“I have an education.
“‘Now you are armed for the battle,’ said my professor, in bidding me adieu. ‘Who triumphs at college enters victorious into la carrière’ [career].
“What carrière?
A former classmate of my father’s, who was passing through Nantes and stopped off to see him, told him that one of their fellow-classmates, he who had won all the prizes, had been found dead—mangled and bloody—at the bottom of a carrière [quarry] of stone, into which he had cast himself after having been three days without food.
It is not into this ‘carrière’ I must enter, I take it,—at least, not head first.”—Jules Vallès, in Jacques Vingtras—Le Bachelier.

A RECENT morning paper contained the following item in its column of “Crimes and Casualties”:—

“La Littérature qui Tue.

“Enamoured of art and persuaded that he would quickly win a name in Paris, Louis M——, a young man of twenty-five, left some six months ago the little provincial city where he was born.

“Like Balzac’s hero, Lucien de Rubempré, who entered the Latin Quarter with two hundred and forty francs in money and the manuscripts of L’Archer de Charles IX. and Les Marguerites, this young provincial arrived in Paris with a light purse and the bulky manuscript of a drama in five acts, which he expected to get performed immediately. Unfortunately, the purse was quickly emptied, and the drama was refused by all the theatre managers.

“As his father was not rich, Louis M—— was unwilling to appeal to him, and suffered without complaining.

“One day, however, he confessed his desperate situation to Mme. C——, a friend of his family, who inhabits a comfortable apartment, rue ——. Mme. C—— promised to see what she could do for him. In the midst of a conversation with her yesterday he drew a revolver from his pocket, and before she could catch his arm fired a bullet into his heart.

“Death was instantaneous.”

Emile Goudeau, in his Dix Ans de Bohème, tells of the picturesque suicide of a young Latin Quarter poet of his acquaintance:—

“D——, arrayed in a new suit and with his hands full of bouquets, went up to the cashier’s desk and graciously adorned the counter and corsage of the cashier. Then, turning to a medical student, he said to him nonchalantly, ‘My dear fellow, I have made a bet that the little point of the heart is here between these two ribs’; and he designated a spot on his vest. ‘Not at all,’ corrected the other, ‘it is lower down. There!’ ‘I have lost then,’ D—— replied.

“He called a cab, and ordered the cocher to drive him to the Arc de Triomphe.

“When the cocher arrived at the head of the Champs Elysées, and opened the cab door, there was only a corpse upon the cushions. D—— had shot himself full in the heart.”

The last season I passed on the Left Bank of the Seine, the Quartier was deeply moved by the death of one of its faithful devotees, the poet René Leclerc (nom-de plume, Robert de la Villoyo), who poisoned himself with cyanide of potassium.

Leclerc was thirty-two at the time of his death. He had inhabited the Quartier for more than a decade. He had come thither to study medicine in accordance with the wishes of his bourgeois parents; and he had stayed on after all thought of practising as a physician had left him, in order to pursue the literature which had become his passion.

With the funds which his family provided he lived neither too well nor too ill, working steadily, but gaining little, slowly developing a very real, if not very robust, talent. He completed two romances, contributed more or less regularly to La Plume and the minor reviews and literary weeklies of the Left Bank, which are the easier to enter since contributors are paid nothing at all or very little, and placed an occasional poem and chronique in the daily press. Indeed, everything went well with him up to the moment when his family, disgruntled at his persistency in holding to so unprofitable a calling, deprived him of his income. Then he set out bravely to earn his living with his pen. He besieged editors with copy, but succeeded in placing but few articles; and, when he did place them, he was more often than not kept waiting for his pay, and sometimes defrauded out of it altogether. He tried in vain to find a publisher for either of his two manuscript romances. He did difficult and ill-paid hack-work, collaborating on a translation into French of the Norwegian Strindberg and on an adaptation into French verse of the Mandragore of Machiavelli; and he undertook—oh, the bitter pill!—the task of writing a volume on the Côte d’Ivoire, of A Suicide of the Latin Quarter A Suicide of the Latin Quarter which he was as ignorant as he was of the borders of the supposititious canals of the planet Mars. Even this concession to mercantilism—beyond which it is not surprising he was unwilling to go—did not suffice to procure him a living. He ran behind two quarters on his rent, and was threatened with eviction. If not actually destitute, he was on the verge of destitution. And yet to those who were familiar with René Leclerc’s proud and sensitive spirit it seems more likely that it was disgust with his lot rather than terror before the approach of want which drove him to kill himself. It was because he held his art so high that he was unwilling to survive its debasement. He had made concessions that he regarded as enormous,—compromised his ideal, vulgarised his taste, and prostituted (at least so it seemed to him) his talent. It was too much. His last act-could a dying gesture well be finer?—was to reduce to ashes the hateful manuscript of the Côte d’Ivoire and all his other writings that he held unworthy.

And journalists were found contemptible enough to censure him, to call him coward, because he was too fastidious to stoop to their own corrupt, degrading practices, even to save his life.

Among the works he left, as having his affection and which by one of those ironies so common with the law went to his unappreciative family (who might have saved him), was a collection of sweet and delicate poems, entitled La Guirlande de Marie, dedicated to her who had shared his prosperity and remained the faithful friend of his adversity.

Here are a few stanzas (from a poem of this collection) inscribed to Henry Mürger, in which he sings the praises of the Bohemia by which he died:—

And here is a portion of a poem, “Le Sabot de Noël,” that is a sort of playful prayer:—

Poor boy! It was this very “orgueil simple” that was his sad undoing.

“If the artist,” says Balzac in a memorable passage of his Cousine Bette, “does not hurl himself into his work, like Curtius into the gulf, without reflecting, and if, in this crater, he does not dig like a miner buried under a land-slide, ... his work perishes in the atelier, where production becomes impossible; and he assists at the suicide of his talent.”

René Leclerc, though no mere dawdler, as the twelve sizable manuscripts he left behind him prove, was not endowed with either the mental or the physical endurance to perform the Herculean labour which Balzac both preached and practised. No more was Louis M—— nor D——; no more was the brilliant Gérard de Nerval, who was found one winter morning in the rue de la Vieille Lanterne hanging from a window-bar, nor the precocious Escousse and Lebras, who at nineteen and sixteen respectively killed themselves because a first phenomenal success with a drama was followed by failures; no more was Chatterton in England. Few artists are. With most of them ample time for revery is a prerequisite condition of production. And yet the record seems to show that suicides are relatively rare among poets and artists.

Perhaps this is because the record does not occupy itself with the poets and artists, the Louis M——s and the D——s, who are not known as such to the world at large. Or, perhaps, it is because so many die in the hospital, like Gilbert, Malfilâtre, Hégésippe Moreau, and the Joseph D—— of Mürger’s tale; and so many others are claimed by Charenton, like Jules Jouy, Toulouse de Lautrec, and André Gill (for bedlam is another Bohemian resort), that suicide has no need to assert its rights. In any event, two cardinal qualities of the artistic temperament are distinctly hostile to self-destruction; namely, faith in the sure emergence and supremacy of genius, and a Hamlet-like irresolution that prefers pouring out woes on paper to ending them by an energetic trigger-pull.

The despair of the victims of the misère en habit noir, who are less able to sustain themselves by faith and who are more capable of decisive action, is, like their dress, much blacker and more austere; and suicides are far commoner among them.

Chapter XIV

FREAKS AND “FUMISTES”

“If there is a fill of tobacco among the crew, for God’s sake pass it round and let us have a pipe before we go.”—Robert Louis Stevenson.

“‘Lord, my dear,’ returned he, with the utmost good humour, ‘you seem immensely chagrined; but, hang me, when the world laughs at me, I laugh at all the world, and so we are even.’”

Oliver Goldsmith, Beau Tibbs at Home.

“Much good might be sucked from these beggars.”—Charles Lamb.

“Mieux vaut goujat debout qu’empereur enterré.”—Emile Goudeau.

THE dislike of and contempt for the bourgeois felt by the Bohemian students and the other Bohemians who have elected to reside in the Quartier Latin pale into insignificance before the absolute detestation of the bourgeois displayed by the Quartier’s chevaliers d’industrie, the hangers-on and camp-followers of its littérateurs and artists, who bear about the same relation to their principals that a side-show bears to a circus or the capering monkey to the hand-organ and its grinder.

As the lackey of the nobleman often holds himself above the commoner far more than does the nobleman himself, and as he will rather put up with poor living and poor wages in the service of an indigent aristocrat than demean himself by serving in the households of tradesmen, so these ne’er-do-wells of the Quartier Latin—ragged retainers of the threadbare gentry of arts and letters, pinched flunkeys of the straightened lords of thought, seedy clients of needy Latin patricians, tatterdemalion cup-bearers to tattered Parnassians, supernumeraries to the protagonists in the melodrama of cultured poverty, chorus to the soloists of the Learned Beggars’ Opera—would be humiliated and miserable outside of the atmosphere of letters. They would rather be door-keepers, to paraphrase a familiar text, in the house of the intellectual élite than to dwell in the tents of vulgarity.

If there is more comedy and less tragedy in the existences of these satellites than in the existences of their controlling luminaries, it is not because their physical hardships are fewer,—for, parasites, sycophants, trencher-friends, pick-thanks, and toad-eaters though they be, theirs is but sorry hap,—but because they are mostly ambitionless or feeble-minded and so not as susceptible to the mental torture of disenchantment.

They “carry the half of their mattresses in their hair,” after the fashion of the nephew of Rameau described by Diderot. They don the cast-off garments and retail the worn-out epigrams of their fétiches, who are amused by and therefore endlessly indulgent of them. They strut and smirk and rant like children masquerading in the attic frippery of their elders, make as clever displays of superficial knowledge as the most up-to-date members of the most up-to-date women’s clubs, and revert constantly to a previous connection with the university which is not always imaginary. As individuals, these pseudo-connoisseurs and savants come and go in the Quartier Latin: the class goes on forever.

There are plenty of persons still living in the Latin Quarter who knew the originals of the eccentric Quartier types immortalised by Jules Vallès in his phenomenal Réfractaires.

Fontan-Crusoe, a genuine bachelor of arts, who slept one hundred and eleven consecutive nights under a tree near the fortifications, spent for nourishment from three to five sous a day which he earned by selling in the street his two principal works, Le Spectre Noir: Elégie and Un Galop à travers l’Espace.

Poupelin, called also “Mes Papiers,” he of the enormous yellow felt, “pantalon d’enfant,” and “redingote de centennaire,” who spent his time seeking titled office and recommendations therefor, when he was not occupied in one of the three positions which he accepted with equal alacrity and in which he was equally efficient,—or inefficient,—namely, teacher, school usher, and cook.

And M. Chaque, “Orientaliste,” another genuine bachelier, who had a useful habit of carrying rice pudding in his hat and omelettes and beef à la mode in his pockets,—ex-professor of a colonial school; author of a volume of travels in Greece (published by a reputable firm) with which he beset Greek enthusiasts orally and successfully; a constant reader of the Revue des Deux Mondes, to which he had, once on a time, contributed an article; communicant of all the Christian or pagan sects that had churches or temples in Paris; privileged hanger-on of gaming-houses and soldiers’ barracks; razor-sharpener and professional weeper at the cemetery of Montparnasse.

Two vagrant types (equally grotesque with those of Vallès), who are now dead, but whom one need not have been long associated with the Quartier to remember, were Eugène Cochet and Amédée Cloux.

Cochet was an ex-prefect of the Department of the Eure, a rhymester and the author of an unpublished work of “philosophical reflections,” who depended for his sustenance on the bounty of one or two restaurants and the soupes populaires, and who had a mania for decorations, like Poupelin. The students, who made Cochet the butt of a great deal of good-natured chaffing, which he accepted gratefully as so much tribute to his worth, formally invested him one day with the star of the Legion of Honour (attached to a flaming red cravat) and with the insignia of ten fantastic foreign orders, notably with that of the Garter and that of the Green Elephant, which last consisted of a zinc elephant, painted green, suspended from a bailiff’s chain.

Amédée Cloux, poet, emulated the literary forgeries of Chatterton at closer range. He had a marvellous facility for copying poetic styles, and he got his living for a time by the deaths of his more illustrious brother poets. As soon as a well-known poet died, he produced imitations of his poetry, which he sold as posthumous works. His most successful efforts, “Le Chien Mort,” attributed by him to Baudelaire, and “Plus de Représailles” and “L’Ode à la Colonne Déboulonnée,” purporting to be by Eugène Vermesch, deceived both the public and the experts until the good Cloux, who was more of a joker than a vulgar swindler, acknowledged his ruse.

Of the freaks who now perch in (for they can hardly be said to inhabit) the Quartier Latin, far and away the most famous is Bibi-la-Purée,

No Parisian of the period, perhaps, has been more written about, and none more photographed, sculptured, etched, and painted; and none has done more to divert his time than Bibi. Bibi is by turns an artist’s model, a sponge, a simple beggar, a shoe-black, a tourist’s guide, a watcher of bicycles at cafe doors, a dealer in photographs of himself and in original poems, a boon companion of poets and artists, and a confidant and counsellor of étudiantes; but he is first, last, and all the time Bibi the fop, the Beau Tibbs of Latium, the Beau Brummel of the Castalian gutter.

The first time I saw Bibi was in 1895, at an anarchist meeting addressed by Louise Michel, in the rue de la Montagne Ste. Geneviève, back of the Panthéon. He was muffled to the eyes, conspirator-like, in the folds of a rusty, tattered Spanish cloak, faced with dirty red velvet, and wore besides a white yachting cap, white skin-tight pantaloons, gaping patent leather shoes fitted with cavalry spurs, and white gaiters.

The last time I saw Bibi he was pulling an unlighted cigar, and tenderly convoying to his lodging a poet, not of the most obscure, who had been imbibing too freely. He was dight in a red fez, a bright green velvet waistcoat under an Inverness cape (with no jacket intervening), a yellow silk neckerchief, cavalry boots, and baggy brown corduroy trousers; and, if I should itemise all the different costumes it has been my privilege to see Bibi wear between these dates, a large octavo volume would scarcely hold the list. Reputed in some quarters to be an ex-student, an ex-journalist, a political refugee, and a disguised nobleman, and in others to be a blackmailer, a swindler, a thief, a police spy, and a pander, the mystery that envelopes Bibi’s present as well as his past—a mystery which his autobiography, published in L’Idée, did appreciably nothing to dispel—gives him a curiosity-piquing charm.

There is no doubt as to Bibi’s untidiness, his inordinate vanity, his assurance, his unscrupulousness, and his genuine kindness of heart; but beyond this all is conjecture.

Jehan Rictus in a recent poem, to the recitation of which (at the Noctambules or the Grille) Bibi often listens with his inscrutable smile, has given Bibi a large symbolic significance:—

Bibi was a humble follower and adorer—slave almost—of Verlaine, who playfully honored him with the following verses in his Dédicaces:—

A sincere mourner for Verlaine since his death, Bibi regards it as his special mission to cherish the cult of the dead poet’s memory.

The sincerity of Bibi’s mourning, however, has not prevented him from turning an honest penny by selling the inscribed volumes Verlaine had given him, nor from turning many a dishonest penny by selling, as relics, copies of Verlaine’s works supplied with forged inscriptions, and numerous other objects Verlaine never saw.

Thanks to Bibi’s zeal, Verlaine’s last cane and last pipe have been multiplied, like “the only true cross,” and have taken up their abodes in the poetic shrines of two hemispheres.77

It is impossible to think of Bibi without thinking of the Mère Casimir, lately deceased, who was, for some reason, Bibi’s most cordial aversion.

The Mère Casimir was a tiny, twisted, shrivelled old flower-woman, who claimed to be an ex-danseuse of the Opéra and to have had for friends “princes and marquises,” and who was ready at any moment, in consideration of a few sous, to prove it by executing certain grotesque Terpsichorean movements on the sidewalk.

While the Mère Casimir was still alive, there was nothing that delighted the students more than bringing about an encounter between her and Bibi, and hearing the pair blackguard each other. Only once, so far as history records, was there a truce between them,—a certain Mi-carême, when, Bibi having been elected king and the Mère Casimir queen of the fête, they paraded the streets of Paris together in the same car. On that day the antipathetic pair were so impressed with the dignities and responsibilities of their position that they treated each other with royal magnanimity. Bibi even went farther than strict etiquette required. In descending from his throne at the breaking up of the cortège, he gallantly fell to his knees,—sight for gods and men!—and kissed the hand of his queen.

The Marquis de Soudin, a long-haired but relatively neat little man, with the noiseless step of a bird, who makes crayon portraits, at ten sous per head, at the Grille and the Noctambules and in the all-night restaurants of the Halles Centrales, is as much of a mystery in his way as Bibi, though he has lived in the Quartier more than twenty-five years. He is said to have been crossed in love early in life, and his title is believed by many to be genuine. However that may be, the little Soudin has the education and manners of a gentleman, and noblesse oblige inspires his conduct. He does no offence to any, and is a veritable providence to his poorer fellow-Bohemians. M. le Marquis makes poems as well as portraits, but not for money. “At least no merchant traffics in his heart.”

The artist bard of Père Lunette’s,78 who makes crayon portraits at ten sous a head, like the little marquis, and poems for money, unlike the little marquis, is also supposed by many to be of noble origin. He is a dashing, handsome fellow, with the felt and the swagger of a mousquetaire, and is, when he chooses to quit the vulgar rôle his position at Père Lunette’s imposes upon him, a lively and stimulating conversationalist. In summer, with his bosom friend Père Jules, he tramps the country roads of France.

Achille Leroy, philosopher and poet (the anarchist author-editor-publisher-bookseller, referred to in the chapter on the oral propaganda of the anarchists), is another favourite with the students, upon whose quizzical, good-natured patronage he depends mainly for the sale of his wares.

Some years back, at the moment of the anarchist “Terror,” Achille, whose illusions regarding his intellect are on a par with those of Bibi regarding his person, offered himself as a candidate for the Academy. He made the customary “visits” to the Academicians attired in the uniform of a Mexican general, and wherever he was not received left an ominous-looking brass kettle to which, along with his visiting card, this inscription was attached:

Other contemporary freaks who help to swell the picturesqueness and gaiety of the Quartier are: the anarchist cobbler chansonnier Père La Purge (author of the Chanson du Père La Purge, quoted in a previous chapter), whose customers (mainly the poets and artists of the Quartier) visit his shop in the rue de la Parcheminerie to enjoy the piquancy of the contrast between his ruddy, contented face and his anathemas against society; Gaillepand, a big, athletic-looking fellow, who, having failed to earn a living by legitimate sculpture, took to making plaster medallions of the celebrities of Paris, especially those of the Quartier, and selling them up and down the Boulevard St. Michel, while his brother “Môme l’Histoire” (now dead) displayed his phenomenal memory by reciting biographies and poems; the Mère Souris (Mother Mouse), so called from her conical head and her funny little walk, ex-proprietor of an artists’ restaurant and present palmist, fortune-teller, and reputed usurer,—in short, a very useful personage to the étudiantes; Victor Sainbault, author, editor, publisher, and book-seller, like Achille Leroy; and the poet Coulet, who gives author’s readings before the terraces of the cafés, and who between times, if hearsay may be credited, provides petty bourgeois families with wedding, christening, and funeral verses at so much per yard.

It is because these freaks take themselves seriously, because they are unconscious humourists and involuntary farceurs, that they are amusing. But the Quartier has always had among its choicer Bohemians a class of conscious, almost professional humourists and deliberate farceurs, called fumistes,79 who by drolly expressing their very disrespect for life have done much to make life worth the living.

“A little jackass, born in the land of La Fontaine and of Rabelais, ... made a campaign for a deputy’s chair. When election day came, this jackass, this typical candidate, answering to the unequivocal name of Nul, executed a last-hour manœuvre. ZO D'AXA'S NOVEL CANDIDATE ZO D'AXA'S NOVEL CANDIDATE ZO D’AXA’S NOVEL CANDIDATE   On a warm Sunday in May, while the people crowded to the urns, the white jackass, the candidate Nul, enthroned on a triumphal car drawn by electors, traversed Paris, his bonne ville.

“Slowly the jackass went through the streets. As he advanced, the walls were covered with placards by members of his committee, while others distributed his proclamation to the crowd:—

“‘Reflect, dear fellow-citizens. You know that your deputies deceive you, have deceived you, will deceive you; and yet you vote. Vote for me then! Vote for the jackass! Elect the jackass! It is impossible to be more stupid than you.’

“This frankness, a trifle brutal, was not to everybody’s taste.

“‘They are insulting us,’ bellowed some. ‘They are ridiculing universal suffrage,’ protested others more justly. Some one shook his fist at the jackass furiously, and said, ‘Sale Juif!’ (Dirty Jew), but a laugh burst out, and spread sonorous. The candidate was acclaimed. Bravely the elector made fun of himself and of his representatives. Hats and canes were waved. Ladies threw flowers. The jackass passed.

“He descended from the heights of Montmartre, going towards the Quartier Latin. He crossed the Grands-Boulevards, the Croissant,80 where is cooked, without salt, the ordinaire served by the gazettes. He saw the halles (markets) where the starving glean in the heaps of garbage, the quays where electors elect lodgings under the bridges.

“Heart and brain! Paris! Democracy!...

“The jackass arrived before the Senate.

“He skirted the palace, whence the guard emerged hurriedly. He followed, on the outside, alas! the too-green gardens. Then came the Boulevard St. Michel. On the terraces of the cafés the youth of the Quartier clapped their hands. The crowd, constantly growing, snatched out of each other’s hands the jackass’s proclamations. The students harnessed themselves to the car, a professor pushed the wheels; but it struck three, and the police appeared.

“Since ten o’clock that morning, from post to commissariat, the telegraph and the telephone had signalled the strange passage of the subversive animal. The order was issued: ‘Arrest the jackass!’ And now the police sergeants barred the route of the candidate.

“Near the Place St. Michel, the faithful committee of Nul was ordered by the armed force to conduct its candidate to the nearest police station. Naturally, the committee paid no attention, and kept on its way. The car crossed the Seine, and soon it halted before the Palais de Justice.

“The police, re-enforced, surrounded the white jackass, the impassive jackass. The candidate was arrested at the gate of this Palais de Justice, whence deputies, defaulters, panamistes, all the big thieves, go out free.

“In the midst of the surging crowd the car swayed as if about to capsize. The police, a brigadier at their head, had seized the shafts and donned the straps. The committee insisted no more: they helped harness the sergents de ville.

“Thus the white jackass was abandoned by his warmest partisans. Like any other vulgar politician, the animal had come to a bad end. The police towed him, authority guided his route. From this moment Nul was only an official candidate. His friends acknowledged him no more. The door of the prefecture opened wide, and the jackass entered quite as if he were entering his own stall.”

What has all this starving and self-killing and freakishness and practical joking of the Quartier Bohemians to do with revolution? Much every way.

Jules Vallès (all his life a Latin Quarter Bohemian), whom Richepin has characterised as “the most curious and the most complete of the déclassés of the pen”; of whom his intimate friend Gill said, “He would be the tenderest, the most spirituel, the most charming, and the most eloquent fellow in the world, were it not for the mania which possesses him to believe himself at ease only in the smoke of battles or the bawlings of the faubourgs”; who presented himself at the elections of 1869 as “le candidat de la misère,” and put at the head of his second volume of Jacques Vingtras (Le Bachelier), “A ceux qui nourris de Grec et de Latin sont morts de faim, je dédie ce livre,”—Jules Vallès (and who should know better than Vallès?) said, not long before the Commune was declared:—

“In this life there is a danger. Misère without a flag conducts to the misère that has a flag, and makes of the scattered réfractaires an army which counts in its ranks less sons of the people than sons of the bourgeoisie. Behold them bearing down upon us, pale, mute, emaciated, beating the charge with the bones of their martyrs upon the drum of the révoltés, and waving as a standard, at the point of a sword, the blood-stained shirt of the last of their suicides!...

“These déclassés must find places, or they will have revenge; and this is why so much absinthe runs down their throats and so much blood upon the paving-stones. They become drunkards or rebels.”

And again, in the introduction to his Réfractaires, he says, “Give me three hundred of these men, any sort of a flag, toss me down there before the regiments in a raking fire, and you shall see what short work I will make of the gunners at the head of my réfractaires!”

Every convulsion Paris has undergone has proved the truth of Vallès’ mordant sentences. What was the Commune, indeed, but the joint self-assertion of the déclassés?

“Déclassés,” wrote Richepin of the leaders of the Commune shortly after its suppression, “from the unrecognised general, Cluseret, to the unappreciated caricaturist, Pilotell; from the intelligent deputy, Millière, to the lunatic, Allix; from the great painter, Courbet, to the ex-monk, Panille, and tutti quanti; déclassés of politics, like Delescluze and Pyat, of journalism and of literature, like Vallès, Vermesch, Vermorel, Grousset, Vésinier, Maroleau; of the army, like Rossel, of the workshop, like Assi, of the brasserie, like Rigault, of lower still, like Johamard.”

Not all these starving, suiciding, freakish, jesting Latin Quarter Bohemians are conscious socialists and anarchists, though there is a good proportion of them who are,—a greater proportion probably than among the students proper, by as much as their situations are more precarious; but they nearly all hold vaguely subversive humanitarian views, and they are all, even the Bohemians by choice, réfractaires and révoltés. Like the Thélémites of Rabelais, they all recognise but the one law which is no law,—“Fay ce que vouldras.”

Their way of living is a species of the propagande par l’exemple from which it is a quick and easy step to the propagande par le fait. Given a crisis, réfractaire, révolté, and révolutionnaire spell very much the same thing. They are all ripe for disorder.

The victims of the misère en habit noir—the poor doctors, teachers, lawyers, petty functionaries, and clerks—are, in the nature of the case, more submissive to their fate than the free-living freaks, littérateurs, and artists; but there are evidences that they, too, are beginning to think of stepping over the bounds within which patience is a virtue.

M. Paul Webre, one of a group of young men of means and education—evolutionists, not revolutionists—who have pursued the laboratory method of studying the conditions, the psychology, and the relations to society of various employments, has given the following testimony to the expectant, if unaggressive, attitude of the small clerks:—

“My relatively frail health forbidding me work in a factory, I sought a place as a clerk. After twenty ineffectual applications I succeeded in crossing the threshold of an insurance company. I earn there 100 francs a month, on which I manage to live without resorting to my income. I carry with me in the morning a lunch of bread, cheese, and a slice of ham or sausage, and I talk with my comrades of the office. Some are married. These are the most unfortunate; but they reflect that, if they quit their meagre situations, there are innumerable persons in the streets ready to vie with each other to obtain them, and they cling to them for dear life. Nevertheless, their hatred is brooding. While taking cold bites during the hour of respite which the avaricious administration accords us, we pass our chiefs in review, and compare their profits with our own. The director has a salary of 100,000 francs, the president is several times a millionaire; while we, morbleu! Oh, the monotonous days! the repulsive work! the ominous end of the month! and the certainty of plodding along for twenty years in the same fashion, only to be sent away at last without resource! It is poverty in the frayed frock-coat, the worst poverty. I have tried to organise the discontented, but they have a terror of compromising themselves and of making themselves marks for the Company’s blows. So, bending over their documents, they spy the growlings in the street, ready to descend there, in their turn, when the revolution asserts itself. The atmosphere in which these petty clerks stagnate is saturated with bitterness, with rancours, with regrets, with deceived ambitions. Terrible eruptions are being prepared therein. And I cry to the capitalists: ‘Take care! Transform these enemies into friends, these anarchists into conservators! Share your profits with them. Throw them a honey-cake while there is still time.’”