Paris and the Social Revolution Part 29

If his talents are literary, he contributes to diet and fashion journals, writes advertis.e.m.e.nts or puffs for trade organs, sings songs of his own composition in the streets, or prints original poetry on slips and sells it in the cafes. He reads and writes letters at so much a piece for illiterate neighbours, supplies street singers (at a nominal price) with words for their songs, makes almost presentable (by editing) the productions of sn.o.bs, and constructs for _feuilletonistes_ romances which said _feuilletonistes_ sign. He writes indifferently theses for students, brochures for pamphleteers, placards and palaver for strolling showmen, prospectuses for charlatans, anniversary rhymes for husbands or wives, G.o.d-parents or G.o.d-children, toasts for empty-pated banqueters, and funeral speeches or elegies for unimaginative mourners. If his gift is musical, he plays in night orchestras. If his gift is artistic, he poses as a model for his companions of the chisel and brush who chance to be in funds, copies old masters at ten to fifteen francs a picture, designs posters and daubs scenery for the fetes of the faubourgs, colours crude religious prints for the provincial market, paints workingmen's children in their first communion regalia, and makes portraits for fond widows and widowers-between demise and burial-of their dear deceased. If his health is particularly robust, he figures the cured patient in quack doctors' waiting-rooms.

He may, quite regardless of his bent, hawk toys in the street on fete days, play the races (under sealed orders) for a friend too busy to attend, fish tadpoles in the suburbs for the reptiles of menageries, help out a small shopkeeper with his book-keeping, back envelopes for a big bazaar, perform the duties of a valet under the euphuistic t.i.tle of secretary, and advertise wares by demanding them insistently where they are not kept. He may even make himself a printer's, house painter's, mason's, blacksmith's, or carpenter's a.s.sistant, a market porter, or a _demenageur_ (mover). In all these contingencies, however, the immediate need having been satisfied, he takes up again his normal autonomous existence. He has not bound himself to lasting servitude. He has not sold his soul, and it is a rare thing that he is seriously demoralised by his half-humorous concessions. On the other hand, he has touched life at new points, deepened his sentiments, broadened his human sympathies, and lifted his horizon without lowering his ideal.

"Implacable sausage!" cries the author of _Le Dimanche d'un Jeune Homme Pauvre_. "We do not give sufficient credit to the influence of the hog on literature! I know men of letters _en route_ for the Academy who ate kilometres of _boudin_ [blood pudding] during the hard years of their novitiate." This is merely a highly concrete way of saying that the French Bohemian is much less exercised over the savouriness of food than over its staying power. The problem he has to solve oftenest is not how most to tickle his palate, but how to give his system the maximum of bracing at the minimum of expense. To the solution of this problem, the _Montmartrois_ brings an address that is amazing. So long as he can keep in the good graces of his _restaurateur_ or of his butcher, baker, grocer, and sausage-man by painting handsome portraits of them and of their families or by flooding them with inscribed copies of his poems, the equation is a simple one, and all goes easily enough. But when the inevitable day of reckoning comes for him, when credit is withdrawn, and all relations with these well-nigh indispensable individuals are incontinently snapped; when, furthermore, he has dined with his friend the interne, J--, at the hospital table with his friend the sergeant, K--, in the sub-officers' mess, and with his former cla.s.smates, the Baron Y-- and the leather merchant X--, in their homes, and when he has made the round of the _cenacles_ at which he is welcome for the verses he recites, the stories he tells, or the songs he sings,-then the simple equation becomes an affected quadratic one, and a lugubrious change comes over the spirit of his dreams. Then bread and _boudin_, bread and cheese, bread and a sou's worth of the meat kept for dogs, or bread helped down with a gla.s.s of _vin ordinaire_ at the corner wine-shop, are the most that he can hope to obtain, unless, like Zola, he takes to snaring sparrows on the house-top, and roasting them, spitted on a curtain rod, by way of a brochette.

If the bread and cheese and the bread and wine also fail, if the _boudin_ has to be put into the category of the unattainable along with beefsteak, and if the sparrows are coy, he may join the cats, dogs, and rag-pickers in exploring the garbage boxes at the break of morning; but he usually prefers-perhaps because he does not easily accommodate himself to early rising-some less direct, more diplomatic proceeding, such as tasting the stock of the market and street venders with the fastidious air of an intending buyer. Thus, walking up to a barrow of strawberries: "Your strawberries look good. How do you sell them?" "Four sous a pound." "May I taste them?" "Certainly."

He munches and savours two or three berries attentively, as if almost convinced of their merit, puts his hand into his pocket and draws out his purse as if to order, but, tasting another berry as he does so, makes a wry face, and e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.es, "No, no, they'll never do at all: they're too sour," and moves on to another barrow.

Berry by berry, slowly, but surely, he ama.s.ses a meal, as the miser ama.s.ses his h.o.a.rd; and, if he has the luck to get a sou's worth of bread with which to punctuate his b.u.t.ter, cheese, and fruit tastings, the result is not half a gastronomic failure. Happy, however, the taster whose crisis of penury coincides with the opening of the "Ham Fair"!

Picking petty quarrels for the sake of the substantial festivity that is likely to accompany the making up and betting on its eating capacity are other favourite ways for penniless hunger to satisfy itself.

Catulle Mendes, who made the acquaintance of the _Vache Enragee_ during the brief period when his family were unsympathetic with his aims, tells of a poet, presumably himself, who after thirty-six hours of abstinence succeeded in breaking his fast by making a gingerbread bet:-

"The poet eyed the sweets wistfully, eyed them long.... He was just going away, I know not where, in the direction of the river perhaps, when he heard his name called. It was some one he scarcely knew, a young man also, not a poet, met somewhere by chance.

"'How hard you look at that gingerbread!' he said. The poet replied with gravity, 'It is because I adore it.'

"'Really?'

"'Yes, to distraction. There are days when I could eat a franc's worth at a sitting.'

"'You're joking. I bet you the franc you can't eat as many as you say.'

"'I take you up,' cried the _Parna.s.sien_, with starveling enthusiasm; and he precipitated himself upon the stall, and devoured the gingerbreads,-would have eaten of them for still greater, for enormous, sums,-taking pains to choose the pieces without almonds, which were poorer in quality, but which were bigger for the price. It was thus that he did not die of hunger."

It is said that Ibsen in his early days of poverty before the publication of _Brand_ made it an invariable rule to take a long walk at noon, whether he had the money for a meal or not, in order not to lose caste-and hence credit-with his landlady by revealing that he could not dine as often as every day. Similarly the Montmartre Bohemian displays a fine pathetico-humorous ingenuity in making others believe he has eaten when he has not, and even-supreme prestidigitation!-in making himself believe it: as when he pa.s.ses the day in bed or puts his watch back to cheat his appet.i.te; when he takes his _dejeuner_ in the middle of the afternoon, not only to get a dinner at the price of a _dejeuner_, but to afford himself the illusion of having both; or when he makes the Heaven-sent _aperitif_ that should precede or the gratuitous cigar that should follow a dinner, stand him in the stead of the dinner itself.

His so-called affectations and poses-bizarre accoutrement and outlandish speech-are, in the last a.n.a.lysis, so many devices for cheap living, so many expedients for disguising the completeness of his dest.i.tution from his fellows and from himself, so many talismans for metamorphosing a hard necessity into an idiosyncrasy of genius, or so many modes of whistling, so to speak, to keep up his courage. Thus Goudeau, under the stress of exceptional ill-hap, consecrated himself solemnly to playing practical jokes in a _phalanstere_; and the rotund and rippling Raoul Ponchon flaunted a splendid Breton costume at the very time he had nothing better than a wash-house to sleep in.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MONTMARTRE TYPES]

If the _Montmartrois_ carries his hat in his hand with a distrait, philosophical air, it is certain that the last piece of head-gear Providence has vouchsafed him is either too large or too small for his head. If he speaks feelingly of his old aunt, he is referring indubitably to the p.a.w.n-shop, whose quotations are of far more moment to him than are those of the Bourse. If you detect him in a railway station, waiting more than half an hour for a train, it is that the shelter of the cafe has been, for some reason or other, temporarily denied him. And, if he appears more than half a mile from his lodging in dressing-gown and slippers, with a salad or a bunch of radishes under his arm, it is either because dressing-gown and slippers are, for the nonce, the sum of his wardrobe or because he has put on the dressing-gown to match compulsory slippers or the slippers to match a compulsory dressing-gown. You may be sure he has carried the salad or radishes ever since he set out, and that he will renew them when they have become too withered to serve his deceitful end.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE REAL MONTMARTRE

_La rue St. Vincent, known as "the lovers' walk"_]

He carries his burdens buoyantly, as the best type of old man carries his years, and, making hard necessity pa.s.s for a joke, extracts no end of amus.e.m.e.nt from his vicissitudes, caps himself with a Merry Andrew's bonnet, and "drapes himself," to use a phrase of Maurice Barres, "with irony in order not to appear stark naked before men."

A young couple, who had long been habitues of a certain restaurant in the rue Lepic, entered one night equipped with violin and guitar, made profound obeisance to the a.s.sembled company, and announced that they had got to earn their dinner on the spot that night, if they had one. With their instruments and voices they proceeded to earn it, amid their own and their whilom comrades' jests and laughter. After a fortnight of this unenviable, if mirthful, prominence, their fortunes mended; and they dropped contentedly back into their obscurity as ordinary diners, the richer for an invigorating experience. Three handsome, long-haired, bearded fellows of the rue Menessier have taken Paris by storm this very summer with their mandolin and guitar music in the open air.

A Montmartre Bohemian, who is at once a superior musician and a species of Hercules, having made himself provisionally a _demenageur_, amused himself mightily at his work, confounding the petty bourgeois he served, by playing their pianos. The natural though totally unforeseen result of his somewhat impudent facetiousness was an opportunity to give lessons, which floated him back into the musical current.

Another _Montmartrois_ (Raoul Pouchon, I think), wearied with walking the streets the night after he had been evicted from his lodging, revenged himself by baiting with sugar all the street curs of his district, and introducing them at two o'clock in the morning into the stairway of his evictor's house.

Sometimes, perhaps, these merry Montmartre shifts come near transgressing the bounds which separate fun from lawlessness. The _demenagement a la cloche de bois_,[88] the nailing of one's emptied trunk to the floor to impress one's _concierge_ with its weight, the paying of one's rent by abstracting the clothes of one's landlord and putting them in p.a.w.n, and the grateful acceptance of the _pate_, chop, or sausage brought in by one's pilfering dog, as if one were Elijah and one's _Toutou_ were a raven of the wild, can hardly be defended by any of the recognised bourgeois codes. But even these flagrant escapades proceed less from malice than from mischief, and even these fall strangely in line with equity in nine cases out of ten.

On its Bohemian side, Montmartre is a second and, to the thinking of many, a greater and more brilliant _Quartier Latin_.

Here abound the literary and artistic restaurants, cafes, _bouillons_, _cremeries_, and cabarets which have always conferred a peculiar charm on Paris. Here, as well as in the Latin Quarter (and more numerous and varied, perhaps, here than there), are the modern counterparts of the _Treille d'Or_, the _Pomme de Pin_, the _Radis Couronne_, the _Pressoir d'Or_, the _Ceinture qui Craque_, the _Deux Torches_, and the _Trois Entonnoirs_ of the time of Cyrano; the _Procope_, _de Valois_, _de Foy_, _du Caveau_, and _Mecanique_ of the time of Louis XVI.; the _Viot_, _Blery_, _Flicoteaux_, _de Buci_, and _de la Rotonde_ of the Restoration and Louis Philippe; the _Moliere_, _Voltaire_, _L'Orient_, "_Sherry Cobbler_," and _Bobino_ of the last empire. And here they have been long enough to have already developed their legends and _esprit de corps_.

In the _Bra.s.series des Martyrs_ and _Fontaine_, _Cabarets de Ramponneau_, _de la Grande Pinte_, _du Plus Grand Bock_, and _de la Place Belhomme_, and the _Cafes Jean Goujon_, _Laplace_, _de la Nouvelle Athenee_, and _Du Rat Mort_,[89] poets and painters, now grizzled, chattered and revelled before the grey hairs came. Dinochaux, of the _Cafe Dinochaux_ (rue Breda), who nourished several of his patrons gratis for years, and bestowed credit unsolicited on any one who showed himself worthy in literature or art, has taken his place in history alongside of Ragueneau, the keeper of the _Rotisserie des Poetes_ of _Cyrano_.

You recall Ragueneau, the quaint saint, it is to be hoped. If not, here is a sc.r.a.p of dialogue to evoke him:-

"CYRANO. _Berces par ta voix.

Ne vois-tu pas comme ils s'empiffrent?_

"RAGUENEAU. _Je le vois....

Sans regarder, de peur que cela ne les trouble; Et dire ainsi mes vers me donne un plaisir double, Puisque je satisfais un doux faible que j'ai, Tout en laissant manger ceux qui n'ont pas mange._

"CYRANO (lui frappant sur l'epaule). _Toi, tu me plais!_"

The cook at Marguery's, being asked once upon a time what he thought of the _Vache Enragee_, replied: "_Mon dieu, de la vache enragee! Je crois qu'on pourrait en faire un plat mangeable avec beaucoup de bonne humeur et des pet.i.tes femmes autour._"

At Montmartre the sagacious chef's words are daily verified. At Montmartre, if nowhere else in the world, the _Vache Enragee_ is a "_plat mangeable_."

The line of boulevards extending from the Place de Clichy to the Place d'Anvers which strikes American tourists, who visit it for Montmartre, as a vulgar hodge-podge of Coney Island, the Bowery, the Broadway of the Tenderloin, and South Fifth Avenue, with a dash of, say, a Boston "Pop"

concert on a Harvard night, is no more the real Montmartre than Paris is the real France. The real Montmartre is the abrupt hill known as "The b.u.t.te," just north of said boulevards[90] and included between them,-the rue Marcadet, the rue de Clignancourt, and the avenue de St.

Ouen, a section of which the gigantic Byzantine cathedral of the _Sacre Cur_, the _Moulin de la Galette_, until recently an unsophisticated popular ball, and the _cimetiere de Montmartre_ (the second cemetery of Paris) are the salient features.

This real Montmartre (the Montmartre of the b.u.t.te) contains a tiny local cemetery (long disused), a tiny twelfth-century parochial church (St.

Pierre), a tiny district theatre, a tiny village plaza (Place du Tertre) with the customary trees, benches, and aged, ruminating idlers, a tiny public park (Square St. Pierre), two gaunt, grey windmills, and several sleepy wine-shops, over which sleepy publicans preside. Here are five, six, and seven story city buildings, to be sure, but here are also (particularly on the northern slope) ancient garden-girdled mansions reminiscent of the epoch when the whole district was open country; sculptured gate-posts, crumbling, but stately, and rusty iron gates opening on symmetrical avenues; small one-and-a-half-story tile-roofed and straw-thatched dwellings, also garden-girdled, clutching with the grip of the Swiss chalet the steep hillsides; narrow streets and winding lanes, and worn stone stairways where the hill's incline forbids streets and lanes; high, erratic, heavily b.u.t.tressed stone walls, bulging with age, over which houses also bulging with age (from the windows of which a Paul might be let down in a basket) beetle as if to fall; diminutive fruit orchards and vegetable gardens; and diminutive barnyards, cluttered with chicken-coops, dove-cotes, pig-pens, and rabbit-cages, which advertise cows' and goats' milk, compost, and young pigs for sale.

Here cats and dogs and hens roam mult.i.tudinous and unmolested, birds sing in the shrubbery, and chanticleer proclaims the dawn.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE REAL MONTMARTRE

"_One would believe himself more than two hundred miles from Paris._"]

In sum, the b.u.t.te, the real Montmartre, seems at first view to be one-half country village and one-half large provincial town. In the rue St. Vincent, the rue Mont-Cenis, the rue des Saules, rue de la Fontaine-du-But, rue de la Borne, rue St. Rustique, rue Norvins, and rue de l'Abreuvoir, where one is scarcely a twenty minutes' walk from the Grands-Boulevards, one would believe himself more than two hundred miles from the metropolis,-so different are these streets from the average metropolitan ways,-were it not for the constant outlooks on Paris spread out beneath one, for the large proportion of Angoras among the ubiquitous cats, and the phenomenal _savoir-vivre_, good-nature, and friendliness of the dogs; were it not for an indefinable coquetry, tell-tale of Parisianism, about the little garden-girdled houses and a hundred artistic whimsicalities, such as are represented by a windmill studio and a tram-car dwelling; were it not also that certain vistas are closed by the flippant entrance to the _Moulin de la Galette_, that sundry glimpses of studio interiors are vouchsafed, and that silhouettes of long-haired, capering artists and of artists' models loom up fitfully against the sky; and were there not a sort of vagabond humour in the very atmosphere that accords ill with provincial straight-lacedness.

As the b.u.t.te wears the general aspect of a provincial community, so it has the provincial community's spirit of neighbourliness; but, as its provincial aspect is enlivened by coquetry and mirth, so its provincial neighbourliness is happily modified by being shorn of the meddling spirit. The _Montmartrois_ is not indifferent to the welfare of his fellow-_Montmartrois_; but he minds his own business, which the neighbourly provincial rarely, if ever, does. He is as willing as the most nave countryman to lend a helping hand upon occasion; but, the occasion pa.s.sed, he speedily effaces himself. He does not feel ent.i.tled to enter into your intimacy, to summer and winter with you, so to say, because he has done you a casual good turn.

When I entered Montmartre, as most fellows enter it, with my _lares and penates_ enthroned on a hand-cart, and experienced the difficulty other fellows, thus enc.u.mbered, have experienced in scaling the b.u.t.te, a butcher's boy and an artist who was sketching in the street were prompt to put their shoulders to the wheel (to the tail-board, to be strictly accurate); but they did not by the same token cross-question me regarding my antecedents and intentions, as countrymen, in the same circ.u.mstances, would have done. They gracefully accepted my invitation to a social gla.s.s at an adjacent wine-shop, then went their ways to their respective tasks; and that was the end of it.

The b.u.t.te, then, the real Montmartre, is in Paris, but not of it, and yet, of necessity, perpetually conscious of it,-a community which is and which is not a provincial town, which has an _esprit de corps_ not inconsistent with independence, a unity not destructive of variety, and a sociability admirably accordant with a seemly privacy; while the _Montmartrois_ sees Paris without being blinded by it, touches Paris without being crushed by it, and is stimulated by Paris without losing his ident.i.ty therein.

"_J' vis en philosophe et p'te't' bien Qu'etant presqu'heureux avec rien, J'ai su resoudre un grav' probleme, A mon septieme_,"

sings a _chansonnier_ of Montmartre. And it is indeed this ability to "be almost happy with nothing," this fairy-G.o.dmother power to transform by a simple flourish a pumpkin into a coach, a dowdy into a fair princess, and a cabbage into a rose, this talent, amounting to genius, for squeezing so very much more out of life than there really is in it, that lifts completely out of the commonplace the life of Montmartre.

For four hundred to five hundred francs a year, monsieur and madame,-as in the Latin Quarter every Jack has his Jill, so on the b.u.t.te every _Montmartrois_ has his _Montmartroise_,-monsieur and madame may have a _logement_,[91] consisting of two or three rooms and a kitchen with peerless views of Paris and the valley of the Seine; and in the shops of the _brocanteurs_ they may procure antique furnishings of real beauty and durability, not, alas! for the proverbial song, but for less than the bourgeois pay for their ugly, up-to-date flimflams.

Prices are dearer at Montmartre than in several other parts of Paris.

Nevertheless, there is no district where, day in and day out, there is so much genuine poetry and so much honest zest in living.

Louise France,[92] a dramatic artist of vigorous talent, who has been a.s.sociated with nearly all the important literary movements of Montmartre, is said to have welcomed a party of friends to her modest _logement_ one day with, "_Maintenant, en guise d'aperitif, je vais vous offrir une vue splendide sur Paris: c'est tout ce que je possede_."