CHAPTER XIII

THOSE WHO KILL THEMSELVES

“_This world’s been too many for me._”

Mr. Tulliver, in GEORGE ELIOT’S Mill on the Floss.

“_Et j’ai grand peur à tout moment De voir mourir d’épuisement L’ami d’enfance, Que pour moins de solennité J’appelle ici le Chat Botté, Mais qu’on nomme aussi l’espérance._”

ANDRÉ GILL.

“_Tu veux choisir ta mort; Va sache bien mourir sans crainte niaise: La lâcheté, c’est le travail sans pain, Le suicide lent des ruines et des fournaises. Ne tremble pas, sois fort, de ton dédain, Et fais grève à la vie, enfant sans pain!_”

FRANCIS VIELÉ-GRIFFIN.

“_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.

“_First came the silent gazers; next, A screen of glass we’re thankful for; Last, the sight’s self, the sermon’s text, The three men who did most abhor Their life in Paris yesterday, So killed themselves: and now, enthroned Each on his copper couch, they lay Fronting me, waiting to be owned. I thought, and think, their sin’s atoned._”

ROBERT BROWNING.

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 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:—

_Les gais amoureux et les amoureuses Ont depuis des ans, Mürger, déserté La mansarde étroite où leurs voix rieuses Narguaient le bon sens—et la pauvreté!_

_L’amour, aujourd’hui, s’est fait plus morose; Schaunard est rentier, Colline est bourgeois, Les lauriers coupés, et mortes les roses, Ils ont désappris les chemins du bois._

_Rodolphe et Mimi, Marcel et Musette, Dans leurs lits bien clos sont endormis; Mais, vivante encor, leur chanson coquette Eveille en nos vers des refrains amis;_

_Nos rèves, vois-tu, sont restés les mêmes: Roses du matin, rires du printemps, Châteaux en Espagne ou parcs en Bohème Irréels ou vrais,—comme de ton temps!_

_Nous marchons leur pas, nous aussi, sans trève. Vers quel but lointain? Nous n’en savons rien; Baste! Il faut toujours que route s’achève. Quand nous y serons, nous le verrons bien._

_Peu d’argent en poche, et point de bagages, Nul regret d’antan pour nous chagriner, Nous sommes parés pour les longs voyages, Libres: rien à perdre, et tout à gagner!_

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

_Mets dans mon sabot de Noël Le jeune espoir qui nous fait libre, Mets le désir profond de vivre Et la fleur qui fleurit au ciel._

_Mets le succès dans les efforts, Le travail sans souci ni doute, Et comme étoile sur ma route L’orgueil simple qui fait les forts._

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.