Chapter XV Montmartre and “La Vache Enragée”
“La Gloire marches before the Vache Enragée. Follow her then, try to catch up with her: there is honour even for those who fall by the way.”
Adolphe Willette, in Le Calvaire de la Vache Enragée.
“Whatever scorn, whatever disgrace he may bring upon himself, it is none the less true that the poor and obscure artist is often worth more than the conquerors of the world; and there are nobler hearts under the mansards where only three chairs, a bed, a table, and a grisette are to be found, than in the gémonies dorées and the abreuvoirs of domestic ambition.”
Alfred de Musset, in Preface of Comédies et Proverbes.
“Ils feront de ta corne acérée une épée,
Ils feront de ton crâne une coupe sculptée,
Où nous boirons ton sang avivé de levains.
Ils feront de ton cuir des bottes de sept lieues
Pour courir au pays des illusions bleues
Ou vers l’âpre idéal des rouges lendemains.”
Paul Marrot, in a poem to the Vache Enragée.
“A la Vache Enragée, à Montmartre. Mademoiselle:—
All those who have not known you are like untempered metals.
Accept, I pray, my best wishes.
“E. Frémiet.”
“Vive la Vache Enragée!
“Son ami,
“Alphonse Daudet.”
The official restoration at the Carnival of 1896 of the historic but long unobserved fête of the Bœuf Gras (Fat Ox) was the signal for the creation of the fête of the Vache Enragée (Famished Cow) for that year’s Mi-carême by the denizens of Montmartre.
“Over against the Bœuf Gras, father of the golden calf, emblem of the wealth and prosperity of the bourgeoisie,” said the committee of organisation in its public manifesto, “the painters, poets, and chansonniers of the Mont des Martyrs have prepared for the pleasure and edification of the Parisians a spectacle which they call the Cavalcade of the Vache Enragée (or the Vachalcade), intended to present the picture, sometimes poignant, of their struggles, their sufferings, their ideals, their chasings after phantoms, their unrealised dreams, their often illusory hopes.”
This brand-new cavalcade consisted of a large number of pedestrians masquerading as ducks, geese, rabbits, frogs, camels, donkeys, cats, pigs, and giraffes (the French words for all of which have well-defined metaphorical meanings), and as chimeras, Pierrots and Pierrettes; and a score or more of fantastic floats (designed by Montmartre artists of repute), the subtle and piquant symbolism of which was all Greek to the foreign tourists who chanced to see them and not too intelligible to many Parisians who fancied they knew their Paris and their French. The floats were entitled (to mention only those whose significance is fairly obvious) Pegasus Seized by the Sheriffs, The Anti-Landlord League, The Wrestlers of Thought, The Temple of the Golden Calf, La Vache Enragée through the Ages, Feeding of la Vache Enragée, Drawing the Teeth of la Vache Enragée, A la Belle Etoile,81 and Ma Tante.82 The design for this last, by M. Grün, is given herewith.
Judges were satirically represented as side-whiskered café garçons; the victims of la misère en habit noir, as street pavers, attired in frayed frock-coats, wind-traversed shoes, and weather-beaten “plug” hats; and Les Jeunes,83 as small boys, in dunce-caps, playing on drums.
The street parade lasted from mid-day to sunset. It was preceded by a theatrical representation for the benefit of destitute artists, which included appropriate skits by the Montmartre playwrights Xanrof and Courtéline, an address by the Montmartre socialist poet-deputy Clovis Hugues, and rapid platform drawing by the Montmartre caricaturists, Pal and Grün; and it was followed by bonfires and open-air dancing, and by a masked ball at the Moulin Rouge, in the course of which a lottery was drawn, whose principal prizes were sketches by Montmartre artists, among them Faverot, Willette, Henri Pille, Roedel, Léandre, and Puvis de Chavannes. The occasion was further signalised by the publication of a magazine, La Vache Enragée, under the editorship of Willette.
The distinctive feature of the second and last84 fête of the Vache Enragée (1897) was a musical poem, entitled “Le Couronnement de la Muse de Montmartre,” by the Montmartre composer Gustave Charpentier, now thrice famous as the author of Louise, in which Labour, figured by one Mlle. Stumpp (a working-girl, who had been elected by ballot the Montmartre Muse), was crowned by Beauty, figured by Cléo de Mérode. Charpentier interpreted his cantata as follows:—
“The Muse is the plebeian virgin, the virtuous young working-girl, the daughter of the people, administering a formidable slap in the face to the pères la pudeur,85 showing these drivellers of another epoch, these dotards whose sentiments are false, unnatural, and bourgeois, that it is possible to achieve the beautiful in taking for a queen an ouvrière, a rosière even, of Montmartre, region of ideals too young for their too old ideas.”
This Montmartre fête of the Vache Enragée is unique among the fêtes of the whole world, I fancy, in that it is at once a bold apotheosis of the racking poverty of the artistic career and a defiant, masterful sneer at the smugness of commercial Philistinism.86 “It is a defence of la misère you are making,” said Zola in a communication to its organisers,—“a defence of la misère; and, to my thinking, you are right in making this defence.” Cyrano, a knight of the vache enragée, who would have found himself delightfully at home in the Montmartre cavalcade, made a similar defence, according to Rostand, some centuries ago:—
“Moi, c’est moralement que j’ai mes élégances.
Je ne m’attife pas ainsi qu’un freluquet,
Mais je suis plus soigné si je suis moins coquet.
Je ne sortirais pas avec, par négligence,
Un affront pas très-bien lavé, la conscience
Jaune encore de sommeil dans le coin de son œil,
Un honneur chiffoné, des scrupules en deuil.
Mais je marche sans rien sur moi qui ne reluise,
Empanaché d’indépendance et de franchise;
Ce n’est pas une taille avantageuse, c’est
Mon âme que je cambre ainsi qu’en un corset,
Et tout couvert d’exploits qu’en rubans je m’attache,
Retroussant mon esprit ainsi qu’une moustache,
Je fais en traversant les groupes et les ronds,
Sonner les vérités comme des éperons.”
The device, Vache Enragée, cavalierly adopted as their catchword by the painters, sculptors, poets, and musicians of Montmartre, was taken directly from the title of a Montmartre romance by Emile Goudeau, who was named on that account honorary president of the festival; but the phrase had long been current in French conversation and literature to designate the poverty of the prolétariat artistique et littéraire. Thus, the great Daudet wrote regarding one of the characters of Jack:—
“Then commenced for him this terrible ordeal of the vache enragée, which either breaks you at once or bronzes you forever.
“He became one of the ten thousand poor devils, famished and proud, who rise in Paris every morning giddy with hunger and ambitious dreams, nibble surreptitiously a sou loaf, which they keep hidden away in the bottoms of their pockets, blacken their clothes with penfuls of ink, whiten their shirt collars with billiard chalk, and warm themselves over the registers of the libraries and churches.... Art is such a wizard! It creates a sun which shines for all, like Nature’s sun; and those who approach it, even the poor, even the ill-favoured, even the grotesque, carry away a little of its warmth and its radiance. This celestial flame, imprudently ravished, which the unsuccessful guard in the depths of their eyes, renders them redoubtable sometimes, oftenest ridiculous; but their existence gains from it a grandiose serenity, a contemptuous indifference to misfortune, and a grace in suffering that other kinds of poverty do not know.”
The Montmartre Vache Enragée, you see, is the same old Latin Quarter Misère under another label, the “Bohemian road by which every man who enters the arts without other means of existence than art itself will be forced to travel,... the training school of the artistic profession, the preface to the Academy, the Hôtel-Dieu, or the Morgue.”87
Over the stony and thorny route of the Vache Enragée a large part of the literary, artistic, and musical celebrities of France have at one time or another passed.
Millet painting signs at Cherbourg and hasty portraits for the soldiers at Havre—Vache Enragée!
Barye forced to go about as a pedler in order to vend his now priceless statuettes—Vache Enragée!
Hector Berlioz, ridiculed for wanting the courage to put a bullet through his brain, accepting newspaper work to live, failing to write a symphony the theme of which came to him in a dream, because he would not have money enough to bring it out if it were written—Vache Enragée!
Audran and Charles Lecocq (who took prizes, the one in composition, the other in fugue, at the Conservatoire and the Niedermeyer School respectively) writing opéra bouffe to keep the wolf from the door—Vache Enragée!
Albert Glatigny, out on a hunt for funds to bury the dead mistress of a friend, swimming the Seine (though he was a poor swimmer and it was late autumn) because he could not pay the small bridge toll which was then exacted—Vache Enragée!
The saturnine De Nerval and the brilliant Gauthier chasing dinners, the first in back alley-ways and the second in the salon of the Princesse Mathilde—Vache Enragée!
Vache Enragée, also, young Balzac living on a few sous a day and writing the inevitable five-act drama in an icy garret, because his father, who had intended the boy for the law, had said to him, “There are people who have a vocation for dying in the hospital,” and his mother, “It seems that monsieur has a taste for misery!”
Vache Enragée—young Daudet arriving in Paris, after an over-long fast, shod only with rubbers (as he has narrated in Trente Ans and Le Petit Chose), and existing there on his share of the seventy-five francs a month his brother Ernest earned!
And Vache Enragée—young Zola stifling in a “room under the roof where one was forced to perform a series of acrobatic feats to sit down—on the bed”; living several days on bread soaked in olive oil sent to him from the Midi, and pitifully imploring the editors of Le Travail (a little Latin Quarter review) to print for him a poem written in the style of De Musset!
Vache Enragée again—Eugène Boudin sighing in his journal: “There are moments hard to bear when on every side you see the impossibility of getting a little money. There is a poor old mother who entreats, there is the rent to pay, there is the necessity of clothes, of brushes, of canvases, which you finally have to get along without. Petty economy and the worry that accompanies it kill you by inches.”
Vache Enragée, in short, the privations of all those for whom liberty is a necessity, and beauty a religion, and with whom a glowing faith in art more than atones for the absence of bread, of fire, and of clothes!
Winter before last a painter, fifty-three years of age, well known in art circles, was detected extracting money out of a church poor-box with the aid of a glue-smeared stick. This revolting sort of infidelity to the hard fare of the Vache Enragée is, it need hardly be said, a rare occurrence; but it is not rare for men to be forced to familiarity with the Vache Enragée after they have become famous.
Glatigny never got entirely free of poverty, and it was of disease produced by hunger and exposure that both he and his wife died.