalo’s”

_l’Alouette_ are the most conspicuous examples. They have had their day

so far as spontaneity is concerned, like the _cabarets artistiques et

littéraires_, though, like them, they still attract foreigners and

provincials.

Mercenary and meretricious now to the last degree, however genuine they

may have been in the beginning, they still have this much, at least, of

sincerity,—namely, cordial detestation of the bourgeois; and it is to

this very spirit, strangely enough, that their vogue with the bourgeois

has been due.

It was of one of these _cabarets brutaux_ (Bruant’s _Mirliton_,

probably) that Zola wrote in _Paris_: “Pleasure-seeking Paris, the

_Bourgeoisie_, mistress of money and of power, sickened by their

possessions in time, but unwilling to let anything go, flocked

thither—to receive insults and obscenities full in the face.... Far

more than in the words, the burning insult was in the manner with which

the singer cast the words in the teeth of the rich, of the favoured, of

the fine ladies who elbowed each other to hear him. Under the low

ceiling, amid the smoke of pipes, in the blinding heat of the gas, he

launched his verses brutally like _crachats_, a very hail-squall of

furious contempt.”

Bruant himself rarely appears nowadays at his _Mirliton_, which, with

the aid of under-studies, he, nevertheless, keeps up. Loaded with

notoriety and wealth, he has come to prefer following the hounds or

emptying a bottle of good wine, as the Châtelain of Courthenay, to

entertaining the bourgeois by affronting them.

Not long back Bruant was an unsuccessful candidate for deputy at

Belleville, which adjoins Montmartre. His address to his electors—with

which it is customary for candidates to placard the walls of their

districts—was in rhyme. The verses, though not of his best, are novel

enough to demand quotation:—

AUX ELECTEURS

_de la première conscription du vingtième arrondissement

Belleville-Saint-Fargeau_

PROGRAMME

I

_Si j’étais votre député,

Ohé! Ohé! qu’on se le dise,

J’ajouterais “Humanité”

Aux trois mots de votre devise ...

Au lieu de parler tous les jours

Pour la République ou l’Empire

Et de faire de longs discours

Pour ne rien dire._

II

_Je parlerais des petits fieux, ...

Des filles-mères, des pauvres vieux

Qui l’hiver gèlent par la ville....

Ils auraient chaud comme en été,

Si j’étais nommé député

A Belleville._

III

_Je parlerais des tristes gueux,

Des purotins batteurs de dèche,

Des ventres plats, des ventres creux,

Et je parlerais d’une crèche

Pour les pauvres filles sans lit,

Que l’on repousse et qu’on renvoie

Dans la rue! ... avec leur petit!...

Mères de joie!_

IV

_Je parlerais de leurs mignons,

De ces minables chérubins

Dont les pauvres petits fignons

Ne connaissent pas l’eau des bains,—

Chérubins dont l’âme et le sang

Se pourrissent à l’air des bouges

Et qu’on voit passer, le teint blanc

Et les yeux rouges._

V

_Je parlerais des vieux perclus

Qui voudraient travailler encore,

Mais dont l’atelier ne veut plus, ...

Et qui traînent jusqu’à l’aurore

Sur le dur pavé de Paris,

Leur refuge, leurs Invalides,

Errants, chassés, honteux, meurtris,

Les boyaux vides._

VI

_Je parlerais des petits fieux, ...

Des filles-mères, des pauvres vieux,

Qui l’hiver gèlent par la ville....

Ils auraient chaud comme en été

Si j’étais nommé député

A Belleville._

Bruant’s _Mirliton_, thanks to the forceful talent of its founder, its

lugubrious but artistic furnishings, and its cavalier treatment of its

patrons, is the most famous, the most picturesque, and the most

startling of the _cabarets brutaux_.

Alexandre owes such success as he has had at the _Cabaret Bruyant_ less

to his talent as a writer and singer of _chansons_, which is not great,

than to his having sung in the streets with Mme. Eugénie Buffet for the

benefit of the poor[102] (his cabaret is also known as _Le Cabaret du

Chanteur des Cours_) and to his having been haled into court by Bruant

for plagiarising his costume. The court decided in this _cause célèbre_

(Bruant _vs._ Alexandre) that the top-boots, velvet jacket, scarlet

scarf, and mountaineer’s felt which Bruant wore professionally were his

trade-mark, so to speak, and that the professional costume adopted by

Alexandre—which, without being an exact copy, was as close a copy as

the word “Bruyant,” for example, is of Bruant—constituted a palpable

infringement. And it granted Bruant an injunction restraining Alexandre

from appearing therein. The judgment was reaffirmed upon appeal.

In his first burst of rage over the result, Alexandre threatened to sing

without any costume whatsoever; but he thought better of that. What he

did do was to defy the court. Swearing there was not force enough in

France to undress him, he persisted in wearing the prohibited garb.

[Illustration: ALEXANDRE]

These strained relations with the law of the land made a hero of

Alexandre, in a small way. He became thus a sort of Jules Guérin, and

his cabaret a sort of Fort Chabrol. He elucidated the situation to his

audiences nightly in a speech that ran somewhat like this:—

“What do you say to a republic where you can’t wear, so that

they be decent, any clothes you like? This business has cost

me more than ten thousand francs already. Every day—and it’s

seventeen months now it’s been going on—the sheriff appears.

‘Still in the costume, Alexandre?’ And that means twenty

francs! Twenty francs a day—to say nothing of the costs—counts

up. Well, what of it? Let the bill swell! Let them come as

often as they please! It’s their right! But I keep on wearing

the clothes all the same.

“Not that I don’t recognise in Bruant, for all the harm he’s

trying to do me, my _cher maître_. What should I be without

him? Nothing at all. Oh, yes, I’m ready enough to admit that.

I am no ingrate. For the man who is ruining me, I have

something _there_, at the heart, which abides, and which

nothing can take away.

“When I began to wear the costume, Aristide didn’t object. Not

he. He thought me beneath his notice, I suppose. But, when he

sees I am succeeding, then he brings me up in court.

“The truth of it is, he dreads my competition. I frighten him.

My glory throws him in the shade. He says to Alexandre, ‘Get

out of my light!’

“The Law has smitten me in the name of Bruant: the Law does

not know me. Since I have sung, I have gleaned upon the public

places, in the streets, twenty-two thousand francs for the

poor; and I am ordered to strip off my trousers. There’s

justice for you!

“Now on with the music! Twenty francs to pay every time I dare

to don the forbidden costume, the costume Bruant. It’s cheap

at twenty francs. I don the costume, and I pay.”

The law is effective, it would seem, in preventing Alexandre from

appearing publicly in the costume outside of his own cabaret.

Out of the medley of monologists and _chansonniers_ (largely, of course,

made up of mediocrities) who practise their professions in the cabarets

of Montmartre, several of genuine poetical talent have emerged; and, of

these, at least three are characterised by a thoroughly lawless or

revolutionary spirit. These three are: Aristide Bruant, who exhibits a

reality, a virility, a brutality, a grim humour, a picturesqueness of

epithet, a boldness of imagery, and a tragic quality in caricature which

make him (in a narrow field) a sort of French Kipling, with an honest

devil-may-care quality by the side of which Kipling’s bravado seems

fustian; Jehan Rictus, less facile, less humorous, and less insolent

than Bruant, but his equal in realism and his superior in sentiment; and

Maurice Boukay (retired, and now a deputy), who lacks the grip on

reality of Bruant and Rictus, but who atones partially for this lack by

a wealth of stirring appeal.

Boukay’s point of view is that of the _lettré_, the social philosopher,

the reformer, the enlightened friend of the poor. His words are words of

faith, trumpet-calls from the heights instead of gibes or moans from the

depths. They ring true of reasoned and righteous revolt. His _Chansons

Rouges_ are neither narrative nor descriptive; not _chansons

vécues_,—that is, _chansons_ based on his own experience,—but symbolic

poems,—symbolic in both language and thought, what he himself might

call “_chansons d’humanité multiple et objective_.”

“They were all written,” says M. Boukay in his introduction,

“in a complete independence of spirit, at a time when, not yet

having entered political life, I listened to the great voice

of the people, and endeavoured to seize its hidden meaning....

My master Verlaine said: ‘The _chanson_ of love is blue. The

_chanson_ of dreams is white. The _chanson_ of sadness is

grey.’ The _chanson sociale_ is red.... It is the colour of

the glass of wine that your good heart offers the vagrant to

comfort him on the high road of life. It is the colour of the

rising sun towards which your ardent, hopeful eyes yearn. It

is the most intense hue of the tricolor flag, which lies close

to the heart of all the miseries, which waves in the wind of

all the liberties.

“‘Stop there!’ exclaims some timorous spirit. ‘Do you not

fear, singer of fraternity, to deepen the regrets and inflame

the anguish of the people under pretext of describing them?’

“But, my good critic, will voicing the plaint of him who

travails and suffers, always, then, be to wound the

sanctimonious egoisms of him who digests and does nothing

else? Would you resemble the iniquitous rich man,—tolerate the

stretching forth of the hand, silent and ashamed, to beg, and

forbid the quivering lips to groan? If you do not hear the

groan, how can you console it? If you do not see the sore

of poverty stripped of all its bandages, how will you know how

to cure it?... Be brave and be just, good critic! Open thine

eyes! Open thy heart!... The love of woman has for its

necessary complement the love of humanity. Is this your

belief? If yes, you will sing these _Chansons Rouges_. If no,

you will let the people sing them. In any case, you will

understand.”

[Illustration: AT ALEXANDRE’S

_Cabaret de la rue Pigalle_]

The titles of the _Chansons Rouges_ bear out the promise of this

foreword: _Le Soleil Rouge_, _Le Coq Rouge_, _Le Noël Rouge_, _L’Etoile

Rouge_, _La Cité_, _La Chanson du Pauvre Chanteur_, _Fille et

Souteneur_, _La Chanson de Nature_, _Le Mot Passé_, _La Dernière

Bastille_, _La Madeleine_, _La Femme Libre_, _Les Rafles_, _La Chanson

de Misère_; and the songs bear out the promise of their titles.

[Illustration: MAURICE BOUKAY]

Note the thrilling refrain of _Le Soleil Rouge_,—

“_Compagnon, le vieux monde bouge:

Marchons droit, la main dans la main!

Compagnon, le grand soleil rouge

Brillera, brillera demain_,”—

and the poignant, threatening _Chanson de Misère_:—

LA CHANSON DE MISÈRE

I

_J’ai chanté l’amour à vingt ans,

Et j’ai perdu l’une après l’une,

Blonde ou brune, au clair de la lune,

Mes illusions et mon temps.

Mon cœur oubliait la Misère,

Lire lon laire,

Pourtant la Misère était là,

Lire lon la!_

II

_C’était un matin de rancœur,

Que de ma tristesse accrue,

Je butai du pied, dans la rue,

Un pavé rouge comme un cœur.

C’était le cœur de la Misère,

Lire lon laire,

Entre deux pavés planté là,

Lire lon la!_

III

_Le pavé, se dressant vers moi:

“Combien j’ai vu de barricades,

Combien j’ai reçu d’estocades

De par la lettre de la loi!”

Passant, prends garde à la Misère,

Lire lon laire.

Son cœur n’est pas mort. Halte là!

Lire lon la!_

IV

_Je saigne à chaque iniquité,

Je suis le pavé de souffrance,

Je suis rouge du sang de France

Répandu pour l’humanité.

Fleur de pavé, fleur de Misère,

Lire lon laire,

L’héroisme a passé par là,

Lire lon la!_

V

_Egoïsme, arrière! Je veux

Te marquer de ma chanson rouge.

L’espoir grandit. Le pavé bouge.

Debout, clairon! Sonne les vœux!

C’est la chanson de la Misère,

Lire lon laire.

La Justice viendra par la

Lire lon la!_

There is not a character of the Paris underworld nor a phase of its life

about which Bruant has not cast the glamour of his suggestive _argot_:

beggars and vagabonds; semi-vagabond acrobats, rag-pickers, and

sandwich-men; thieves, thugs, _maquereaux_,[103] and murderers;

foundlings and the lowest grades of prostitutes, a veritable Maxim Gorky

galaxy; starving, shivering, loafing, sinning, and suffering men and

women; attractive sloth, picturesque horror, piquant degradation and

savoury crime,—all in a lurid setting of teeming faubourg streets,

public balls, all-night restaurants, bagnios, prisons, and the

guillotine!

“_Le Philosophe_,” the opening poem of Bruant’s published volume, _Dans

la Rue_,—

“_T’es dans la rue, va t’es chez toi,_”—

the songs of the different faubourgs,—_A Batignolles_, _A la Villette_,

_A Montpernasse_, _A Belleville_, _A Ménilmontant_, _A Montrouge_, _A la

Glacière_, etc.,—_Le Guillotine_, _A la Roquette_, _Le Rond des

Marmites_, _A Mazas_, _Casseur de Gueules_, _Le Grelotteux_,

_Marcheuses_, _Les Quat’ Pattes_, and _Pus de Patrons_ are absolutely

convincing as literature and as studies of society, and, to be

appreciated, have no need of their author’s dramatic delivery. His most

widely known _chanson_, _A St. Lazare_, is one of the poems of a

generation; and his _A Biribi_[104] has probably done more to rouse the

common people against the army than all the anti-militarist meetings of

the socialists and anarchists combined. But propriety, alas! forbids

their presence—and the presence of most of the best of Bruant’s work in

this volume.

[Illustration: MAQUERAUX]

The monologues of Jehan Rictus (_Soliloques du Pauvre_, _Doléances_, and

_Cantilènes du Malheur_) are conspicuous among the poems of poverty for

their absolute and abject despair. Jehan Rictus is a man who has done

many kinds of hard manual labour, if report speaks true, and who knows

the wretchedness of extreme penury by long and cruel experience. “A

strange and highly typical figure; a pale, emaciated head we seem to

have seen somewhere before. Where?—in church paintings, perhaps; sad,

lean, narrow-chested, tall, ‘long as a tear,’ and an expression so

weary! He does not essay a gesture. He has only his voice, the anguish

of his face, and the feverish gleam of his eyes with which to move us.

His hands, held always behind him, twitch ineffectually as if trying to

burst invisible bonds.”

[Illustration:

Voilà comment en verité

Les pieds des Pauvres sont traités

Quand il saura ce traitement

Jésus Christ sera mécontent

‘Et moi je vous le dis mes freres

Prenez bien garde à sa colère.

Jehan Rictus.]

In portraying the physical discomforts of poverty, the racking coughs,

raging thirsts, aching bones, the nights without shelter or sleep, the

days without food, the tears that scald and the tearlessness that

deadens, Jehan Rictus has only done what has been done a score of times

in prose and verse. Surely, an empty heart keeps close company, more

often than not, with an empty stomach, and it is in portraying vividly

the mental and spiritual aspects of poverty that his work is fresh and

unique. The humiliation of poverty’s uniform,—unkempt hair, missing

shirt, drafty shoes, outlandish and threadbare garments,—of the

pavement bed, of the paroxysms of hunger attributed to intoxication, of

the unsuccessful search for work, of debarment from places of public

resort, of silent submission to insult and gibe; the disgust with filth,

vermin, vulgar noise, endless monotony, enforced celibacy, patronising

pity, petty deceits improvised to hide destitution, and hilarity

improvised to keep back tears; the hatred of those who practise

injustice and hypocrisy; the scorn of those who bestow and those who

accept charity; the incipient madness of starvation, at once impelling

to a shedding of the blood of the guilty and raising a horrid dread of

confounding the innocent with the guilty; the regret for loss of

respectability, courage, ambition, energy, talent, faith; the oppressive

lonesomeness; the yearning for fresh distractions, innocent joys,

cleanly living, for kindly words, sympathetic hand-clasps, kisses,

caresses, companionship, friendship, love, precious responsibility; the

stolid indifference to death,—all these, the underlying sentiments of

poverty, have never before been given in poetry, at least not without

the blight of palpable literary effort or factitious emotionalism.

Equally unique and equally powerful with the exhibition of the multiform

woes of the destitute is the poet’s satirical exposure of the

inconsistencies, insincerities, vanities, and refined cruelties of the

various sorts of people who exploit the destitute. With an ironical

pretence of rendering deserved homage to poverty, he elaborates the

important part it plays in the social scheme. Thanks to it, the

employees of the _Assistance Publique_ are able to maintain their

families in comfort; magistrates to attain a rotund and tranquil old

age; economists (deferring to it as a dignified entity) to win

professional chairs and academic honours; politicians to get the public

ear; socialistic and anarchistic bawlers to finish out their careers as

dawdling, alcoholic deputies; poets, painters, and novelists to swim in

glory and good wine, and found luxurious establishments for their

offspring.

The arrival of winter, which clots the blood of one class, stimulates

the circulation of all the others. Then reputable benevolence drums a

réveille on hollow stomachs; burial companies wax radiantly bustling;

salons, languishing for want of something to talk about, revive

promptly; the tourist in the Midi and the bourgeois, smug and snug by

his fireside, daily commiserate suffering—after dinner—in a manner

both magnificent and ample; society gambols at charity fêtes and balls;

the press “rediscovers distress”; journalists sob, weep, and implore—at

three sous a line. In a word, pitying the unfortunate is a profession

like another; and, if the day should ever arrive when there were no more

poor in the world, “many people”—to render idiom for idiom—“would be

badly in the soup.” Such satire stings and routs by virtue of the moral

force behind it: it is the whip of small cords plied by the man with a

soul.

Satire broadens to rollicking humour in depicting the abject terror of a

conscience-stricken bourgeois shopkeeper before the embarrassing spectre

of a hungry man:—

“_Avez-vous vu ce misérable?

Cet individu équivoque?

Ce pouilleux, ce voleur en loques,

Qui nous r’gardait manger à table?

Ma parole! on n’est pus (plus) chez soi,

On ne peut pus digérer tranquille—

Nous payons l’impôt, gn’a (il y en a) des lois!

Qu’est-ce qu’y (ils) font donc, les sergents d’ ville?_”

I laughed almost to tears when I came upon this picture, because I knew

that same bourgeois shopkeeper—in Boston—during the historic famine

winter of 1893-94, when a great press formed a syndicate for the

dissemination of lies, when the authority of a great state was appealed

to, and a great governor received congratulatory despatches from the

confines of a great country for prompt and decisive action in a great

emergency, and all because a few half-starved devils took a notion to

show themselves without washing their hands and faces or changing their

clothes.

But to return to France. Jehan Rictus loves the white apparitions of the

“first communicants,” loves sunshine, lilacs, and watercress, birds and

little children. Mrs. Browning’s memorable “Cry of the Children” is

feeble and conventional by the side of his “_Farandole des Pauv’s ‘tits

Fan-Fans_.” Charles Lamb was not sweeter, tenderer, daintier, in his

tear-compelling reverie, “Dream Children,” than Rictus in dealing with

his dream loves,—his “cemetery of innocents” he calls them, his “poor

little heap of dead.”

“_Et la vie les a massacrés,

Mes mains les ont ensevelis,

Mes yeux les ont beaucoup pleurés._”

His “_Espoir_,” in which he dreams of a sweetheart, is a veritable

Eugène Carrière in verse.

Another poem containing much of the same sad, tender beauty, strangely

commingled with piquant malice, mischievous _esprit_, broad humour, and

bitter satire; a poem which, in spite of startling liberties of

vocabulary, rhythm, and rhyme, is said to have brought honest tears to

the eyes of the impeccable De Hérédia, is “_Le Revenant_.” The

“_Revenant_” is Jesus Christ. The appearance of Christ in

nineteenth-century Paris is a much-worn _motif_ in French literature and

painting; but the slum poet’s handling of it is so new, bold, and strong

that it seems to be altogether fresh.

“_Le Revenant_” is in three parts.

Part I. is a query as to what would happen if Jesus Christ should come

back, and introduces a summary of the principal events of his career and

a strikingly original appreciation of his personality and character. He

is the “man of the beautiful eyes and the beautiful dreams, whose heart

was larger than life.” But he is also “the anarchist,” the “Galilean

tramp,” the “carpenter on a strike,” the “boon companion of thieves,”

the “quack hated by the doctors,” the “duffer who wore another cross

than that of the Legion of Honour, who boxed the bourgeois shop-keepers,

and who wasn’t over-polite to the muffs of his time,”—phrases through

whose vulgar, uncouth, seemingly sacrilegious envelope are plainly

visible intense love and admiration, and which accurately represent the

religious attitude of the submerged, who, proverbially, applaud the name

of Christ while they hiss the barest mention of his professed followers

and his church.

In Part II. Jesus Christ suddenly appears on a corner of one of the

exterior boulevards. The surprised poet greets him with bluff

good-nature, laments drolly his inability to do the proper thing by him

in the matter of drinks, and overwhelms him with eager, naïve questions.

Then, touched to the heart by his dazed look and apparent helplessness,

he assumes a kindly superiority, taking him under his protection, as he

might a lost infant, warning him against many things, especially against

the police, who will be certain to arrest him as a vagabond if he falls

within their view. Finally, he discovers that the figure he has taken to

be that of the Christ is his own figure mirrored in the window of the

wine-shop before which he has been standing.

Part III. is the after-thought, what the poet would most wish to have

said to Jesus Christ if he really had returned and he had been the first

to greet him. Necessarily a repetition at many points of Parts I. and

II., its excuse is the following declaration of faith:—

“_Chacun a la Beauté en lui,

Chacun a la Justice en lui,

Chacun a la Force en lui-même.

L’Homme est tout seul dans l’Univers.

Oh! oui, ben seul, et c’est sa gloire,

Car y n’a qu’ deux yeux pour tout voir._

“_Le Ciel, la Terre, et les Etoiles

Sont prisonniers d’ ses cils en pleurs.

Y’ n’ peut donc compter qu’ sur lui-même,

J’ m’en vas m’ remuer qu’ chacun m’imite,

C’est là qu’est la clef du Problème.

L’Homme doit êt’ son Maître et son Dieu._”

and the following threat:—

“_Donnez-nous tous les jours l’ brich’ ton (pain) régulier,

Autrement nous tâch’rons d’ le prendre._”

It was probably this downright and direct threat that led Jules

Claretie, writing for _Le Temps_, to say: “The poetry of the lean Jehan

Rictus is the Fronde of to-day. Far better that it mutter in the cabaret

than in the street.” The majority of the press critics, ignoring this

single unequivocal threat and numerous indirect but slightly veiled

anathemas, have pronounced his work “gentle and refined.” Both

interpretations are, in a measure, right.

Desiring revolt with his whole soul, and sure of the righteousness of

it, he is likewise so sure of its entire uselessness that he deprecates

it far oftener than he proclaims it. A better state of things, in even

the most distant future, is to him but a dubious “perhaps.” From kings,

presidents, councils, parliaments, nobles, bourgeois, popes, priests,

economists, reformers, and philanthropists he expects nothing. From his

own down-trodden class he expects no more. They are stupid cattle,

waiting patiently to be bled. Enfeebled by hardship, cowed into

spiritlessness by police and magistrates, ready to share with the dogs

the crumbs that drop from rich men’s tables, to cringe and fawn before

the faintest prospect of a bone; ready to sell themselves outright for

two bars of music, three sous of absinthe, or a couple of rounds of

tobacco; blinded by the dazzling fiction of universal suffrage: they are

only fit, at the moment a Bastille ought to be taken, to take the

tram-car of that name, and generally show more signs of reverting to the

type of the ourang-outang than of ushering in that era of universal

affection, when all men will be as brothers, and all nations of one

speech and one mind.

His prayers are despairing cries to a half-credited God,—a God at best

so old, deaf, blind, unconcerned, and far away that his interference is

not much to be counted on.

He conjures Jesus Christ into the world only to chaff him for his faith

in man, to characterise his teachings as the beautiful soliloquies of an

unfortunate, and, finally, to warn him to make good his escape, if he

would keep out of the clutches of nineteenth-century Judas Iscariots and

Pontius Pilates.

The prophets and teachers who have tried radically to better the world

have always been treated as criminals, and always will be. It is vain to

struggle to make things over. Man is a muff by nature, and nature will

never change. The kilogramme of iron falsely called a heart will never

be anything more than a kilogramme of iron. The bank of love “assigned”

centuries ago. Modern civilisation is organised distress. These are his

sober and reasoned conclusions.

But ever and anon, when pain grows too great to be borne, the blind

instinct of self-preservation overtops reason. Then he swears to be his

“own good God all alone,” taking “his own skin for a banner, since that

is the only thing he has in the world.” Even so his words are less the

rallying cry of a reformer who believes in success than the desperate

defiance of a Prometheus chained to a rock; and recoil is speedy to his

habitual sentiment reiterated so often as to be a veritable refrain,

“It’s only life, after all: there’s nothing to do but to weep.”

“Jehan Rictus,” said a writer in the _Gil Blas_, “has definitely fixed a

new poetic sob in the cacophony of eternal human suffering.” Needless to

add, a sob was not his choice. Fate chose for him. His is no case of

“wilful sadness in literature.” Sweet, tender, affectionate by nature,

enamoured of sunlight, he might, under happier conditions, have given a

smile, a cheer, a pæan even, to the world. In giving a sob, he gave what

life gave him,—his all.

He is the perfect nihilist, who fails to be the perfect anarchist only

because he has no faith. His Paris underworld is an Inferno. “All hope

abandon ye who enter here,” is the burden of his message from the

submerged; and it is this, probably, that led Laurent Tailhade to call

him “the Dante of _la misère_.”

Jehan Rictus is at present preaching his gospel of blended defiance and

despair in prose, in a journal called _L’Ennemi du Peuple_. His

journalism, however, rises very little above the commonplace. He is

growing fat and fashionable, and it is to be feared that his days of

significant poetical productiveness are over.

Montmartre participated actively in the revolution of 1830, and was the

seat of the _Club de la Montagne_ in that of 1848. Of the period

immediately preceding the Commune one of its old residents writes:

“There, insurrection held its drums and its guns always ready. The right

to live free was the most precious of all things to the hearts of all.”

It seems to have been the order to seize the cannons which the _Gardes

Nationaux_ had transported to Montmartre after the capitulation of Paris

that precipitated the Commune; and it was at Montmartre that the

generals Lecomte and Clément Thomas were executed.

Louise Michel—and who should know better?—in her fascinating

_Mémoires_ testifies to the revolutionary prestige of Montmartre. She

says, referring to the siege of Paris:—

“The Eighteenth Arrondissement was the terror of the selfish,

plundering jobbers, and others of their breed. When it was

rumoured, ‘Montmartre is coming down’ (‘_Montmartre va

descendre_’), the reactionaries scampered to their holes like

hunted animals, deserting in their panic the secret

storehouses in which provisions were rotting while Paris was

starving to death.”

Again, apropos of her discharge from custody in the early part of the

insurrection, she writes:—

“The four _citoyens_, Th. Ferré, Avronsart, Burlot, and

Christ, came to demand my release in the name of the

Eighteenth Arrondissement. At the first word of this

phrase,—terror of the reaction,—‘Montmartre is coming down,’ I

was given into their hands.”

Still again, in a letter to Rochefort and Pain, on her return from

exile:—

“I am writing to Joffrin at the same time as to you on the

subject of the meeting of Montmartre, before which I cannot go

to any other. It was at Montmartre I marched formerly: it is

with Montmartre I march to-day.”

It was to the Montmartre of the _indigènes_, the Montmartre of the

workingmen, the Montmartre then regarded as a twin of Belleville, which

was known as le _cratère de la révolution_, that Louise Michel paid

these tributes of affection and esteem. The invasion of the hordes of

arts and letters, who hold the _Vache Enragée_ above the Golden Calf,

far from weakening the revolutionary fervour of the Butte, has

strengthened it. Montmartre is none the less a hot-bed of revolution for

having become a shrine of the Muses. On the contrary, its present

revolutionary spirit is the spirit of the old Montmartre and of the new

Bohemia fused into one; and it makes the “selfish, plundering jobbers,

and others of their breed,” quake more than ever.

At every cloud on the municipal horizon no bigger than a man’s hand, at

every suggestion of disturbance in the political atmosphere, at every

slightest rumble presaging the rising of the masses, the classes peer

nervously and timorously in the direction of the beetling Montmartre,

regretting from the bottom of their hearts that the offer Rothschild is

said to have once made, to raze the Butte at his own expense, was not

accepted by the government.

The relations between the aboriginal workingmen and the artistic and

literary colonists of Montmartre are of the most cordial sort. There is

a genuine solidarity between them (wherein is a profound lesson for the

social settler), because they have common sufferings, common hatreds,

common apprehensions, and common hopes; because they faint from the same

hunger, shiver from the same frost, dread the same rent-bills, are

liable to the same evictions and the same police _rafles_, and are under

the same temptation, when houseless, to commit a petty misdemeanour in

order to get stowed away for the night.

Artists may help the poor working people about them—without that effort

of will, that compulsion of duty, which inevitably involves patronage,

and which is the bane of all the attempts of the well-to-do to “elevate”

the poor—because, poor themselves, they often accept help from them in

return and _in kind_, and because they are neither mysteries nor objects

of envy to any.

Nowhere in Paris, certainly, is the identity of interests and sentiments

of the simple proletariat and the _prolétariat littéraire_ so

graphically presented and the much-prated alliance between brain and

brawn, labour and intellect, so completely realised. Nowhere this side

of heaven, probably, is social democracy so real and so devoid of pose.

It is not to be supposed that these poor devils of painters and poets,

ardent-eyed and beauty-loving, are inwardly submissive because they rail

outwardly at their misfortunes; that they pardon either the individuals

who victimise them or the society which allows individuals to victimise

them. Revolt is none the less revolt for perpetrating and relishing a

joke.

The note of social revolt in the cavalcade of the _Vache Enragée_ and in

the mock ceremony of the marriage of the _Rosière_; in the more than

unconventional daily life, with its contemptuous disregard of ordinances

of state and sacraments of church; in the political and social satire

of the _chansonniers_, who sing indifferently in the _soirées_ of the

socialist and anarchist groups and in the _cabarets artistiques et

littéraires_; and in the coarse derision of the bawlers of the _cabarets

brutaux_,—is not to be ignored on the ground that it bears a semblance

of mirth. The child’s play theory is absolutely untenable in this

connection. These jolly Bohemian dogs of Montmartre are capable of

corroding rancours and terrible wrath. And, if that descent from

Montmartre which the conscience-stricken bourgeois feel in their bones

will come, ever does come, it will not be the simple proletariat that

will inaugurate and lead it, but the rollicking _prolétariat

littéraire_.

[Illustration: LES CORBEAUX]

CHAPTER XVII

THE REVOLUTIONARY SPIRIT IN PROSE LITERATURE & THE DRAMA

“_I have intended to rehabilitate the pariah, whatever form it

may take; whether it be a buffoon, like Triboulet, a

courtesan, like Marion Delorme, a poisoner, like Lucrezia

Borgia, the oppressed, like the people. Those who say that I

have practised art for art’s sake say a silly thing. No one,

more than I, has practised art for society and humanity. I

have always worked for this end, and have known what I wished

to do_.”—VICTOR HUGO.

“_We know what it cost the First Empire to have displeased

Châteaubriand, what it cost Louis Philippe to have offended

Lamartine, Napoleon III. to have vexed Victor Hugo_.”—GASTON

DESCHAMPS.

“_The aptitude for commerce is an inferior aptitude. There are

multitudes of banks in which fortunes are perpetuated. Is

there an unbroken line of Hugos, of Ampères, of Courbets,

which progresses incessantly from father to son? Commerce is

an absurd criterion of merit, base in itself and still more

degrading when it is regulated by laws like ours._”

Hélier, in ROSNY’S Le Bilatéral.

“_This morning I received the visit of the police commissary,

my neighbour, accompanied by four alcoholics. They turned

everything topsy-turvy in my rooms, mixed up my

correspondence, rumpled my collection of prints, and all to

seize, at the end, a wood-cut of Maurin and the works of

Tolstoy._”

Meyrargues, in VICTOR BARRUCAND’S Avec le Feu.

“_I believe it is impossible to-day for a great mind not to be

somewhat anarchistic._”—AUGUSTIN FILON.

“_My own art is a negation of society, an affirmation of the

individual outside of all rules and of all social

necessities_.”—EMILE ZOLA.

Whatever may be the verdict of posterity regarding the literary and

philosophical activity of this restless, problematic period, the verdict

of the contemporary world seems to be that Tolstoy, Ibsen, and Zola are

the three biggest literary philosophers (or philosophical littérateurs)

of their day and generation; and it is a noteworthy fact, to put it

mildly, that the attitude towards society of each one of these three

intellectual giants is, more or less openly, revolutionary. All three

may be claimed by the parties of revolt without any considerable forcing

of the note.

Tolstoy, by reason of his adoration of Jesus, his insistence on a

literal interpretation of Jesus’ teachings, his advocacy of

non-resistance as the most effective form of resistance, and his

attempts to incorporate liberty in education and, by education, in life,

seems to fall naturally enough into the category of the “Christian

anarchist.” But, whether Tolstoy be a “Christian anarchist” or a

“Christian socialist,” as certain Christian socialists rather

presumptuously claim, is immaterial. He is opposed to the established

order, and belongs indisputably with the revolutionists.

Ibsen is a fearless, implacable, self-confessed destroyer of dogma and

tradition, whom the anarchists may claim without doing violence either

to themselves or to him.

The attitude of Zola towards society and the social problem is not so

easy to define.

Zola exposed with a frankness bordering on brutality the rottenness of

the wealthy and privileged classes, the oppressions and cruelty of

capital, the selfishness and hypocrisy of ministers, magistrates, army

officers, and priests; pictured with a friendliness bordering on

advocacy the sufferings and struggles of the labourers, and stated with

perfect fairness the most revolutionary ideas and ideals. That he had

in him little enough of the stuff of which real martyrs are made—in

spite of his constitutional inability to “shut himself up in his works,

and act only through them,” as he a hundred times announced his

intention of doing—was shown clearly enough by his ignominious flight

when things turned against him in the Dreyfus affair. Nevertheless, no

novelist of his time—at least none in France—has portrayed so

masterfully, so sympathetically, one might almost say so devoutly, the

character of the extreme, the martyr type of anarchist, the

_propagandiste par le fait_.

Zola is said to have boasted of the progress anarchistic violence made

after he “launched his Souvarine into the world.” The charge is probably

a libel; but from this cold, calculating, consecrated Souvarine of

_Germinal_ to the generous, sentimental Salvat of Paris the sincere

_propagandiste par le fait_ was explained, excused, admired, extolled by

him.

This is not saying that Zola was consciously (or unconsciously) an

advocate of the _propagande par le fait_. He extended an equal

cordiality to all the reformers and innovators who are groping towards a

new and better world. The evils of contemporary society are so gigantic,

in his view, and the necessity for a change of some sort so imperative,

that he could understand and condone any and every honest protest, no

matter how imprudent and no matter how fruitless.

Besides, Zola was more of an observer than a philosopher, and more of a

poet than either. His later works, and _Germinal_ at least among his

earlier ones, are primarily prose epics. He loved the dynamiter for his

epic value as Milton loved his magnificent Satan, and may have had no

more intention of holding him up to men as an exemplar than Milton had

of instituting devil-worship.

[Illustration: Emile Zola]

It is not normal for the poet to have a coherent system, and it is

extremely doubtful if Zola had one. Still, the poet must have, like

other mortals, his personal point of view; and Zola’s personal point of

view (which is not for a moment to be confounded with his point of

view as a poet) seems to have been that of the scientists of his

novels,—anarchistic as to end, but evolutionary as to means: the

attitude of Guillaume Froment in _Paris_, who saw in “unities creating

worlds, atoms producing life by attraction, by free and ardent love, the

only scientific theory of society,” and who “dreamed of the emancipated

individual evolving, expanding without any restraint whatsoever, for his

own good and for the good of all.” The attitude of Bertheroy (_Paris_),

“who worked, in the seclusion of his laboratory, for the ruin of the

present superannuated and abominable régime, with its God, its dogmas,

its laws, but who desired also repose, too disdainful of useless acts to

join in the tumults of the street, preferring to live tranquil, rich,

recompensed, in peace with the government (whatever it might be), all in

foreseeing and preparing the formidable issue of to-morrow,”—the

Bertheroy who says: “I have only contempt for the vain agitations of

politics, revolutionary or conservative. Does not science suffice? Of

what use is it to wish to hurry things when a single step of science

does more to advance humanity towards the city of justice and truth than

a hundred years of politics and social revolt? Science alone is

revolutionary: it alone can make not only truth, but justice prevail, if

justice is ever possible here below. Of a certainty, it alone brushes

away dogmas, expels the gods, creates light and happiness. It is I,

member of the Institute, rich and decorated, who am the only

revolutionist.” The attitude of Jordan (_Travail_), “a completely

emancipated spirit, a tranquil and terrible evolutionist, sure that his

labour will ravage and renew the world.... According to Jordan, it is

science solely that leads humanity to truth, to justice, to final

happiness, to the perfect city of the future towards which the peoples

are so slowly and painfully advancing.”

All things considered, it would not be unfair, perhaps, to address to

Zola himself the words which he made this Jordan speak to the reforming

hero of _Travail_, Luc Froment: “Only, my noble friend, you are nothing

more nor less than an anarchist, complete evolutionist as you believe

yourself; and you have every reason to say that, while it is with the

formula of Fourier that we must begin, it is by _l’homme libre dans la

commune libre_ that we must end.” And, if Zola had been thus addressed,

it is not unlikely that he would have replied laughingly, as he made his

Luc reply, “At any rate, let’s begin; and we shall see in due time

whither logic leads us.”

There is no doubt possible regarding Zola’s belief in a good time

coming. His later books were fairly saturated with a sublime faith

almost childlike. There is also no doubt that he believed that science

consecrated to the service of humanity is quite capable of regenerating

the world, as he indicated by the communistic experiment of Luc in

_Travail_. But whether he believed that science _will_ be consecrated to

the service of humanity or whether he was presenting a method which

might be employed, and which he simply hoped, almost against hope, would

be so employed, is not so clear. Thus, in the last chapter of _Travail_,

after giving a beautiful picture of the superb results of the peaceable

revolution accomplished through the altruistic initiative of Luc in the

commune of Beauclair, he added a sort of apocalyptic vision of the

happenings in the principal divisions of the big world outside, in which

the same superb results have been secured by violence,—by a bloody,

socialistic _coup d’état_, by the multiplication of anarchistic bombs,

by a universal war,—quite as if he would say to the classes in power:

“I have shown you how society may be renewed. I have shown you the way

of your salvation, the only way. If you would but walk in this way, you

might save yourselves and the world with you. But you will not. You are

too stupid, too selfish, too obstinate, too corrupt. You will not. I

have known you only too long, and I know you will not. Well, then, so

much the worse for you! Expropriation, massacre, annihilation, await

you!”

If you ask intellectual Frenchmen, without distinction of social

position or political faith, who is the foremost living French man of

letters, five out of six will answer, without an instant’s hesitation,

Anatole France. Less pictorial, less colossal, and less epic than Zola,

but more penetrating and more profound; æsthetic and erudite (in the

good old-fashioned sense of the latter word), subtile, suave, and

refined; abundantly endowed with the humour and the wit in which Zola

was deficient; as impeccable in point of language and style as Zola was

careless, as measured as Zola was violent, as gentle as Zola was brutal,

as finished as Zola was crude; as perfect an embodiment of the Greek

spirit as Zola, if he had only had a keener sense of the grotesque,

would have been of the Gothic,—Anatole France is none the less a

redoubtable iconoclast,—the most redoubtable iconoclast of his

generation, perhaps. A playful pessimist, a piquant anarchist, a

mischievous nihilist, if you will, but a pessimist, an anarchist, a

nihilist, for all that. “Prejudices,” he says, “are unmade and remade

without ceasing: they have the eternal mobility of the clouds. It is in

their nature to be august before appearing to be odious; and the men are

rare who have not the superstition of their time, and who look straight

in the eye what the crowd does not dare to look at.” M. France is one of

these rare men. He combines the amiable doubt of Montaigne with the

mocking irreverence of Voltaire and the subversive grace of Renan. “The

end which M. France seems to pursue persistently,” says one of his

literary brethren, “is the demolition of the social edifice by the force

of a logic tinctured with irony, without anger, and without phrases. By

as much as Zola, Tailhade, and Mirbeau are ardent and passionate when

they attack society, by so much is M. France calm and feline; but he is

not, on that account, the less to be feared.”

[Illustration: ANATOLE FRANCE]

As the most eminent living representative of the best classic

traditions of French prose, M. France is the idol of the lettered youth

of France. From admiration of form to acceptance of the substance

underlying the form is but a step. His ideas insinuate themselves

consequently into the very penetralia of culture,—that exquisite

culture which brooks the presence of nothing common or unclean,—and

they act as a disintegrating force in circles where downright

revolutionary propaganda cannot enter.

In his writings, Anatole France is the precise intellectual

counterpart—at every point but that of Catholicism, and even here his

passion for Augustine, Chrysostom, and the other Church Fathers deters

him from displaying an uncomely asperity—of his own adorable creation,

l’Abbé Coignard,[105] the “delicious Catholic _révolté_, who juggles

with principles and human institutions as if they were a Merry Andrew’s

painted spheres; the railing anarchist who lashes with jests and whose

only bombs are _bons mots_.” And the best characterisation it is

possible to give of M. France, the genial iconoclast, is to repeat

certain of his observations on the character of his Abbé and certain of

the sayings he puts into his Abbé’s mouth,—which I accordingly do in

the following detached paragraphs, making no pretence of preserving in

the translation the peculiar savour and charm of the original:—

OF THE CHARACTER OF JERÔME COIGNARD.

“His free intelligence trampled under foot vulgar beliefs and

never accepted without examination the common opinion, except

in what had to do with the Catholic faith in which he was

immovable.

“The sagest of moralists, a sort of marvellous blend of

Epicurus and Saint Francis of Assisi.... He preserved, in his

boldest explorations, the attitude of a peaceful

promenader.... It is certain that the world, to his eyes,

resembled less the deserts of the Thébaïde than the gardens of

Epicurus. He sauntered therein with the audacious

ingenuousness which is the essential trait of his character

and the elemental principle of his teaching.”

“Never did spirit show itself at once so daring and so

pacific, nor temper its disdain with more sweetness.... He

despised men with tenderness. He endeavoured to teach them

that, since they have nothing anywhere near great in

themselves except their capacity for suffering, they can

cultivate nothing useful or beautiful but compassion.”

“It was his benevolence which impelled him to humiliate his

fellows in their sentiments, their knowledge, their

philosophy, and their institutions. He had to show them that

their imbecile natures have neither imagined nor constructed

anything worth being attacked or defended very energetically,

and that, if they knew the fragile crudity of their greatest

works, such as laws and empires, they would fight over them

only in play, for the sheer fun of the thing, like the

children who build castles of sand on the rim of the sea.”

“The majesty of the laws did not impose on his clairvoyant

soul; and he deplored the fact that the unfortunate are

burdened with so many obligations of which, for the most part,

it is impossible to discover the origin or the sense.”

“What he had the least of was the sense of veneration. Nature

had refused it him, and he did nothing to acquire it. He would

have feared, in exalting some, to debase others; and his

universal charity embraced equally the humble and the proud.”

SOME OF JERÔME COIGNARD’S SAYINGS.

_Of Society and Governments_:

“After the destruction of all the false principles, society

will subsist, because it is founded upon necessity, the laws

of which, older than Saturn, will rule when Prometheus shall

have dethroned Jupiter.”

“I conclude that all the laws with which a minister swells his

portfolio are vain documents that can neither make us live nor

prevent us from living.”

“It is well-nigh a matter of indifference whether we are

governed in one fashion or another, and ministers are

imposing only by reason of their clothes and their carriages.”

“These assemblies [parliaments] will be founded upon the

confused mediocrity of the multitude of which they will be the

issue. They will revolve obscure and multiple thoughts. They

will impose on the heads of the government the task of

executing vague wishes, of which they will not have full

consciousness themselves; and the ministers, less fortunate

than the Œdipus of the fable, will be devoured, one after the

other, by the hundred-headed Sphinx, for not having guessed

the riddle of which the Sphinx herself did not know the

answer. Their greatest hardship will be to resign themselves

to impotence, to words instead of action. They will become

rhetoricians, and very bad rhetoricians, since the talent

which carried with it ever so little clarity would ruin them.

They will be obliged to speak without saying anything, and the

least stupid among them will be condemned to deceive more than

the others. In this way the most intelligent will become the

most contemptible. And, if there shall be some capable of

arranging treaties, regulating finance, and supervising

affairs, their ability will profit them nothing; for time will

be lacking, and time is the stuff of great enterprises.”

_Of the Army_:

“I have observed that the trade the most natural to man is

that of soldiering; it is the one towards which he is the most

easily borne by his instincts and by his tastes, which are not

all good. And apart from certain rare exceptions, of which I

am one, man may be defined as an animal with a musket. Give

him a handsome uniform and the hope of going to fight, he will

be content.... The military condition has this also in keeping

with human nature, that one is never forced to think therein;

and it is clear that we were not made to think.”

“Thought is a disease peculiar to certain individuals, and

could not be propagated without bringing about promptly the

end of the species. Soldiers live in bands, and man is a

sociable animal. They wear costumes of blue and white, blue

and red, gray and blue, ribbons, plumes, and cockades; and

these give them the same prestige with women that the cock has

with the hen. They go forth marauding and to war; and man is

naturally thieving, libidinous, destructive, and sensible to

glory.”

“It is astounding, Tournebroche, my son, that war and the

chase, the mere thought of which ought to overwhelm us with

shame and remorse in recalling to us the miserable necessities

of our nature and our inveterate wickedness, should, on the

contrary, serve as matter for the pride of men; that

Christians should continue to honour the trade of butcher and

headsman when it is hereditary in the family; and that, in a

word, among civilised peoples the illustriousness of the

citizens is measured by the quantity of murder and carnage

they carry, so to speak, in their veins.”

[Illustration: A Pair of Army Officers]

_Of the Academy_:

“Happy he who has not put his hope in The Academy! Happy he

who lives exempt from fears and desires, and who knows that it

is equally vain to be an Academician and not to be an

Academician! Such a one leads, without trouble, a life hidden

and obscure. Beautiful liberty follows him everywhere. He

celebrates in the shade the silent orgies of wisdom, and all

the Muses smile on him as on their adept.”

“The immortality which has just been decreed to M. de Séez

neither a Bossuet nor a Belzunce desires. It is not graven in

the hearts of wondering peoples: it is inscribed in a big

register.”

“If there are to be found, among the forty, persons of more

polish than genius, what harm is there in this? Mediocrity

triumphs in the Academy. Where does it not triumph? Do you

find it less powerful in the parliaments and in the councils

of the crown, where, surely, it is less in its place? Does one

need to be a rare man to work on a dictionary which pretends

to control usage and which can only follow it?

“The _Académistes_ or _Académiciens_ were instituted, as you

know, to fix the proper usage in what concerns discourse, to

purge the language of every venerable and popular impurity,

and to prevent the appearance of another Rabelais, another

Montaigne, _tout puant la canaille, la cuistrerie, et la

province_.”

“Genius is something unsociable. An extraordinary man is

rarely a man of resources. The Academy was very well able to

do without Descartes and Pascal. Who can say that it could as

easily have done without M. Godeau or M. Conrart?”

_Of Justice, Courts, and Judges_:

“I hold man free in his acts because my religion teaches it;

but, outside the doctrine of the Church (which is

unequivocal), there is so little reason to believe in human

liberty that I shudder in thinking of the verdicts of a

justice that punishes actions of which the motives, the order,

and the causes equally elude us, in which the will has often

little part, and which are sometimes accomplished

unconsciously.”

“Tournebroche, my son, consider that I am speaking of human

justice, which is different from the justice of God, and which

is generally opposed to it.”

“The cruelest insult that men have been able to offer to our

Lord Jesus Christ has been the placing of his image in the

halls where the judges absolve the Pharisees who crucified him

and condemn the Magdalen whom he lifted up with his divine

hands.”[106]

“What has he, the Just, to do with these men who could not

show themselves just, even if they wished it, since their

dreary duty is to consider the actions of their fellows not in

themselves and in their essence, but from the single point of

view of the interests of society; that is to say, in the

interests of this mass of egoism, avarice, errors, and abuses

which constitute communities, and of which they (the judges)

are the blind conservators.”

“Judges do not sound the loins and do not read hearts, and

their justest justice is crude and superficial.... They are

men; that is to say, feeble and corruptible, gentle to the

strong and pitiless to the weak. They consecrate by their

sentences the cruelest social iniquities; and it is difficult

to distinguish, in this partiality, what comes from their

personal baseness and what is imposed on them by the duty of

their profession, this duty being, in reality, to support the

State in what it has of evil as well as in what it has of

good; to watch over the conservation of public morals, whether

they are excellent or detestable.... Furthermore, it should be

observed that the magistrate is the defender, by virtue of his

function, not only of the current prejudices to which we are

all more or less subject, but also of the time-worn prejudices

which are conserved in the laws after they have been effaced

from our souls and our habits. And there is not a spirit ever

so little meditative and free that does not feel how much

there is of Gothic in the law, while the judge has not the

right to feel it.”

“By the very nature of their profession, judges are inclined

to see a culprit in every prisoner; and their zeal seems so

terrible to certain European peoples that they have them

assisted, in important cases, by ten citizens chosen by lot.

From which it appears that chance, in its blindness,

guarantees the life and liberty of the accused better than the

enlightenment of the judges can. It is true that these

impromptu bourgeois magistrates, selected by a lottery, are

held well outside the affair of which they see only the

exterior pomp. It is true further that, being ignorant of the

laws, they are called in, not to apply them, but also simply

to decide, by a single word, if there is occasion to apply

them. We are told that assizes of this sort give absurd

results sometimes, but that the peoples who have established

them cling to them as to a highly precious protection. I

easily believe it. And I comprehend the acceptance of verdicts

rendered in this fashion, which may be inept and cruel, but of

which the absurdity and barbarity are, so to speak,

attributable to nobody. Injustice seems tolerable when it is

sufficiently incoherent to appear involuntary.”

“Just now this little bailiff, who has so strong a sentiment

of justice, suspected me of belonging to the party of thieves

and assassins. On the contrary, I so far disapprove theft and

assassination that I cannot endure even the copy of them

regularised by the laws; and it is painful for me to see that

judges have found no better means of punishing robbers and

homicides than by imitating them. For, after all,

Tournebroche, my son, in good faith, what are fines and the

death penalty, if not robbery and assassination perpetrated

with an august exactitude? And do you not see that our justice

merely tends, in all its pride, to this shame of avenging an

evil by an evil, a suffering by a suffering, and in doubling

misdemeanours and crimes in the name of equilibrium and

symmetry?

“Customs have more force than laws. Gentleness of demeanour

and sweetness of spirit are the only remedies which can

reasonably be applied to legal barbarity. For to correct laws

by laws is to take a slow and uncertain route.”

But for the historic setting, the turn of the phrase, and the absence of

bitterness, one might fancy himself reading the contemporary anarchist

organs, _Les Temps Nouveaux_ and _Le Libertaire_.

Anatole France is as chary of Utopias as Zola is prone to them. He fears

nothing so much as intemperance of emotion and speech. He believes in

nothing, not even in his own unbelief. “If ever M. Anatole France,” says

Gaston Deschamps, “seeks martyrdom, it will be to confess the doctrine

of the relativity of knowledge, to affirm the nothingness of human

opinions, and to attest, at the price of his blood, that there is no

truth”; and yet it was apropos of this same M. France that this same M.

Deschamps, in the course of a contention that literature always ends by

having its way, sounded the note of warning placed at the beginning of

this chapter.

In spite of the dilettante humour or, to be more accurate, the

dilettante philosophy that informs his writings, Anatole France did not

remain within his _tour d’ivoire_ during that strange Dreyfus affair

which transformed nearly every literary Frenchman into an agitator—for

one side or the other. Like Zola and like most of his fellow-craftsmen

of an anarchistic or socialistic bent, he engaged actively in the

anti-militarist campaign, the pretext of which was the wrongs of a Jew

whom they believed to be persecuted. In M. France, apostle of the

nothingness of things in general and in particular, such a course was

very surprising and, it must be admitted, very inconsistent. His most

plausible excuse probably is that he could not help himself, his

chivalrous instincts proving stronger than his quietism. But he might

defend himself, if he thought it worth while, by citing the reply of

Jerôme Coignard to his satellite Tournebroche when the latter inquired

why he would “reduce to dust the foundations of equity, of justice, of

laws, and of all the civil and military magistracies”:—

“My son, I have always observed that the troubles of men come

to them from their prejudices, as spiders and scorpions come

from the dimness of cellars and from the humidity of vaults.

It is good to flourish the broom and the brush a little in all

the dark corners. It is good even to give a little blow of the

pick here and there in the walls of the cellar and garden to

frighten the vermin and prepare the necessary ruins.”

M. France has not yet gone back into the _tour d’ivoire_ from which the

irresistible “Affair” drew him. He is a member of the executive

committee of the Co-operative Bakery and a leader in the organisation of

the _Universités Populaires_; he presided on the occasion of the Victor

Hugo Centennial over a gigantic mass meeting of the latter, in which he

gave “a little blow of the pick” to clericalism; and in 1903 he

contributed an introduction to Premier Combes’ volume _Campagne Laïque_,

in defence of anti-clericalism.

At a recent anniversary of Diderot, whom both anarchists and socialists

claim as an ancestor, but who is more particularly an idol of the

anarchists, he said:—

“_Citoyens_, master-spirits who are our friends have come here

to speak of Diderot, the savant, and Diderot, the philosopher.

As for me, I have only a word to say. I desire to show you

Diderot, the friend of the people. This son of the cutler of

Langres was an excellent man. A contemporary of Voltaire and

of Rousseau, he was the best of men in the best of centuries.

“He loved men and the pacific works of men. He conceived the

great design of lifting up into esteem the manual trades

looked down upon by the military, civil, and religious

aristocracies.

[Illustration: OCTAVE MIRBEAU]

“_Citoyens_, at a time when the united enemies of knowledge,

of peace, of liberty, arm themselves against the Republic, and

threaten to stifle democracy under the weight of all that

which does not think, or thinks only against thought, you have

had a happy inspiration in singling out for honour the memory

of this philosopher who teaches men happiness through work,

knowledge, and love; and who, looking far into the future,

announced the new era, the coming of the proletariat into a

pacified and comforted world.

“His penetrating view discerned our present struggles and our

future successes. And it is not too much to say that Diderot,

whose memory we celebrate to-day, Diderot, dead for one

hundred and twenty years, touches us very closely; that he is

ours, a great servitor of the people and a defender of the

proletariat.”

Anatole France is the gentlest and subtlest ironist of his time; Octave

Mirbeau (to whom M. France’s _Jerôme Coignard_ was dedicated) is the

fiercest. M. Mirbeau has not yet obtained the world renown of Zola nor

the national renown of M. France, but he may become in time as famous as

either. He surpasses every living French writer in portraying the

monstrous, the atrocious, and the horrible, and in expressing hatred and

disgust; and his irony—too often fulminated, in violation of the

commonest courtesy, not to say decency, against individuals antipathetic

to him—rives and blasts like the thunderbolt. It is doubtful if the

world has seen anything comparable to him for vitriolic vindictiveness

since England had Dean Swift. He is bitter, brutal, savage, terrifying

to the last degree; “one of those combative natures,” says Eugène

Montfort, “who are dreaded because their conviction partakes of the

nature of an animate being, ... breathes, feeds, grows, is endowed with

the instinct of self-preservation and struggles for life.”

His _Calvaire_, as he himself puts it, “strips war of all its heroism.”

His _Journal d’une Femme de Chambre_ is the most complete and awful

arraignment of society it is possible to imagine between the covers of a

single volume. Merciless towards the hypocrisy and hollowness of the

hour, towards meanness and pretentiousness, towards impotent and

misdirected philanthropy, above all, towards the stupidity and ugliness

of the smug bourgeois, whom he fairly flays alive as Apollo flayed

Marsyas, M. Mirbeau is, on the other hand,—and here his resemblance to

Swift ceases,—infinitely humane and uplifting, full of tenderness and

chivalry for the outcast and unfortunate, for the goodness which would

diffuse happiness everywhere; full of generous ardour, high aspiration,

and unfaltering faith in the ultimate triumph of the just.

M. Mirbeau is a declared anarchist; and, as such, he published a

wonderful Apology of Ravachol, furnished an introduction for Jean

Grave’s most famous volume, and played a leading rôle in the Dreyfus

affair.

His _chroniques_ are daring, incisive, brilliant, explosive, virile,

insulting. They cut, burn, scald, corrode. His short stories are

passionate, dramatic, lyrical even, all in being realistic. His novels,

though they deal only indirectly with public issues, are upon all the

anarchist library lists.

Emile Zola, Anatole France, and Octave Mirbeau are held, by many persons

who do not in the least share their views, to be the three pre-eminent

masters of modern French fiction. On a distinctly lower plane than these

three, but still far above mediocrity, are two other novelists of a

revolutionary cast, Lucien Descaves and Victor Barrucand.

Descaves demonstrated in his first volume—a collection of short stories

entitled _Le Calvaire d’Héloïse Pajadin_—the depressing and degrading

influence of the decent poverty of petty clerks and tradesmen; his _La

Colonne_ portrayed the contrasts of the Commune; and his _Soupes_

exposed the hypocrisies, cruelties, and absurdities of professional and

amateur charity and philanthropy. But M. Descaves’ specialty is the

army: it is in his novels of the barracks that he is at his best, and by

these works he is best known.

In these books, with a talent which approaches genius, through hundreds

of pages he holds the reader’s attention to the flat, stale, and

unprofitable barrack life,—to its pettiness, selfishness, monotony,

physical and moral untidiness, desolation and disgust,—a life entirely

lacking in all that we are accustomed to consider the material for

romance. Under his skilful handling the commonplace and the vulgar

become alternately tragic and grimly comic; and his _Sous-Offs_ and

_Emmurés_, to which he owes his nomination as a charter member of the

_Académie Goncourt_, are almost classics of their kind. Less exalted and

less epic than Zola, of whose big, spectacular qualities he is quite

destitute, Descaves is, nevertheless, much closer to Zola than he is to

Mirbeau or to France. And he easily surpasses Zola in the latter’s

much-heralded but rather superficial realism; that is, in the capacity

for heaping up significantly and without boresomeness minute, unromantic

details.

Descaves has a square bull-dog head and jaw, if his photographs are to

be trusted. He certainly has a bull-dog’s fixity of purpose in the

matter of both substance and form. Nothing in the world will induce him

to relax his grip on his immediate aim to indulge in fine ideas or fine

writing. His style is cold, hard, dry, correct, keen, and sure. He is an

out-and-out anarchist, who has played a fairly active part in the events

of the last few years. His _Sous-Offs_, though entirely free from

doctrinal discussion, cost him, by reason of its damaging revelations,

an encounter with the law. No other novel—indeed, no other work of this

generation, unless it be Bruant’s _chanson_, _Biribi_—has exerted so

profound an anti-militarist influence in France.

In 1895 Victor Barrucand published in the _Revue Blanche_ a series of

articles, concluding with a serious proposition for the establishment of

“_Le Pain Gratuit_” (free bread); and on the occasion of the municipal

elections of that year he placarded the principal communes of France

with the following appeal:—

“TO THE PEOPLE.

“The tactics of the ambitious and the usurpers have always

been to create division in order to reign.

“WORKERS!

“Be no more divided over political programmes of which you are

the dupes.

“Band yourselves together upon the basis of your interests.

“Let us not expect anything from the good will of anybody, but

let us define our own wills. Let us not say to any exterior

power, ‘GIVE US (_Donnez-nous_) OUR DAILY BREAD’; for manna

will not fall from heaven nor from the governmental spheres.

But let us say, ‘GIVE OURSELVES’ (_Donnons-nous_)! We can, if

we will it, affirm with solidarity true LIBERTY FOR ALL.

“Let us combine our determination and our scattered energies,

and let us constitute the great party of men with hearts upon

this question of bread, proclaiming THE RIGHT TO LIVE (_le

droit à la vie_) without humiliating conditions.

“Let bread, in all the communes, be the property of all, like

the water of the fountains, the lights of the streets, and the

streets themselves.

“We have free instruction, which profits only those who can

receive instruction. Let us organise, more justly, LE PAIN

GRATUIT for the profit and the liberty of all the workers.

“Let the bread necessary to life be a right, and not an alms.

Let it be no more the derisive price with which the labourer,

nourisher of the rich, is paid. Let us abrogate the law of

death inscribed on the margin of the code against him who has

not found a way to sell himself.

“THE PEOPLE MUST SPEAK OUT LOUD AND FIRM! THEY MUST DICTATE

THEIR TERMS!

“Let us vote no more for individuals nor for complicated

programmes. Let us vote for LE PAIN GRATUIT! Let there be no

political divisions upon this point. Let us be with those who

are with us, and be on our guard against the false

philanthropists who promise more butter than bread.

“Let us begin at the beginning. Let us lay the corner-stone of

a social edifice which shall shelter our children FREE AND

RECONCILED IN THE COMMON HAPPINESS.

“Let us silence the ambitious who see in the suffering of the

people only a means of attaining their ends. Let us replace

the politics of personalities (so remote from the interests of

the masses) by a finely human organisation of things. Let us

vote for the idea which cannot betray us.

“LET US VOTE FOR FREE BREAD!

“VICTOR BARRUCAND.”[107]

In _Avec le Feu_, a novel whose action is placed in the troubled period

of the execution of Vaillant and the overt act of Emile Henry, M.

Barrucand has given an exceedingly subtle and suggestive study of the

disgust with society of a certain element of the intellectual _élite_,

and of the reasons for their espousal of the anarchist cause.

The principal character, one Robert, is a good type of the cultured,

semi-neurasthenic anarchist of a period chiefly characterised by its

restlessness and yearning:—

“On certain evenings he descended into the street, and

saturated himself with the crowd. On the benches he breathed

the mortality of the squares. He suffered for these miserable

cattle who bleed no more under the goad of conscience. He

roamed entire nights as chance led, hunting the débris of

souls, exploring with his emotions, as with a dark lantern,

the pavements of the drowsy city. At daybreak he came back

shivering, coughing, weary with over-walking, drunk with pity,

his stomach steeped in bad drinks. He concluded then that

labour had brutalised the species, and he sought the secret of

lifting it up. On these mornings he speculated daringly,

dreamed of sacrifices, of revolts, of noble disdains, of

ferocious protests against philanthropy and respectability. A

savour of death blended with his charity and perfumed his

heroic sleep.”

The novel ends dramatically, not with bomb-throwing, but with suicide,

which this strange anarchist hero, who aspires to bomb-throwing, without

having the necessary force of character to achieve it, chooses in its

stead.

It would be unfair to class M. Barrucand as an anarchist, or even as a

revolutionist, on the strength of this book, in spite of the generally

sympathetic tone which pervades it. In fact, M. Barrucand’s philosophy

as displayed therein is of so cynical and, at times, of so flippant an

order, his temperament so weary and so buoyant, his moral outlook so

severe and lackadaisical, his style so lurid and simple, his

appreciations so morbid and sane, and his literary method so

impressionistic, realistic, and symbolic, by turns, that it would be

rash to draw any conclusions from it whatsoever, did not his attitude in

his other works—notably in his two historical biographies, _La Vie

Véritable du Citoyen Rossignol_, _Vainqueur de la Bastille_, and

_Mémoires et Notes de Choudieu, Représentant du Peuple_—and his

identification with the movement for Free Bread enroll him definitively

in the ranks of revolt.

Maurice Barrès, who is at present an apostle of nationalism, was at one

time classed as a “sentimental anarchist,”—an anarchist “with a rebel’s

brain and a voluptuary’s nerves, who would wear purple and fine linen.”

“I am an enemy of the laws,” he said at that time.

Among other French novelists and short-story writers of a certain

reputation who are more or less revolutionary in tone may be

mentioned:—

Georges Darien, author of _Biribi-Armée d’Afrique_, a novel of the

convict-legion, which has proved a potent factor in lessening the

rigours of the companies of discipline; Dubois-Dessaulle,[108] author of

_Sous la Casaque_, who, after being released from the convict-legion to

which he had been consigned (because a brochure by Jean Grave and an

article by Sévérine were found in his knapsack), had the superhuman

courage to soak his left arm in kerosene and set fire to it in order to

avoid ever being sent back into this inferno; Jean Ajalbert, author of

_Sous le Sabre_; Marcel Lami, author of _La Débandade_; Louis Lamarque,

author of _Un An de Caserne_; Paul Brulat, author of _La Faiseuse de

Gloire_, _Le Nouveau Candide_, _La Gangue_, and _Eldorado_, books

replete with generous indignation against social abuses; Jean Lombard,

one of the makers of the programme of the _Congrès Régional_ of Paris

(1880) which declared for class candidates, whose untimely death was a

great loss to French literature; Camille Pert, author of _En

l’Anarchie_; Henri Rainaldy, author of _Delcros_, an exposure of the

cowardices and murderousness of society; Adolphe Retté, author of _Le

Régicide_; Marcel Schwob, author of _Spicilege_; Mme. Sévérine, author

of _Pages Rouges_; Frantz Jourdain, author of _L’Atelier Chanterel_;

Zéphirin Raganasse, author of _Fabrique de Pions_; Louis Lumet, author

of _La Fièvre_; M. Reepmaker, author of _Vengeance_; Théodore Chèze,

Henri Fèvre, Jules Cazes, Pierre Valdagne, and the _feuilletoniste_

Michel Zevacco.