La Rue Mont-Cénis
à la Muse de Monmartre
O Muse de Montmartre, ouvrière
aux doigts fins
Qui saurait broder d’or l’azur des
Séraphins
Et qui daignez sourire aux larmes des
poètes,
Salut! Salut! pour t’applaudir nos
mains sont prêtes.
Te voici parmi nous, vagues chercheurs
de rien,
L’un sculpteur, l’autre peintre, un tel
musicien,
Guettant un idéal parmi les âpres cimes,
Songeur des formes et des rhythmes et
des rimes.
Te voici parmi nous! Tes levres de
corail
Nous chantent le couplet sublime du
travail.
Emile Goudeau.
THE REAL MONTMARTRE
La rue Mont-Cénis
At the height of his fame the critic Gustave Planche was often without money enough to go to the barber-shop,—if Vallès is to be believed,—and occupied an attic at twenty-five francs a month. He never earned more than four thousand francs a year, and rarely as much as three thousand francs,—a sum which was destitution, nothing more nor less, for a person whose vocation forced him into the world and whose inability to walk necessitated a perpetual outlay for carriage hire.
In a striking passage of his novel, La Faiseuse de Gloire, Paul Brulat writes: “An old man approached the desk timidly, and stammered something in a low voice. The editor, annoyed at being interrupted, repelled him with cruel words. ‘Oh, say now, won’t you ever stop coming here begging?’ The old man moved off with a senile shake of the head. He bore a great name in literature. He was called Villiers de l’Isle-Adam.”
Henry Becque, whose Corbeaux was refused by ten theatres before it was accepted by the Théâtre Français, “lived on a seventh floor, under the roof,” says his friend and admirer, Henri Bauer. “The furnishings of his single room were an iron bed, an unpainted table, and three straw-bottomed chairs.” And this was long after Becque’s masterpieces had been given a hearing, at a time when he was regarded by a large and influential group of his contemporaries as the greatest French dramatist the last half of the nineteenth century had produced.
Berlioz, Millet, Verlaine, and Hégésippe Moreau ate of the Vache Enragée, more or less regularly, all their lives. So have many other artistic natures, not the least worthy and not the least celebrated.
Franz Servais, after having given fifteen years of labour, at untold sacrifice, to the creation and perfection of his opera, L’Apollonide, won the support of the Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar only to have his patron die just as the preparations for the production of the opera were complete and to die himself a few days after. In a letter to a friend, Servais has related how on one occasion, when everything looked dark, he missed an almost certain order from a musical publisher for want of presentable shoes: “I was unable to keep the appointment. At the last moment I perceived that my best shoes were all broken open. They gaped at the ends like carps’ noses. You can imagine the face of the good editor, his regret for having offered me a little money, and how he would have torn up the contract! I must wait for better luck.”
Franz Servais took himself too tragically in letting a good thing escape him simply because he had holes in his shoes. But Servais, though identified with Paris, was a Belgian, not a Frenchman, by birth, and was not a Montmartrois.
With a remunerative offer as an incentive, your typical Montmartrois would not have taken more than fifteen minutes to beg, borrow, or steal, hire or buy on the strength of the offer itself or of a supposititious heritage, the necessary shoes, and would have celebrated the happy outcome with his friends the very same night. Resourcefulness is a salient trait of the Bohemian wherever he may be found, and of none more than of the Bohemian of Montmartre. His contrivances for making the pot boil are legion.
In a tight place, he utilises the erudition, of which he is ordinarily more than half ashamed, in teaching foreigners French, working on cyclopedias or dictionaries, and giving lessons in the “three Rs,” for a few sous a day, to the children of his concièrge. He gives lessons just as readily in dancing, fencing, sparring, and savate.
If his talents are literary, he contributes to diet and fashion journals, writes advertisements or puffs for trade organs, sings songs of his own composition in the streets, or prints original poetry on slips and sells it in the cafés. He reads and writes letters at so much a piece for illiterate neighbours, supplies street singers (at a nominal price) with words for their songs, makes almost presentable (by editing) the productions of snobs, and constructs for feuilletonistes romances which said feuilletonistes sign. He writes indifferently theses for students, brochures for pamphleteers, placards and palaver for strolling showmen, prospectuses for charlatans, anniversary rhymes for husbands or wives, god-parents or god-children, toasts for empty-pated banqueters, and funeral speeches or elegies for unimaginative mourners. If his gift is musical, he plays in night orchestras. If his gift is artistic, he poses as a model for his companions of the chisel and brush who chance to be in funds, copies old masters at ten to fifteen francs a picture, designs posters and daubs scenery for the fêtes of the faubourgs, colours crude religious prints for the provincial market, paints workingmen’s children in their first communion regalia, and makes portraits for fond widows and widowers—between demise and burial—of their dear deceased. If his health is particularly robust, he figures the cured patient in quack doctors’ waiting-rooms.
He may, quite regardless of his bent, hawk toys in the street on fête days, play the races (under sealed orders) for a friend too busy to attend, fish tadpoles in the suburbs for the reptiles of menageries, help out a small shopkeeper with his book-keeping, back envelopes for a big bazaar, perform the duties of a valet under the euphuistic title of secretary, and advertise wares by demanding them insistently where they are not kept. He may even make himself a printer’s, house painter’s, mason’s, blacksmith’s, or carpenter’s assistant, a market porter, or a déménageur (mover). In all these contingencies, however, the immediate need having been satisfied, he takes up again his normal autonomous existence. He has not bound himself to lasting servitude. He has not sold his soul, and it is a rare thing that he is seriously demoralised by his half-humorous concessions. On the other hand, he has touched life at new points, deepened his sentiments, broadened his human sympathies, and lifted his horizon without lowering his ideal.
“Implacable sausage!” cries the author of Le Dimanche d’un Jeune Homme Pauvre. “We do not give sufficient credit to the influence of the hog on literature! I know men of letters en route for the Academy who ate kilometres of boudin [blood pudding] during the hard years of their novitiate.” This is merely a highly concrete way of saying that the French Bohemian is much less exercised over the savouriness of food than over its staying power. The problem he has to solve oftenest is not how most to tickle his palate, but how to give his system the maximum of bracing at the minimum of expense. To the solution of this problem, the Montmartrois brings an address that is amazing. So long as he can keep in the good graces of his restaurateur or of his butcher, baker, grocer, and sausage-man by painting handsome portraits of them and of their families or by flooding them with inscribed copies of his poems, the equation is a simple one, and all goes easily enough. But when the inevitable day of reckoning comes for him, when credit is withdrawn, and all relations with these well-nigh indispensable individuals are incontinently snapped; when, furthermore, he has dined with his friend the interne, J——, at the hospital table with his friend the sergeant, K——, in the sub-officers’ mess, and with his former classmates, the Baron Y—— and the leather merchant X——, in their homes, and when he has made the round of the cénacles at which he is welcome for the verses he recites, the stories he tells, or the songs he sings,—then the simple equation becomes an affected quadratic one, and a lugubrious change comes over the spirit of his dreams. Then bread and boudin, bread and cheese, bread and a sou’s worth of the meat kept for dogs, or bread helped down with a glass of vin ordinaire at the corner wine-shop, are the most that he can hope to obtain, unless, like Zola, he takes to snaring sparrows on the house-top, and roasting them, spitted on a curtain rod, by way of a brochette.
If the bread and cheese and the bread and wine also fail, if the boudin has to be put into the category of the unattainable along with beefsteak, and if the sparrows are coy, he may join the cats, dogs, and rag-pickers in exploring the garbage boxes at the break of morning; but he usually prefers—perhaps because he does not easily accommodate himself to early rising—some less direct, more diplomatic proceeding, such as tasting the stock of the market and street venders with the fastidious air of an intending buyer. Thus, walking up to a barrow of strawberries: “Your strawberries look good. How do you sell them?” “Four sous a pound.” “May I taste them?” “Certainly.”
He munches and savours two or three berries attentively, as if almost convinced of their merit, puts his hand into his pocket and draws out his purse as if to order, but, tasting another berry as he does so, makes a wry face, and ejaculates, “No, no, they’ll never do at all: they’re too sour,” and moves on to another barrow.
Berry by berry, slowly, but surely, he amasses a meal, as the miser amasses his hoard; and, if he has the luck to get a sou’s worth of bread with which to punctuate his butter, cheese, and fruit tastings, the result is not half a gastronomic failure. Happy, however, the taster whose crisis of penury coincides with the opening of the “Ham Fair”!
Picking petty quarrels for the sake of the substantial festivity that is likely to accompany the making up and betting on its eating capacity are other favourite ways for penniless hunger to satisfy itself.
Catulle Mendès, who made the acquaintance of the Vache Enragée during the brief period when his family were unsympathetic with his aims, tells of a poet, presumably himself, who after thirty-six hours of abstinence succeeded in breaking his fast by making a gingerbread bet:—
“The poet eyed the sweets wistfully, eyed them long.... He was just going away, I know not where, in the direction of the river perhaps, when he heard his name called. It was some one he scarcely knew, a young man also, not a poet, met somewhere by chance.
“‘How hard you look at that gingerbread!’ he said. The poet replied with gravity, ‘It is because I adore it.’
“‘Really?’
“‘Yes, to distraction. There are days when I could eat a franc’s worth at a sitting.’
“‘You’re joking. I bet you the franc you can’t eat as many as you say.’
“‘I take you up,’ cried the Parnassien, with starveling enthusiasm; and he precipitated himself upon the stall, and devoured the gingerbreads,—would have eaten of them for still greater, for enormous, sums,—taking pains to choose the pieces without almonds, which were poorer in quality, but which were bigger for the price. It was thus that he did not die of hunger.”
It is said that Ibsen in his early days of poverty before the publication of Brand made it an invariable rule to take a long walk at noon, whether he had the money for a meal or not, in order not to lose caste—and hence credit—with his landlady by revealing that he could not dine as often as every day. Similarly the Montmartre Bohemian displays a fine pathetico-humorous ingenuity in making others believe he has eaten when he has not, and even—supreme prestidigitation!—in making himself believe it: as when he passes the day in bed or puts his watch back to cheat his appetite; when he takes his déjeuner in the middle of the afternoon, not only to get a dinner at the price of a déjeuner, but to afford himself the illusion of having both; or when he makes the Heaven-sent apéritif that should precede or the gratuitous cigar that should follow a dinner, stand him in the stead of the dinner itself.
His so-called affectations and poses—bizarre accoutrement and outlandish speech—are, in the last analysis, so many devices for cheap living, so many expedients for disguising the completeness of his destitution from his fellows and from himself, so many talismans for metamorphosing a hard necessity into an idiosyncrasy of genius, or so many modes of whistling, so to speak, to keep up his courage. Thus Goudeau, under the stress of exceptional ill-hap, consecrated himself solemnly to playing practical jokes in a phalanstère; and the rotund and rippling Raoul Ponchon flaunted a splendid Breton costume at the very time he had nothing better than a wash-house to sleep in.
If the Montmartrois carries his hat in his hand with a distrait, philosophical air, it is certain that the last piece of head-gear Providence has vouchsafed him is either too large or too small for his head. If he speaks feelingly of his old aunt, he is referring indubitably to the pawn-shop, whose quotations are of far more moment to him than are those of the Bourse. If you detect him in a railway station, waiting more than half an hour for a train, it is that the shelter of the café has been, for some reason or other, temporarily denied him. And, if he appears more than half a mile from his lodging in dressing-gown and slippers, with a salad or a bunch of radishes under his arm, it is either because dressing-gown and slippers are, for the nonce, the sum of his wardrobe or because he has put on the dressing-gown to match compulsory slippers or the slippers to match a compulsory dressing-gown. You may be sure he has carried the salad or radishes ever since he set out, and that he will renew them when they have become too withered to serve his deceitful end.
La rue St. Vincent,
known as “the lovers’ walk”
He carries his burdens buoyantly, as the best type of old man carries his years, and, making hard necessity pass for a joke, extracts no end of amusement from his vicissitudes, caps himself with a Merry Andrew’s bonnet, and “drapes himself,” to use a phrase of Maurice Barrès, “with irony in order not to appear stark naked before men.”
A young couple, who had long been habitués of a certain restaurant in the rue Lepic, entered one night equipped with violin and guitar, made profound obeisance to the assembled company, and announced that they had got to earn their dinner on the spot that night, if they had one. With their instruments and voices they proceeded to earn it, amid their own and their whilom comrades’ jests and laughter. After a fortnight of this unenviable, if mirthful, prominence, their fortunes mended; and they dropped contentedly back into their obscurity as ordinary diners, the richer for an invigorating experience. Three handsome, long-haired, bearded fellows of the rue Menessier have taken Paris by storm this very summer with their mandolin and guitar music in the open air.
A Montmartre Bohemian, who is at once a superior musician and a species of Hercules, having made himself provisionally a déménageur, amused himself mightily at his work, confounding the petty bourgeois he served, by playing their pianos. The natural though totally unforeseen result of his somewhat impudent facetiousness was an opportunity to give lessons, which floated him back into the musical current.
Another Montmartrois (Raoul Pouchon, I think), wearied with walking the streets the night after he had been evicted from his lodging, revenged himself by baiting with sugar all the street curs of his district, and introducing them at two o’clock in the morning into the stairway of his evictor’s house.
Sometimes, perhaps, these merry Montmartre shifts come near transgressing the bounds which separate fun from lawlessness. The déménagement à la cloche de bois,88 the nailing of one’s emptied trunk to the floor to impress one’s concièrge with its weight, the paying of one’s rent by abstracting the clothes of one’s landlord and putting them in pawn, and the grateful acceptance of the pâté, chop, or sausage brought in by one’s pilfering dog, as if one were Elijah and one’s Toutou were a raven of the wild, can hardly be defended by any of the recognised bourgeois codes. But even these flagrant escapades proceed less from malice than from mischief, and even these fall strangely in line with equity in nine cases out of ten.
On its Bohemian side, Montmartre is a second and, to the thinking of many, a greater and more brilliant Quartier Latin.
Here abound the literary and artistic restaurants, cafés, bouillons, crèmeries, and cabarets which have always conferred a peculiar charm on Paris. Here, as well as in the Latin Quarter (and more numerous and varied, perhaps, here than there), are the modern counterparts of the Treille d’Or, the Pomme de Pin, the Radis Couronné, the Pressoir d’Or, the Ceinture qui Craque, the Deux Torches, and the Trois Entonnoirs of the time of Cyrano; the Procope, de Valois, de Foy, du Caveau, and Mécanique of the time of Louis XVI.; the Viot, Bléry, Flicoteaux, de Buci, and de la Rotonde of the Restoration and Louis Philippe; the Molière, Voltaire, L’Orient, “Sherry Cobbler,” and Bobino of the last empire. And here they have been long enough to have already developed their legends and esprit de corps.
In the Brasseries des Martyrs and Fontaine, Cabarets de Ramponneau, de la Grande Pinte, du Plus Grand Bock, and de la Place Belhomme, and the Cafés Jean Goujon, Laplace, de la Nouvelle Athénée, and Du Rat Mort,89 poets and painters, now grizzled, chattered and revelled before the grey hairs came. Dinochaux, of the Café Dinochaux (rue Bréda), who nourished several of his patrons gratis for years, and bestowed credit unsolicited on any one who showed himself worthy in literature or art, has taken his place in history alongside of Ragueneau, the keeper of the Rôtisserie des Poètes of Cyrano.
You recall Ragueneau, the quaint saint, it is to be hoped. If not, here is a scrap of dialogue to evoke him:—
“Cyrano. Bercés par ta voix.
Ne vois-tu pas comme ils s’empiffrent?
“Ragueneau. Je le vois....
Sans regarder, de peur que cela ne les trouble;
Et dire ainsi mes vers me donne un plaisir double,
Puisque je satisfais un doux faible que j’ai,
Tout en laissant manger ceux qui n’ont pas mangé.
“Cyrano (lui frappant sur l’épaule). Toi, tu me plais!”
The cook at Marguéry’s, being asked once upon a time what he thought of the Vache Enragée, replied: “Mon dieu, de la vache enragée! Je crois qu’on pourrait en faire un plat mangeable avec beaucoup de bonne humeur et des petites femmes autour.”
At Montmartre the sagacious chef’s words are daily verified. At Montmartre, if nowhere else in the world, the Vache Enragée is a “plat mangeable.”
The line of boulevards extending from the Place de Clichy to the Place d’Anvers which strikes American tourists, who visit it for Montmartre, as a vulgar hodge-podge of Coney Island, the Bowery, the Broadway of the Tenderloin, and South Fifth Avenue, with a dash of, say, a Boston “Pop” concert on a Harvard night, is no more the real Montmartre than Paris is the real France. The real Montmartre is the abrupt hill known as “The Butte,” just north of said boulevards90 and included between them,—the rue Marcadet, the rue de Clignancourt, and the avenue de St. Ouen, a section of which the gigantic Byzantine cathedral of the Sacré Cœur, the Moulin de la Galette, until recently an unsophisticated popular ball, and the cimetière de Montmartre (the second cemetery of Paris) are the salient features.
This real Montmartre (the Montmartre of the Butte) contains a tiny local cemetery (long disused), a tiny twelfth-century parochial church (St. Pierre), a tiny district theatre, a tiny village plaza (Place du Tertre) with the customary trees, benches, and aged, ruminating idlers, a tiny public park (Square St. Pierre), two gaunt, grey windmills, and several sleepy wine-shops, over which sleepy publicans preside. Here are five, six, and seven story city buildings, to be sure, but here are also (particularly on the northern slope) ancient garden-girdled mansions reminiscent of the epoch when the whole district was open country; sculptured gate-posts, crumbling, but stately, and rusty iron gates opening on symmetrical avenues; small one-and-a-half-story tile-roofed and straw-thatched dwellings, also garden-girdled, clutching with the grip of the Swiss chalet the steep hillsides; narrow streets and winding lanes, and worn stone stairways where the hill’s incline forbids streets and lanes; high, erratic, heavily buttressed stone walls, bulging with age, over which houses also bulging with age (from the windows of which a Paul might be let down in a basket) beetle as if to fall; diminutive fruit orchards and vegetable gardens; and diminutive barnyards, cluttered with chicken-coops, dove-cotes, pig-pens, and rabbit-cages, which advertise cows’ and goats’ milk, compost, and young pigs for sale. Here cats and dogs and hens roam multitudinous and unmolested, birds sing in the shrubbery, and chanticleer proclaims the dawn.