CHAPTER XII

THOSE WHO STARVE

“_Whoever throws himself into the streets of a great city, into the mêlée of rapacities and ambitions, with a pen for a weapon, takes_ ‘La Misère’ _for a flag._”—JEAN RICHEPIN, in Les Etapes d’un Réfractaire.

“_You have the stuff of three poets in you; but, before you become known, you run the risk of dying six times of hunger, if you count on the income from your poetry for the means to live._”

Etienne Lousteau to Lucien de Rubempré, in BALZAC’s Illusions Perdues.

“_Cressot died of want the day want forsook him. He died because his body, habituated to suffering, was not able to accept well-being._”

JULES VALLÈS.

Fifty odd years ago, in a volume of short stories,—little read in France nowadays, and quite unknown, I fancy, elsewhere,—_Le Roman de Toutes les Femmes_, Henry Mürger, author of the universally known and loved _La Vie de Bohème_, narrated, under the title “_La Biographie d’un Inconnu_,” the life history of a young sculptor who died of “the malady to which science does not dare to give its true name, _la misère_.”

Joseph D——, born in a provincial town of poor, hard-working, respectable parents, manifested a strong vocation for sculpture from his early boyhood. His father having decided to put him to the carpenter’s trade, Joseph, who had no notion of becoming a mechanic, went secretly to the Free School of Design. The professor of the school procured him a place as pupil with a government architect, which his father, under the impression that carpentry and architecture were very much the same thing, allowed him to accept. Joseph made such progress that he paid his way at the end of a month, and at the end of six months earned his seven or eight francs a day. But he was getting no nearer to sculpture by this work; and he left the architect’s office, in the face of his father’s opposition, and entered a sculptor’s atelier for study, paying a month in advance for his teaching. He took part in a competition for admission to the _Beaux-Arts_, and failed. Having no money with which to pay for lessons, he was forced to leave the atelier, but was received—about the only bit of good luck in his whole career—by the great master, Rude. He lodged at this time in the rue du Cherche-Midi, over a cow stable, where he was warmed only by what heat ascended through a hole in the floor.

Finding he could not pay for the models and materials necessary to enter the _Salon_ competitions, he assisted for a year, without entirely neglecting his studies, a noted ornament-worker, and put by enough to enable him to pursue his art studies to good advantage. Working by night in a cold workshop, he contracted a sickness which confined him to his bed for a time, and which swept away all his savings. As soon as he was well again, he went back to work for his first employer (the architect), designing ornaments whose execution was intrusted to others. He thus gained a little pile—about 1,200 francs—with which to compete for the _Salon_. It was stolen by a roof-worker who, while repairing an adjacent building, had seen him counting it.

This “mischance”—to go on in Mürger’s own language—“was a terrible blow to Joseph. ‘There are some people who have no luck,’ he said, ‘who would lose with all the trumps of the pack in their hands.’ ‘Never mind,’ he resumed, brightening, ‘I will attempt the assault of the Louvre[74] with what little I have left. I will enter there with plaster instead of bronze or marble.’”

All his courage had returned. He tried making fanciful statuettes, which he could prepare without the expense of hiring models; but he had little success in selling them.

“_La Misère_ returned, and knocked at his door. She entered, terrible and pitiless, like a vanquished foe whose turn has come to triumph, and who uses without mercy the right of reprisal. Joseph’s destitution reached such a point that, when one of his friends invited him to dinner, he answered naïvely, ‘I’m afraid it will put me out: it’s not my day.’ For tobacco he smoked walnut leaves, which he gathered in the forest of Verrières, then dried, and chopped up fine.

“His sole hope was the coming _Salon_. In a room without a fire,”—the odorous days of the calorific cow stable must have seemed a paradise in retrospect,—“in a Siberian temperature, he worked during three consecutive months on a Saint Antoine, for he had been forced to renounce his group of Galatea, the too costly execution of which he had deferred to better times. Clay, in spite of its moderate cost, was too dear for his empty purse, this same purse which had held almost a fortune; for, by a strange irony, the thief who had taken his money had left him his purse. He dug his clay himself, therefore, in some fields of the _banlieue_. A rag-picker of the rue Mouffetard whom he had met, I know not where, gave him sittings at five sous an hour; and three-quarters of the time the worthy man invented angelic ruses to avoid being paid.

“The date set for sending to the _Salon_ was near. It was time to think of taking the plaster cast of the statue. Michelli, Fontaine, and the other moulders who worked for the artists, when they saw Joseph’s destitution, were unwilling to venture credit. All he could obtain from one of them was the furnishing of the necessary plaster. Aided by several friends, Joseph took the cast of his statue himself. The operation lasted two days, and turned out well.

“It was the eve of the day on which the jury was to begin its sittings and on which the works to be passed upon must be at the Louvre, by midnight at the very latest. During the night it came on cold, and Joseph, to minimise the action of the frost upon his statue, the still damp plaster of which had not acquired the solidity which dryness gives, wrapped his only blanket about it, and piled up on it, as a cuirass of warmth against the darts of the cold, all his clothing, playing thus, towards Saint Antoine, the rôle of Saint Martin.

“The next forenoon two or three friends came to aid Joseph in transporting his statue to the Louvre. The wagon arrived four hours too late. Nor was this all. At this point, fatality intervened in the person of an absurd _concièrge_, who declared that he would let nothing leave Joseph’s room before the back rent was paid. The artists explained to the _concièrge_ that a statue was not a piece of furniture, and that the law did not permit him to hold it back. He would not listen to reason, and, stony in his stubbornness, demanded a written permit from the landlord. They hurried to Passy, where the landlord lived, and did not find him. He would not be in before dinner. They returned at the dinner hour. He had just gone out. It was already eight o’clock in the evening. They decided to apply to a justice of the peace. The justice turned them over to the commissary of police, who began by sustaining the _concièrge_, but who decided, on Joseph’s representations of the injury that would be done him if he were made to miss the _Salon_, to authorise the removal of the statue. It was then eleven o’clock. They had barely an hour to get to the Louvre. A dangerous coating of thin ice rendered the streets impracticable. Vehicles could only advance at a walk. The artists needed three hours at least, and they had only one. Furthermore, repairs which were being made on the sewers forced them to take the longest route. In crossing the Pont-Neuf, Joseph and his friends heard it strike the half-hour.

“‘It’s half-past eleven,’ said Joseph, who was sweating great drops in spite of the fact that the thermometer marked a north-pole temperature.

“‘It’s half-past twelve,’ volunteered a young man who detached himself from a band of painters who were returning with their pictures because they had arrived at the Louvre too late. They were making the best of it, and were singing gaily, ‘_Allons-nous-en, gens de la noce! etc._’

“Joseph and his friends retraced their steps.

“A little later Joseph exposed his Saint Antoine and a statuette of Marguerite at the _Exposition du Bazar Bonne Nouvelle_ (corresponding to the modern _Salon des Réfusés_), and sold the two to the Museum of Compiègne for 150 francs.

“This paltry sum enabled him to drag himself about some time,—a year almost. Then he entered the hospital through the intervention of an interne, for he had no characterised malady. He died there of exhaustion at the end of three months....

“Joseph D—— died at the age of twenty-three, without rancour or recrimination against the art that had killed him, as a brave soldier falls on the field of battle, saluting his flag.”

If I have reproduced here with much fulness this old story of Mürger’s, it is because Joseph D—— stands to the Bohemians of the _Quartier_ as a kind of saint, _Saint Joseph de la Dèche_,[75] patron of poor artists, and because the half-century during which civilisation is supposed to have been advancing with enormous strides has made no appreciable difference in the hardships of the needy artist or in the bravery with which he faces them. Parents are still too often dull-witted, narrow, and unsympathetic where their offspring are concerned. Rents are still hard to pay, and art materials and models, food, clothes, and fuel hard to be had just when they are most needed. Luck is as capricious, the _concièrge_ as officious, winter as brutal, warmth as coy, and death as chary of reprieves as ever. Joseph D—— is as strictly up to date as if he had been born in 1881 and died in 1904. One hesitates to depict the slow starvation of one’s acquaintances and friends, even under assumed names; and the fateful career of Mürger’s Joseph is so perfectly typical of the careers of the poor devils of artists in the _Quartier_ of the present period that there is no necessity of depicting it.

Quite as terrible, though far less romantic than the _misère_ of the Bohemian artist and littérateur, is the “_misère en habit noir_”—the nomenclature is Balzac’s—of the patientless doctor, the briefless barrister, and the unemployed or underpaid teacher and professor.

Your poet, your painter, or your sculptor, is, as a rule, a careless, jolly dog, who has something of the genuine vagabond or adventurer in him. He cannot tolerate anything that is cut and dried, not even prosperity; and he would be infinitely bored by life if its elements of uncertainty were quite eliminated. He prefers agreeable surprises to disagreeable surprises, of course; but he prefers disagreeable surprises to no surprises at all.

Dissimulation is not an indispensable part of his artistic baggage. He may flaunt and vaunt his poverty, swear at it or make game of it, and be none the less considered, at least in his _milieu_. He is excused from playing the dismal farce of keeping up appearances. He may live in an attic, clothe himself in tattered and seedy raiment, shirk the bath-tub, ignore the very existence of the laundress and the barber, be noisy and reckless, and defy all the canons of the social code without stultifying himself or dishonouring his calling. Best of all, his life is rarely a lonely one. He suffers, but he has the _camaraderie_ of suffering; and this enables him to laugh or shout his misery away.

On the other hand, your so-called professional man—your physician, for instance—must be more than decently lodged; be arrayed, at no matter what hour of the day,—such is the Old World convention,—in a faultless frock-coat and silk hat; be restrained, not to say dignified, in demeanour; assume to be busy when he is weary unto death with inaction,—and all this though hunger be consuming his very vitals.

He must button his suffering securely under his respectable black waistcoat, and wear his professional complacence when his heart is torn with sobs. If the reputable lodging or the reputable bearing fail him, even for a little, he is lost irrevocably.

Four years ago or thereabouts a young physician, one Dr. Laporte, was arraigned before a Paris court for criminal negligence in the practice of his profession. The court condemned him to prison, in spite of the testimony of an eminent specialist in his favour, but with the palliative of the _Loi Bérenger_.[76]

The condemnation was based on these facts: Summoned to an emergency case already compromised by lay treatment, and not possessing the surgical instrument which it called for, Dr. Laporte cast around for a makeshift tool. He used unsuccessfully the only thing in any way adapted to his purpose that he discovered in the patient’s house; and then, finding his efforts futile, and foreseeing the fatal issue, which was not slow to arrive, he withdrew, saying there was nothing more to be done.

The reasons for the attachment of clemency to the sentence were these: the evidence showed conclusively that he had had no patients for days and perhaps weeks; that he had no money to keep in proper repair the instruments he owned, to say nothing of buying the instrument in question; and that he had not eaten a morsel of food for a full day previous to the emergency visit, and was a prey to the giddiness of hunger at the moment he made his deplorable attempt.

“The police investigation,” said the presiding judge to the culprit while the trial was in progress, “shows you as nervous, excitable, unbalanced, passing quickly from a state of exaltation to a state of the most profound depression.” What wonder!

“_They are logical in their insane heroism, they utter neither cries nor plaints, they endure passively the obscure and rigorous destiny which they allot themselves. They die for the most part, decimated by the malady to which science does not dare to give its true name_, ‘la misère.’”

HENRY MÜRGER, Introduction to La Vie de Bohème.