Chapter XIX To What End?
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
Shakespeare.
“Truth’s fountains may be clear, her streams are muddy.”
Lord Byron.
“Myself when young did eagerly frequent
Doctor and Saint, and heard great argument
About it and about: but evermore
Came out by the same door wherein I went.
*******
The Ball no question makes of Ayes and Noes
But Here or There as strikes the Player goes;
And He that tossed you down into the Field,
He knows about it all—HE knows—HE knows!”
Rubáiyát of Omar Kháyyám.
“A man finds he has been wrong at every preceding stage of his career, only to deduce the astonishing conclusion that he is at last entirely right. Mankind, after centuries of failure, are still upon the eve of a thoroughly constitutional millennium. Since we have explored the maze so long, without result, it follows, for poor human reason, that we cannot have to explore much longer; close by must be the centre.... How if there were no centre at all, but just one alley after another, and the whole world a labyrinth without end or issue?”—Robert Louis Stevenson.
“Avec tous nos points de repères,
Te voyons-nous mieux que nos pères,
O fond, fond qui nous désespères,
Fond obscur, fond mystérieux?
Pour avoir fait glose sur glose,
Nous croyons savoir quelque chose;
Mais la Cause de tout, la Cause,
Qui donc la tient devant ses yeux?”
Jean Richepin.
“I mean to say that if, in the pitiful comedy of life, princes seem to command and peoples to obey, it is only a piece of acting, a vain appearance, and that really they are both conducted by an invisible force.”
Anatole France, in Les Opinions de M. Jerôme Coignard.
The wisest words, probably, that were ever heard in a court-room were uttered by Gamaliel, the Pharisee, at the trial of Peter and John: “Refrain from these men, and let them alone: for if this counsel or this work be of men, it will come to nought: but if it be of God, ye cannot overthrow it; lest haply ye be found even to fight against God.”
To a similar purport, Montaigne wrote:—
“’Tis a very great presumption to slight and condemn all things for false that do not appear to us likely to be true, which is the ordinary vice of such as fancy themselves wiser than their neighbours. I was myself once one of these; and if I heard talk of dead folks walking, of prophecies, enchantments, witchcrafts, or any other story, I had no mind to believe.... I presently pitied the poor people that were abused by these follies, whereas I now find that I myself was to be pitied as much at least as they; not that experience has taught me anything to supersede my former opinions, though my curiosity has endeavoured that way; but reason has instructed me that thus resolutely to condemn anything for false and impossible is to circumscribe and limit the will of God and the power of nature within the bounds of my own capacity, than which no folly can be greater. If we give the names of monster and miracle to everything our reason cannot comprehend, how many such are continually presented before our eyes! Let us but consider through what clouds and, as it were, groping through what darkness, our teachers lead us to the knowledge of most of the things we apply our studies to, and we shall find that it is rather custom than knowledge that takes away the wonder, and renders them easy and familiar to us;... and that, if those things were now newly presented to us, we should think them as strange and incredible, if not more so, than others.... He that had never seen a river imagined the first he met with to be the sea, and the greatest things that have fallen within our knowledge we conclude to be the extremes that nature makes of the kind.”
To have pondered and appropriated these words of the far-sighted Pharisee and the sage of Périgord is to have stricken the word impossible from one’s vocabulary, to have lost the desire to emit shrieks of anger or dismay before new views of life and society, and, without “mockings or arguments,” to simply “witness and wait.”
The philosophic doubt which no one more than Montaigne has approved—the “Que sçais-je?” which forbids the swearing of unconditional allegiance to unproved theories—is, of course, always in order; but doubt becomes most pernicious dogmatism when it assumes the rôle of denial. It plays its proper part when, and only when, it produces a willingness to “leave great changes,” as Stevenson happily puts it, “to what we call great blind forces, their blindness being so much more perspicacious than the little peering, partial eyesight of men.”
“La folie d’hier est la sagesse de demain” has been said so long, and accepted so long, that there is no tracing it to its origin; and yet we go on diligently disregarding it, seizing every fresh occasion to “kick against the pricks,” quite as if the stupidity of the practice had not been demonstrated a thousand times over, quite as if the stones rejected by the builders had never become the heads of the corners, and the first had never been last, and the last first.
“Vieux soldats de plomb que nous sommes,
Au cordeau nous alignant tous,
Si de nos rangs sortent des hommes,
Tous nous crions: A bas les fous!
On les persécute, on les tue,
Sauf, après un long examen,
A leur dresser une statue
Pour la gloire du genre humain.”143
“If we came from a globe where there was some semblance of rule and order,” says Georges Clemenceau, “the spectacle of our planet would appear to us a pure abomination.” In the interests of clearness, M. Clemenceau has exaggerated, perhaps. Nevertheless, there is an element of truth in what he says. Our society is abundantly open to criticism; and that we chance to be inimical to panaceas and suspicious of Utopias is no valid reason for calling the black of our society white, and blandly treating its absurdities, illogicalities, injustices, and cruelties as infallibilities and amenities. Because the reformer commits the folly of dogmatising in one direction does not excuse us for committing the counter-folly of dogmatising in another. Suppose we hold with Omar that
“the first Morning of Creation wrote
What the Last Dawn of Reckoning shall read,”
and suppose we are prone to take at the letter these lines of Walt Whitman,—
“There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now,
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now,”—
is it, therefore, necessary for us to shut our eyes to the most obvious facts of the present and to all possibilities for the future?
When Victor Barrucand, a few years ago, put forward his scheme for free bread (“le pain gratuit”), he was not treated as a visionary in any important quarter. The semi-bourgeois journals showed themselves, in several instances, rather friendly; and the opposition he encountered from the straight bourgeois press was of quite a different sort from that which is evoked by a preposterous proposition. M. Clemenceau, one of the few radicals who has never for a moment lost his balance, supported him warmly.
“It is high time we knew,” said Clemenceau, “whether, at the degree of civilisation to which we have attained, we can continue to tolerate that men, women, and children die of want—in a few months from the exhaustion induced by insufficiently remunerated work or in a few hours from downright hunger. Our republican and monarchical conservatives—all excellent Christians—answer, ‘No,’ but continue to act ‘Yes.’... I just remarked that M. Barrucand did not propose revolution to us. I ask myself now if I did not go a bit too fast. Yes, eighteen hundred years after the Christ, it is a revolution for Christians to prevent the death of their fellows by slow and rapid starvation. Well, then, let us inaugurate this revolution!”
“Le pain gratuit c’est le futur,” said Jules Lermina at the same moment. And, really, is it so unreasonable that every one should be given enough to eat, when slaves have been, and domestic animals are, so provided for, and when every one is given the privilege of learning to read and write? Is it not rather surprising that a person should be permitted, nay, forced, to acquire reading and writing, and should be supplied at the public expense (without apparent opposition from any source) with fresh air, lights, pure water, paved streets, and parks, and should not be provided with bread; that he is entitled to food inspection and is not entitled to food itself; that he is assured proper disposition for his waste and is not assured a sufficiency of supply; that he can count on a burial and cannot count—supreme irony!—on a living; has the right to a grave-plot and has not the right to a loaf? Is illiteracy so much more dangerous to society than destitution? Is everything as merry as it might be when death thus lords it over life; when a man asks for bread, and is given a coffin?
A republic with manhood suffrage and generally disseminated book-knowledge would probably have seemed as chimerical to the minds of our not very remote ancestors as the community of the socialist or anarchist dream seems to us. It would not be more remarkable if wage-earners should disappear than it was that serfs and slaves disappeared; if the factory system should disappear than it was that it once appeared; if alms-giving should be replaced by a recognition of the right to work than that charity from being a fine, spontaneous human impulse has become an unwieldy, soulless machine; if private property should be transformed into collective property than that private property was evolved out of the tribal possessions; if the church should cease to be an institution of the state—indeed it has already ceased to be in America—than that it ever became one; if l’union libre should supersede marriage (with the loss of the latter’s chief sanctions, private property and the already much-enfeebled authority of the church) than that monogamy has superseded polygamy; if woman should be emancipated than that man has, up to a certain point, been emancipated. Furthermore, it would be no more extraordinary if the tiers état (the present dominant bourgeoisie) should be evicted by the quatrième état (the proletariat) than it was that the tiers état evicted the nobility and clergy in 1789; if a social republic (under which without knowing or, at least, without admitting it we are already half installed) should follow close upon the heels of a simple republic than that a simple republic followed close upon the heels of a monarchy and a monarchy close upon the heels of a feudal system; if nations should pass as political entities by being merged in an Internationale than that they emerged out of the seeming chaos of the Middle Ages; if there should be one tongue over all the earth144 than that there has come to be one tongue over any entire people; if there should be general peace than that there has been general war.
No, there is nothing inherently incredible or absurd about the ideas and ideals of the contemporary revolutionists; nothing more transcendental or more visionary than there was, for their day and their generation, in the ideas and ideals of the Encyclopedists, and of the innovators and reformers of all the past.
It may have been a mistake for the classes to impose book-learning on the masses, to compel them to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which makes men as gods; but, having given their wards to eat thereof, having deliberately stimulated them to think, the privileged must let them follow out their thinking to the logical—perhaps, also, to the bitter—end. There is no alternative. There is no such thing as staying them midway in their course, since with growing knowledge has come growing desire.
If the classes did not wish the masses to drink deep of the Pierian spring, they should have had the sense to keep them away from it altogether instead of ingenuously leading them up to sip. As it is, the people have become mentally and morally incapable of blind submission. They cannot be hoodwinked by fine phrases as of yore. Their roused and trained intelligence is rapidly penetrating the shams, puncturing the frauds, and stripping off the shows of republicanism. They will not much longer be put off with the mere forms and formulas of liberty and well-being which satisfied them at the start. They are now beginning to demand the things themselves, and they have at last the minds and the manhood necessary to enforce their demand. The illogical, hypocritical, plutocratic republic which they find themselves under disgusts and exasperates them quite as much as would a monarchy. They have resolved to have out-and-out democracy instead of the miserable makeshift for democracy that has been thrown to them as a sop; and have it they will! Gare à vous, naïve, short-sighted bourgeois, who with your reading and writing started them on their quest for the new, if you attempt to place obstructions in their path!
The people have a startling way of getting, in the long run, the specific things they set their hearts on. And one may admit—without the slightest prejudice to his intellectual independence or the slightest abdication of his preferences—that the specific things the revolutionists of Paris and the world at large are striving for may sooner or later be theirs.
A successful social revolution, one day or another, is neither an inconceivable, an impossible, nor even an improbable event. The time may come, at least for all that we can reasonably affirm to the contrary, when there will be no more governments, no more great fortunes, no more private property, no more poverty, no more “marrying and giving in marriage,” no more wars, no more armies, no more patriotism, and no more diversity of tongues.
This is not saying that the individual life will be fuller, richer, and sweeter then than it has been and is, nor that the world will be enormously better and happier than it is and has been. Apples of the most golden seeming have been known to turn to ashes in the plucker’s hand; and, when the time comes—if it does come—that the revolutionists’ present cravings have all been satisfied, the millennium will still, in all likelihood, be as far as ever away.
Change, incessant change, is the law of the universe; but change, though inevitable, and hence never really bad and never really to be regretted, is not synonymous with progress,—not in the sense, at least, in which the latter word is generally understood.
“Partout de l’astre à l’étincelle,
Partout la vie universelle,
Se fond, tourbillonne, et ruisselle,
Et tout passe, et rien s’en va.”
It is as big a piece of dogmatism to be cock-sure the world is growing better all the time and all along the line, simply because it is perpetually changing, as it is to be cock-sure it is constantly growing worse, and as big a piece of credulity to look forward confidently to a Golden Age in the future as to revert—unhumorously—to a Golden Age in the past. Every system of society which has existed thus far is now admitted to have had its qualities and its defects,—what is more, the defects of its qualities. Our period of machinery, universal suffrage, and diffused book-knowledge (factors from which our fathers expected miracles to spring) has its blemishes as well as the periods of illiteracy, blooded aristocracy, and hand labour. Our new woman—we are reminded every day—is as antipathetic and inept in some ways as she is charming and useful in other ways; and, while we cannot be sure that every future period will “depress some elements of goodness just as much as it will encourage others,” we have, alas! no adequate guarantee that it will not do so.
It may be that it is again to be the mission of France to redeem (or appear to redeem) the world by a sort of vicarious atonement. The cult of revolution is not dead there, and the impulse that demolished the Bastille has by no means spent itself. Or it may be that for Russia, where the provocation is greatest, or for America, where there is most initiative and the most accelerated rate of change, is reserved this fearsome rôle. But, wherever the Social Revolution begins and wherever it reaches, the well-balanced man, who has won through stress and travail to a sane outlook and to an enthusiasm for life; he who can say with Kipling’s “Tramp Royal,”—
“Gawd bless this world! Whatever she ‘ath done—
Excep’ when awful long—I’ve found it good.
So write before I die, ‘’E liked it all!’”—
will await its arrival with complete equanimity.
“Think, then, you are To-day what Yesterday
You were—To-morrow you shall not be less.”
Friendships and loves—the only things really worth while to seasoned natures—have always been. Under all régimes, men have had friends and sweethearts and little ones for the greater glory of their souls; and friends and sweethearts and little ones—the boldest innovators do not assert otherwise—they are likely to have while time is.
These loves and these friendships have found such beautiful expression already that there is little to hope from the future. On the other hand, so far as they are concerned, there is nothing to fear.
What matters, then, in the last analysis the march of public events,—monarchy, republic, social republic, or anarchistic commune,—so that we bear the brunt together, heart to heart, and the great elemental things abide?
“Of the possibility of a free communistic society there can really I take it be no doubt. The question that more definitely presses on us now is one of transition—By what steps shall we, or can we pass to that land of freedom?
“We have supposed a whole people started on its journey by the lifting off of the burden of Fear and Anxiety; but in the long slow ascent of Evolution no sudden miraculous change can be expected; and for this reason alone it is obvious that we can look for no sudden transformation to the communist form. Peoples that have learnt the lesson of ‘trade’ and competition so thoroughly as the modern nations have—each man fighting for his own hand—must take some time to unlearn it. The Sentiment of the Common Life, so long nipped and blighted, must have leisure to grow and expand again; and we must acknowledge that—in order to foster new ideas and new habits—an intermediate stage of Collectivism will be quite necessary. Formulæ like the ‘nationalisation of the land and all the instruments of production,’ though they be vague and indeed impossible of rigorous application, will serve as centres for the growth of the sentiment. The partial application of these formulæ will put folk through a lot of useful drilling in the effort to work together and for common ends.”—Edward Carpenter.
Footnotes
1 Reclus’ anarchist brochure A mon Ami le Paysan is a veritable literary gem.
2 When they do not render it unproductive by transforming it into hunting grounds or pleasure parks or leave it sterile, either through want of sufficient capital to ameliorate it or simply from indifference and neglect.—Jean Grave.
3 In France. The usage is somewhat different in certain other countries.
4 Normally, all posters must carry revenue stamps.
5 The officers of an assembly are so called in France.
6 Charenton is the Paris insane hospital.
7 The word trimardeur is derived from the dialect word trimard, which means grande route (the great road).
8 Strictly, at 2 sous a four-page folder, each folder containing the words and music of one song and the words of two or three others.
9 Ravachol was convicted of several overt acts, among them the dynamiting of the house of the judges Benoit and Bulot.
10 M. Leroy now has a little book-store in the Montsouris district.
11 Henri Bérenger’s L’Action, for all its violence, cannot be so classed. A pronounced anarchist, Charles Malato, was for a time one of the pillars of the acrimonious daily L’Aurore, and it is frequently recommended by the anarchist press for anarchist reading. But it was never, strictly speaking, an anarchist sheet. It is now under the control of the radical Clemenceau.
12 The general title of the series is La Bibliothèque Documentaire.
13 The office of the Temps Nouveaux has been transferred to the rue Broca, in the same district.
14 A set of anarchist groups, loosely federated, which devote themselves to study with persistence and zeal.
15 Drawn after an image de propagande.
16 Author of the explosion at the Café Terminus.
17 The assassin of Carnot.
18 Inability to pay this fine involving further imprisonment, the real term of the editors condemned for two years became in most cases three years or three years and a half. It should be noted, however, that a considerable proportion of them were condemned for contumacy, they having made good their escape to England or Belgium before their cases were tried.
19 M. Gabriel Girond has written a volume entitled Cempuis on this educational experiment, which no educator or student of education can afford to neglect. Maurice Devaldès, also, in a brochure entitled L’Education et la Liberté, compares the educational experiment of Tolstoy at Yasnaïa-Poliana with M. Robin’s experiment at Cempuis, to the advantage of the latter.
20 Believed by many to have been managed by the police in order to sow dissensions and cause divisions in the ranks of the anarchists.
21 In Russia, where many of the most violent propagandistes par le fait are men of letters or scientists, the situation is quite different.
22 Reclus’ daughters have entered into union libre openly with their father’s entire approval. A man of Elisée Reclus’ standing would not aid and abet such a course without profound conviction.
23 A strike of pick-and-shovel labourers, to supervise which the government hurried 75,000 soldiers into Paris, although there were no signs of violence.
24 Certain anarchists hold that it is proper for an anarchist to penetrate into the unions, so that he does not preside at their formation nor hold office therein,—an attitude which is amusingly analogous to that of the scrupulous Episcopalian dame who drew the line of the permissible in Lent just this side of white kid slippers.
25 Communist-anarchists, in spite of the word Socialistes in their title.
26 Vaillant threw a bomb in the French Chamber.
27 Bresci killed King Humbert of Italy.
28 Estimated in France officially, and hence conservatively, as 40,000.
29 Special laboratories, with walls constructed to minimise the force of a shock were erected at this time at four different points in Paris,—Montrouge, Aubervilliers, Berey, and Le Point du Jour.
30 Salsou, who attempted to assassinate the Shah of Persia, was a trimardeur.
31 Whence the slang verb watriner and the substantive watrinade.
32 Another version is that Pini, having voted twice, was condemned to three months’ imprisonment, and that it was to avoid this that he left the country.
33 Frustrated by a faithful dog.
34 This sentence was commuted to long-term imprisonment by President Grévy.
35 Le terme (rent) in Paris must be paid quarterly and in advance. It is due on the 1st, and must be paid on the 8th or 15th (according to its amount) of January, April, July, and October.
36 There is a distinct class of men and women in Paris ready at any moment to cry à bas or vive, no matter whom or what, for a five-franc piece. Napoléon Hayard, known as the “empereur des camelots,” who died recently at a ripe age, was known to Parisians for many years as an organiser of manifestations.
37 It was Rochefort who declared the mysterious shooting of Labori during the Dreyfus trial at Rennes to be a fictitious manœuvre.
38 The curious filing of the hammer of Salsou’s pistol, which rendered impossible—according to a portion of the expert testimony—its discharge, lent a certain colour of truth to this accusation.
39 As lately as 1902 the anarchist spy service was recruited in this fashion, and so openly that spies might almost be said to have been advertised for.
40 M. Andrieux’s La Révolution Sociale was probably not the last journal of its class.
41 The militant anarchist’s knowledge of the code and of legal procedure is also phenomenal. There is nothing he enjoys better, when in good humour, than to remind his judge of a forgotten or wilfully neglected formality.
42 Baumann shot a priest who was personally unknown to him for the sake of the propaganda.
43 Ravachol was attempting to make a convert an hour and a half after the explosion of the rue de Clichy.
44 Passanante attempted to assassinate King Humbert of Italy.
45 The prosecution of Tailhade was probably a sop to the Russian diplomats, his article having been specially directed against the czar.
46 Ravachol justified these acts to himself on the ground that the living and still more the dead had no right to hold wealth in unproductiveness while human beings were starving. The proceeds of both these deeds were religiously consecrated by him to the propagande.
47 The probable author of the explosion at the Restaurant Véry.
48 Accused of complicity in various overt acts, but not condemned.
49 Ravachol’s masterful sneer at the church on his way to the guillotine was not, it seems, pure perverseness. Ravachol had taken a real liking to the prison priest, whom he admitted to be a good fellow, but he had such a horror of being claimed by the church after his death as an eleventh-hour penitent that he had requested the priest not to assist at his execution. To this request the priest had answered,—could anything well be more maladroit?—“I cannot avoid it. I shall be there by the same right as the headsman.”
50 The Guesdistes and the Jeunesse Blanquiste were the most important exceptions.
51 Hostile, that is, except at the eleventh hour of their congress, when they usually contrive to vote resolutions of harmony.
52 Leader of the Parti Socialiste Révolutionnaire.
53 Leader of the Fédération des Travailleurs Socialistes.
54 There is no socialist daily, however, which is not under capitalistic control.
55 There has long been a shelf in one of the book-stalls of the arcade of the Odéon devoted exclusively to works on Socialism. Whether this device is due to business insight or propagandist fervour, it is equally significant.
56 Leader of the Groupe des Socialistes Independants.
57 Commemorating the Bloody Week of the Commune.
58 Burned at the stake in the sixteenth century.
59 Some coopératives socialistes have been established.
60 Leader of the Parti Ouvrier Français.
61 Leader of the Parti Ouvrier Socialiste Révolutionnaire.
62 The illustration of the Place Maubert shows one of its humble latter-day distinctions. It is the market-place for the Mégotiers of the Quarter, gatherers of cigar and cigarette stubs, who carry canes with which to rake up these tobacco remnants.
63 Michelet.
64 Jules Vallès.
65 Whence the word frondeur (captious), currently applied to the students to this day.
66 La Harpe, the autocrat of the literary world, appeared before his class one day in a red Phrygian cap, and devoted a portion of his lecture-hour to declaiming revolutionary chansons.
67 It would be superfluous to name their present habitués, since they are as yet too young to be famous.
68 The accompanying illustration is a portrait sketch of the son of Felix Gras in his favourite seat at one of these cabarets, above which some artist has scrawled his caricature.
69 The Grille and the Noctambules, the best-known café-concerts of the Quartier, are purely professional affairs. Their performers are not students, and students make up only a small part of their audiences.
70 There were martyrs to conviction on both sides in the Dreyfus case, as there were under the last empire.
71 More than once during the Dreyfus affair the Quartier seemed to be on the verge of an eruption; but the lying, contemptible manœuvres of Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards alike threw cold water on both its military and its anti-military enthusiasm.
72 Haraucourt has recently been elevated to the position of librarian of one of the principal libraries of Paris.
73 Jacques Le Lorrain has just died of consumption. A short time before his death he had the happiness of having his remarkable poetical play Don Quixote performed at the Théâtre Victor Hugo.
74 The Salons were held in the Louvre at this period.
75 Dèche and purée (the latter akin to the Americanism “in the soup”) are Bohemian slang for misère.
76 A law which commutes the penalty, but without expunging the condemnation from the record.
77 Since these lines were written, word has come, alas! that Bibi is dead.
78 The Cabaret du Père Lunette—on the edge of the Latin Quarter—and its near neighbour, the Château Rouge (also called La Guillotine), were notorious criminal resorts in the days, not so very remote, before the piercing of the rue Lagrange and the enlarging of the Place Maubert rendered innocuous one of the most dangerous corners of Paris. The Château Rouge was recently demolished, and the Père Lunette ceased several years back to be anything but an insipid show-place for tourists. Neither has ever been an organic part of the Quartier life.
79 Practical joker seems to be the only possible translation of the word fumiste, but it is a most inadequate one.
80 The rue de Croissant is filled with newspaper offices.
81 Se coucher à la belle étoile is to be without a lodging other than the pavement.
82 Ma tante = the pawn-shop.
83 A name given to the younger poets of the more eccentric schools.
84 Discontinued with the discontinuance of its provocation, the fête of the Bœuf Gras.
85 Père la Pudeur, a name applied originally to the French Anthony Comstock, M. Bérenger.
86 The Bal Gavarni and the Bal Monnier held at Montmartre in 1902 and 1904 respectively—as a tribute to the memory of two great French caricaturists—and the open-air Montmartre festivals, Le Couronnement de la Rosière Montmartroise (1903) and Le Mariage de la Rosière Montmartroise (1904), though similar in conception to the cavalcade of the Vache Enragée, proved less effective from this particular point of view.
87 Henry Mürger.
88 Déménager à la cloche de bois is to move secretly without paying one’s rent.
89 The Rat Mort has completely changed its character of late years. Only at the déjeuner and the dinner hours is any hint of its former self obtainable.
90 The slope from these boulevards to the rue de Lamartine and the rue St. Lazare (between the rue de Clichy and the rue de Rochechouart) is affiliated with Montmartre, and by a stretching of the point may be said to belong to it; but its population is too largely made up of bourgeois and the exploiting cocottes of the Olympia, Moulin Rouge, Casino de Paris, and Folies-Bergères to admit of its being absolutely co-ordinated with the Butte.
91 Called logement to distinguish it from the appartement, which is more pretentious. The kitchen of the logement is provided with running water and gas; and the gas company is required by law to furnish the tenant who does not pay more than 500 francs a year rent a new gas range, gratis. Ateliers are relatively dearer, and the artist does not easily find an atelier in which he can live and work for less than 600 francs.
92 Recently deceased.
93 At Montmartre, as in all parts of Paris, hand-carts may be hired for a few sous an hour.
94 Cyrano de Bergerac.
95 A seaside resort.
96 It is not a rare thing for a Montmartre organ to speak of a trip to the Grands-Boulevards or the Latin Quarter as “un départ vers les pays étrangers désignés sous le nom des Etats-Unis de Paris.”
97 The word hydropathe was absolutely without significance in this connection. It was hit upon by the merest chance, and welcomed because it suggested nothing that could mislead or occasion dispute.
98 Salis died several years ago.
99 One of these just beginning to be known, and hence sure soon to be spoiled, began with improvised tables made by placing boards upon wine-casks, and with other paraphernalia in keeping.
100 Deceased.
101 The French free-stage movement, which involved revolutionary thought as well as revolutionary form, was launched at Montmartre, and was identified with Montmartre through all its polemic period,—up to the moment, in fact, when it became Parisian, having gained its cause.
102 Alexandre is about to leave Montmartre for the Grands-Boulevards.
103 Maquereau is a type name for a criminal loafer who lives by the prostitution of his mistress.
104 Biribi is the name given to the African battalion to which recalcitrant soldiers are assigned.
105 Les Opinions de M. Jerôme Coignard. M. Coignard belongs to the eighteenth century.
106 Since M. France wrote these words, the images of the Christ have been removed from the French courts.
107 As evidence that M. Barrucand’s scheme for free bread deserves to be considered as something more than the Utopian ideal of a littérateur, it should be mentioned that the economist L. Auby advocated the same thing (winter of 1903-04) in as conservative an organ as the Annales Parlementaires.
108 Dubois-Dessaulle, while acting as a newspaper correspondent in Abyssinia in the spring of 1904, was assassinated by natives. He was a martyr to his conscientious belief that it is a crime to carry arms.
109 J.-H. Rosny is the signature of the Rosny brothers, who have to be treated as one person in their relations to thought and literature.
110 Several of the persons here named are also writers of fiction or poetry.
111 Lately deceased.
112 Lately deceased.
113 This title may perhaps be paraphrased by the American colloquialism “Out of It.”
114 Henri Fouquier, an older conservative journalist (recently deceased), of so much distinction that he was considered a possible Academician, published about this time an article in the XIXe Siècle in which he ridiculed the blowing up of the house of the bourgeois as an act devoid of common sense, but declared comprehensible a desire to blow up the Chamber of Deputies, the Prefecture of Police, or the Palace of the President.
115 “I surely have the right,” he said, “to quit the theatre when the piece becomes odious to me, and even to slam the doors behind me in going out, at the risk of troubling the tranquillity of those who are satisfied.”
116 Author of Démolissons and De Mazas à Jérusalem.
117 On the occasion of this lecture Xavier Privas was assisted by an actor and an actress who recited appropriate poems and by the chansonnier Trimouillat. The hall was entirely without light except for a single lamp before the lecturer. In the accompanying illustration the standing figure is Trimouillat.
118 A translation of this play has been successfully produced in America (1904) under the title Business is Business.
119 La Cage is well known, nevertheless, since it is given several private representations every season.
120 Forbidden by the censorship, but a favourite at the amateur theatricals of the anarchistic groups.
121 Under the ban of the censorship from 1891 to 1900.
122 Forbidden by the censorship, but given a representation—by invitation—at which literary and artistic Paris was fully represented.
123 Prohibited by the censorship at the time it was written. The prohibition was removed in the winter of 1904.
124 No notice is taken here of Richepin as a writer of romances.
125 Technically, “d’avoir commis une provocation directe au crime de meurtre, laquelle provocation, non suivie d’effet, avait pour but un acte de propagande anarchiste.”
126 The court in detaching this violent passage from its philosophical and artistic setting made Tailhade’s offence appear much graver than it really was.
127 “What I have had especially in view has been to serve the cause of progress, of knowledge; that is to say, the Revolution,” wrote the editor of Le Décadent.
128 The minor French poets are so little known in England and America that it would be superfluous to mention by name the members of these bizarre coteries.
129 The Magiques, Romanistes, and Magnificistes are possible exceptions. But the Magiques possessed at one time such an unquiet spirit as Paul Adam, and the Magnificistes oppose the tyranny of science and magnify “les êtres.” The Romanistes, it is true, accept relatively regular poetic forms, but they attack the Christian church and admit the destruction of nationality. The union of the Latin peoples, which they advocate, they regard simply as an intermediate step preparatory to the union of the whole human race.
130 Meunier, who is primarily a sculptor, is a Belgian; but his artistic career has been sufficiently identified with Paris to warrant his introduction here.
131 Deceased.
132 See Chapter XVI.
133 Dagnan-Bouveret may have a religious purpose, but scarcely a humanitarian one.
134 The French word dessinateur is currently applied to illustrators, freehand draughtsmen, and lithographic sketch artists; in fact, to all workers in black and white, and even to certain workers in colour for purposes of reproduction. It is used above because there seems to be no single English word equally inclusive. No hard-and-fast distinction is made here between the dessinateurs who are primarily caricaturists and those who are not.
135 Willette, usually classed as a revolutionary socialist, is said by his intimates to have been a Bonapartist always at heart. However this may be, there is no necessary conflict between Bonapartism and the revolutionary ardour which Willette has displayed too often and too unequivocally to admit of any misunderstanding regarding his attitude towards the actual condition of things.
136 M. Bérenger, familiarly known as Père-la-Pudeur, is an uncompromising censor of public morals.
137 Steinlen is also a painter, but his works in this field, with the exception of certain fascinating studies of cats, are little known outside the circle of his friends, and are not equal to his drawings.
138 Recently deceased.
139 L’assiette au beurre = the plate of butter. To have an assiette au beurre is to belong to the wealthy; that is, to be able to eat butter on one’s bread (or as the French more often say) on one’s spinach.
140 The artistic merit of the Assiette au Beurre has sadly fallen off of late.
141 Even these have made important concessions, as did Verdi in Italy.
142 Produced at the Grand Opéra.
143 Béranger.
144 Compare the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel.