CHAPTER XVI

LITERARY AND ARTISTIC CABARETS OF MONTMARTRE

“_We sang when the English dismembered the kingdom, we sang during the civil war of the Armagnacs, during the ‘Ligue,’ during the Fronde, under the Régence; and it was to the sound of the_ chansons _of Rivarol that the monarchy disappeared at the end of the eighteenth century._”—DE JOUY.

“_The_ chanson _became history: it donned defiantly the Phrygian bonnet, and marched in the forefront.... Men went singing to the guillotine._” HENRI AVENEL.

“_It is certain that the_ chanson _is, like wine, a product of our soil, a flower of_ la patrie.”—JULES CLARETIE.

“And I send these words to Paris with my love, And I guess some chansonniers there will understand them.” WALT WHITMAN.

The Bohemians of the _Quartier Latin_ who do not starve, commit suicide, return to their parents to eat the fatted calf, become rich and famous or alcoholic and insane, have one other resource left them,—a resource beside which the proverbial jump out of the frying-pan into the fire is the quintessence of discretion,—namely, emigration to Montmartre.

Originally given over to windmills and plaster ovens, a suburb at the time of the Great Revolution (when it went for a while by the name of Mont-Marat), Montmartre did not become a part of Paris proper until 1859.

“I knew Montmartre,” says one of its ardent admirers, “thirty-five years ago. It was a quarter like another, less alive, in fact, than most others, except in the immediate vicinity of the balls, _le Grand Turc_, _la Boule Noire_, etc.

“All of a sudden the Haussmannising empire bound it to Paris by the Boulevard Magenta, and the picks of the workmen have had no respite since.”

The Eighteenth Arrondissement, which corresponds roughly with Montmartre, has nearly doubled in population since the Franco-Prussian war, and is now a city of more than 225,000 souls.

“Travellers tell us,” wrote Aurélien Scholl in 1898, “that in America cities spring up with incredible rapidity.... I know only two localities in France which have undergone a similar speedy transformation,—Royan[95] and Montmartre. It is not so very long ago that we saw from the boulevards looking up the rue Laffitte a verdant _butte_ with a few windmills whose arms enlivened the perspective. There were hovels and tiny, shabby-looking shops along the present boulevards (Clichy and Rochechouart).

“Montmartre is to-day one of the finest cities of France. It has three theatres, five or six _cafés-concerts_, a circus, restaurants, and _brasseries_.... _La cigale_ sings there all summer—and all winter.”

In the partial eyes of the loyal _Montmartrois_, Montmartre, “_Ville Libre_,” literary and artistic Bohemia _par excellence_, is as much the capital of Paris[96] as Paris is the capital of France. To them all the rest of Paris, the Latin Quarter included, is merely Montmartre’s back yard.

Montmartre, by reason of its surpassing view, has always been favoured as a place of residence by detached writers and artists; and, after the closing of the _Théâtre Bobino_ in the _Quartier Latin_, a perceptible literary and artistic current thitherward set in. But it was the exodus of the “_Hydropathes_” and “_Hirsutes_” of the _Quartier_ to the _Chat Noir_ that marked (marked rather than caused) the real beginning of Montmartre’s supremacy.

The _Cercle des Hydropathes_[97] owed its origin to one Charles Cros, who, tiring of being relegated to an inglorious obscurity while Coquelin _Cadet_ won laurels by the recitation of monologues, which he (Cros) had written, decided to recite his monologues himself.

The first formal meeting of the _Hydropathes_ was held on a Friday of October, 1878, in a small upper room of a Latin Quarter café, corner of the rue Cujas and the Boulevard St. Michel. There were five persons present. At the next meeting there were seventy-five, at the third one hundred, at the fourth one hundred and fifty, and so on, until, driven from café to café by the need of more room, they settled in a vacant store, with an average attendance of three hundred to three hundred and fifty twice a week.

Emile Goudeau presided,—as nearly, that is, as any one can be said to preside in a Latin Quarter assembly. There was liberty to drink, smoke, and woo the _grisette_. There were folly and tumult, confusion and fun; violin, piano, and guitar music; singing in concert of riotous roof-lifting refrains; recitations of novelties and the classics by Villain, Leloir, Le Bargy, and Coquelin _Cadet_ of the _Comédie Française_. Paul Mounet, also of the _Comédie_, arrayed in a blue blouse and red neckerchief, interpreted _La Grève des Forgerons_ week in and week out with telling effect. Maurice Rollinat sang his own songs and those of Pierre Dupont, and recited selections from his _Névroses_ and _Brandes_. Laurent Tailhade, Jean Moréas, Georges d’Esparbès, Louis Marsolleau, Jean Ajalbert, André Gill, Léon Valade, Charles Monselet, Paul Marrot, Edmond Haraucourt, Félicien Champsaur, Mac-Nab, Auguste Vacquerie, Louis Tiercelin, Alphonse Allais, Jules Jouy, and a full score more of poets and _chansonniers_ rendered their works. Bourget, Coppée, Paul Arène, Luigi Loir, and Bastien-Lepage were frequent, though for the most part passive, spectators. All degrees of talent, all shades of politics, and all of the poetic schools were represented. Bernhardt was proud to be known as a _Hydropathe_. Francisque Sarcey and Jules Claretie visited the _Hydropathes_, and praised them in the press. The police threatened to dissolve them, but wisely refrained.

The _Hirsutes_ differed from the _Hydropathes_ only in name and in the fact that the name had an obvious significance.

It was the _Grand’ Pinte_ (a Louis XIII. cabaret of Montmartre, frequented, but without mummery or fracas, by a band of painters and poets) that gave Rodolphe Salis, an _ex-Hydropathe_, the idea of putting the boisterous _Hydropathe_ performances into a picturesque setting and inviting the paying public to attend. Salis, who was the son of a prosperous man of affairs, was in Bohemia against his father’s wishes. Half-artist and half-littérateur, he supported himself, when the paternal purse-strings were tightened, by writing for the press and painting _Viae Dolorosae_ at fourteen francs apiece. In making himself “_gentilhomme-cabaretier_,” as he called it, this resourceful Salis had hit upon a device for reconciling theory with practice, filial submission with personal inclination, and Bohemia with business, which, to say the least, was not commonplace.

Salis’ _Chat Noir_, “_Cabaret Moyen-Age fondé en 1114 par un fumiste_,” was opened on the Boulevard de Rochechouart in December, 1881; and the first number of its literary organ of the same name, illustrated by Forain, Willette, Rochegrosse, Henri Pille, Rivière, and Steinlen, was published the month following. The cabaret’s bizarre frescos, contributed by the cleverest young artists of Paris, and its fantastic furnishings of curios and antiques, which Salis had zealously collected since his boyhood, have been described too many times to be dwelt upon here. Suffice it to say, the juxtaposition of the beautiful with the grotesque, the serious with the flippant, and the reverent with the blasphemous, was so ingenious and piquant that attempts to imitate it (for the most part unsuccessful) have been made all over the civilised world.

In this suggestive setting nearly the entire _personnel_ of the _Hydropathes_ and a number of poets and dramatists, not _Hydropathes_, who have since become celebrities, among them Georges Courtéline and Maurice Donnay, held witty carnival.

There was an even greater license of speech and act at the _Chat Noir_ than there had been among the _Hydropathes_. There were also more all-night revels, more startling antitheses of the lively and severe, and more practical joking. All this in spite of the fact (or, perhaps, because of it) that the performers, almost without exception, affected impassibility, maintaining a supernatural gravity while dispensing the most side-splitting productions.

Salis’ attempt to serve both God and Mammon resulted, as such attempts have usually resulted, advantageously for Mammon. Bohemia was reconciled to business by being completely swallowed up by business. Salis, the _gentilhomme-cabaretier_, waxed rich, and in waxing rich stooped to methods of holding and dealing with his galaxy that have made his memory the execration of the Butte. Nevertheless, Rodolphe Salis, all unworthy Bohemian as his good fortune revealed him to be, gave Paris, as impresario of the _Chat Noir_, a new manifestation of art and did more than any one man towards establishing that modern republic of arts and letters which is known as Montmartre.

The phenomenal success of the _Chat Noir_, whose fame from being Parisian became European, naturally led to the opening of establishments which copied one or more of its features. Montmartre was soon honeycombed with _cabarets artistiques et littéraires._

Steinlen, Willette, De Feure, Roedel, Redon, Toulouse-Lautrec, Truchet, Bellanger, Le Petit, Grün, and other artists of the Butte, especially the first three, were kept busy decorating; and the most popular monologists and _chansonniers_,—Dominique Bonnaud, Hugues Delorme, Jacques Ferny, Jules Jouy, E. Girault, Eugène Lemercier, Camille Marceau, Georges Millandy, Marcel Legay, Gaston Couté, Paul Delmet, Théodore Botrel, Léon Durôcher, Vincent Hyspa, Yann Nibor, Maurice Boukay, Charles Gallilée, Jehan Rictus, Octave Pradels, Victor Meusy, Camille Roy, Gabriel Montoya, Edmond Teulet, Paul Briand, Xavier Privas, Raoul Ponchon, Fragson, Lefèvre, Xanrof, Perducet, Dumestre, Montéhus, Ivanof, Chatillon, Fursy, Canqueteau, and Trimouillat,—most of whom had received a part of their training at the _Chat Noir_,—performed regularly in two or three places on the same evening.

_La Grand’ Pinte_ (joint inspirer with the _Hydropathes_ of the _Chat Noir_) became under the direction of another Salis—Gabriel—the _cabaret artistique et littéraire, L’Ane Rouge_. Its next-door neighbour, _Le Clou_, fitted itself out with a picturesque second-story supper-room and an eccentric _caveau_, in which tourneys of poetry were frequently given. _Le Café des Décadents_ (later _Café Duclerc_, where the singers wore nooses about their necks), with its “_Bruxellois Soupers_”; _Le Carillon_, with its “Assizes”; _Le Fraternistère_, with its “_Guignol Social_” and its “_chansons et recréations sociologiques_”; _Le Casino des Concièrges_, with its “_Soupers Panamistes_”; _La Fourrière_ (The Pound), _La Roulotte_ (The Gypsy Van), _Le Cabaret des Assassins_ (now _Le Lapin Agile_), _Le Cabaret des Pommes-de-terre Frites_, _La Purée_, _La Purée Sociale_, and the _Cabarets du Ciel, de l’Enfer_, and _du Néant_,—had each its little day of notoriety; and the last three, though by all odds the flattest of the lot, are still run for the benefit of country visitors.

_Le Conservatoire_ (whose specialty is the _Théâtre d’Ombres Chinoises_—shadow pantomime—with which the subtle artist Henri Rivière helped build up the vogue of Salis), _Le Cabaret des Quat’z’ Arts_, _Le Cabaret des Arts_, _La Veine_, and _La Lune Rousse_ are the five closest existing counterparts of the _Chat Noir_. Their decorations are highly effective, and they employ most of the _Chat Noir_ celebrities who have not, like Salis, passed over to the great majority.[98] But their performances, while of high average merit, are totally lacking in the elements of spontaneity and unexpectedness, which constituted the rare and peculiar charm of the programmes of the _Chat Noir_ in its early and unspoiled days; and their prices, which have increased in direct proportion as intrinsic interest has decreased, are prohibitive for most of the real Bohemians of Montmartre. The truth is, these cabarets have long ceased to attract the _Montmartrois_, and are kept up as mere show places for provincial and foreign tourists. It is only in their front rooms, where prices are normal and no performances worth mentioning are given—at the hour of the _apéritif_, that one may find any number of truly representative _Montmartrois_.

At _La Boîte à Fursy_ (in the building to which the _Chat Noir_ repaired when the complaints of its neighbours and the need of more room forced it to quit its original home on the Boulevard de Rochechouart) and _Le Tréteau de Tabarin_ (also under the management of Fursy) the prices are still more prohibitive, so far as Bohemia is concerned, and the audiences, by just so much the more, unrepresentative.

All these places have been practically abandoned by their former patrons, and by the unprofessional singing, rhyming, reciting Bohemians in general, for tiny, obscure cafés or wine-shops,[99] whose tininess and obscurity are defences against sight-seeing invasion, and for private ateliers, from which the uninvited may be readily ejected. Those who, depressed by the professionalism, mercenary spirit, and monotony of the best-known cabarets, declare that the spirit of Bohemianism has abandoned the Butte, do not take into account these multitudinous Bohemian conclaves, of which they are, in all probability, totally ignorant.

One group, to which for two years the writer was privileged to belong, included fifty members, whose ages ranged from twenty to seventy and whose reputations ranged from zero to boulevard celebrity. It dined every Tuesday evening at a really cheap and really Bohemian restaurant of the rue de la Rochefoucauld, adjourned after dinner to the atelier of a musician in the rue Bréda for literary and musical exercises mingled with horse-play, and readjourned at midnight to the supper-room of an adjacent café for unadulterated horse-play, without the slightest literary or musical pretence.

In France the _chanson_ is second only to the press (if, indeed, it really be second to anything) as a moulder of public opinion. It instructs less than the press, perhaps, but it excites more.

“The _chanson_, like the bayonet,” says Jules Claretie, “is a French weapon.... We are afraid of the _chanson_. It is a dishevelled personage who tells the truth. We exile it, we pursue it. M. Javert pursued not otherwise Fantine.... We are afraid of it because it is necessarily, fatally, of the opposition. It has no reason for existence, if it is not factious.... From the _Mazarinades_ to the amusing _Chansons Rosses_ of Fursy, the _chanson_ has administered fillips to the powers. It is its lot. I add, it is its right.... _Vive la chanson_! even the cruel _chanson_, when it is a sort of Daumier!”

Only a small percentage of the songs heard in the _cabarets artistiques et littéraires_ of Montmartre are frankly revolutionary or even “of the opposition,” in the narrow partisan sense of that phrase; but they nearly all “tell the truth to people,” they are nearly all satirical and captious to the last degree—“of the opposition,” that is, in the broader sense of the phrase. They assail all the existing institutions,—army, state, church, property, and marriage,—not with the direct invective which would put them at the censorship’s mercy, but with the ridicule which in Paris, as in perhaps no other spot on the globe, is more potent than invective, and before which the censorship, though it turn pale and tear its hair with rage, is powerless.

Jules Jouy,[100] one of the bright particular stars of the _Chat Noir_ and of several of its successors and imitators, was at once a veritable Gavroche for saucy wit and a fervent pleader for the poor. He was a regular contributor to several socialistic sheets; and his _Chansons de Bataille_—_La Terre_, _Les Enfants et les Mères_, _La Veuve_, _Fille d’Ouvrier_, _Les Inconnus_, _La Grève Noire_, _Pâle Travailleur_, _Victimes du Travail_, _Le Sang des Martyrs_, _La Carmagnole des Meurts-de-Faim_, etc.—are superb examples of the chanson of social revolt and reclamation.

The manager of the _Casino des Concièrges_, _Le Cabaret des Pommes-de-terre Frites_, and _La Purée Sociale_, was an ancient revolutionist, Maxime Lisbonne, who had distinguished himself on a barricade of the Place du Panthéon during the Commune.

In the supper-rooms of the _Clou_ the anarchist poet Paul Paillette was wont to recite his anarchist poems, and the _Clou_ is still a favourite meeting-place for revolutionary groups.

At the _Quat’z’ Arts_ Marcel Legay varies his répertoire of sentimental and patriotic ballads with the stirring revolutionary _chansons_ of Maurice Boukay and J. B. Clément; Gaston Couté recites his subversive “_Les Conscrits_” and “_Le Christ en Bois_”; Eugène Lemercier with genial malice, Gaston Sécot with waggery, and Yon Lug with Chinese imperturbability ridicule officialism in its every phase; Xavier Privas (Prince of _Chansonniers_ by formal election), in his highly individual and snappy fashion, renders—between two idyls—his fine socialistic song _Les Résignés_ or exalts poverty with his _Noël_ or _Testament de Pierrot_; and Jehan Rictus intones his heart-breaking _Soliloques du Pauvre_.

The _Quat’z’ Arts_ has also had courses of Sunday afternoon lectures on the _chanson_ by the socialist deputies Clovis Hugues and Maurice Boukay.

The _Boîte à Fursy_, though catering palpably to the snobs, is shut up nearly every season by an irate censorship, and this more often for reasons of politics than from any consideration of public morality.

“I have been allowed this merit, and it is the sole one I claim,” says Fursy, in the introduction to his _Chansons Rosses_, “of never letting pass, or rarely letting pass, a salient happening without singing it immediately, and attempting to draw from it, in a refrain, the morality—or immorality—which the worthy man called _Monsieur Tout-le-Monde_ assigns it in his talk. I do my utmost not to lose time, and to serve actuality piping hot. I am really satisfied only when I manage to sing, in the evening, couplets inspired by that morning’s event; and I have had the luck almost always to succeed.”

Even the _Cabarets du Ciel_, _de l’Enfer_, and _du Néant_—which, being mainly dependent for their effects upon machinery, hardly belong at all in the class of _cafés artistiques et littéraires_—have, lurking under all their vulgar clap-trap, no small fund of pungent satire on religion and the church.[101]

Finally, there are at Montmartre a round half-dozen resorts, _cabarets de la chanson d’argot_ (also called _cabarets brutaux_), of which Bruant’s _Mirliton_, Alexandre’s _Cabaret Bruyant_, and “Buffalo’s” _l’Alouette_ are the most conspicuous examples. They have had their day so far as spontaneity is concerned, like the _cabarets artistiques et littéraires_, though, like them, they still attract foreigners and provincials.

Mercenary and meretricious now to the last degree, however genuine they may have been in the beginning, they still have this much, at least, of sincerity,—namely, cordial detestation of the bourgeois; and it is to this very spirit, strangely enough, that their vogue with the bourgeois has been due.

It was of one of these _cabarets brutaux_ (Bruant’s _Mirliton_, probably) that Zola wrote in _Paris_: “Pleasure-seeking Paris, the _Bourgeoisie_, mistress of money and of power, sickened by their possessions in time, but unwilling to let anything go, flocked thither—to receive insults and obscenities full in the face.... Far more than in the words, the burning insult was in the manner with which the singer cast the words in the teeth of the rich, of the favoured, of the fine ladies who elbowed each other to hear him. Under the low ceiling, amid the smoke of pipes, in the blinding heat of the gas, he launched his verses brutally like _crachats_, a very hail-squall of furious contempt.”

Bruant himself rarely appears nowadays at his _Mirliton_, which, with the aid of under-studies, he, nevertheless, keeps up. Loaded with notoriety and wealth, he has come to prefer following the hounds or emptying a bottle of good wine, as the Châtelain of Courthenay, to entertaining the bourgeois by affronting them.

Not long back Bruant was an unsuccessful candidate for deputy at Belleville, which adjoins Montmartre. His address to his electors—with which it is customary for candidates to placard the walls of their districts—was in rhyme. The verses, though not of his best, are novel enough to demand quotation:—

AUX ELECTEURS

_de la première conscription du vingtième arrondissement Belleville-Saint-Fargeau_

PROGRAMME

I

_Si j’étais votre député, Ohé! Ohé! qu’on se le dise, J’ajouterais “Humanité” Aux trois mots de votre devise ... Au lieu de parler tous les jours Pour la République ou l’Empire Et de faire de longs discours Pour ne rien dire._

II

_Je parlerais des petits fieux, ... Des filles-mères, des pauvres vieux Qui l’hiver gèlent par la ville.... Ils auraient chaud comme en été, Si j’étais nommé député A Belleville._

III

_Je parlerais des tristes gueux, Des purotins batteurs de dèche, Des ventres plats, des ventres creux, Et je parlerais d’une crèche Pour les pauvres filles sans lit, Que l’on repousse et qu’on renvoie Dans la rue! ... avec leur petit!... Mères de joie!_

IV

_Je parlerais de leurs mignons, De ces minables chérubins Dont les pauvres petits fignons Ne connaissent pas l’eau des bains,— Chérubins dont l’âme et le sang Se pourrissent à l’air des bouges Et qu’on voit passer, le teint blanc Et les yeux rouges._

V

_Je parlerais des vieux perclus Qui voudraient travailler encore, Mais dont l’atelier ne veut plus, ... Et qui traînent jusqu’à l’aurore Sur le dur pavé de Paris, Leur refuge, leurs Invalides, Errants, chassés, honteux, meurtris, Les boyaux vides._

VI

_Je parlerais des petits fieux, ... Des filles-mères, des pauvres vieux, Qui l’hiver gèlent par la ville.... Ils auraient chaud comme en été Si j’étais nommé député A Belleville._

Bruant’s _Mirliton_, thanks to the forceful talent of its founder, its lugubrious but artistic furnishings, and its cavalier treatment of its patrons, is the most famous, the most picturesque, and the most startling of the _cabarets brutaux_.

Alexandre owes such success as he has had at the _Cabaret Bruyant_ less to his talent as a writer and singer of _chansons_, which is not great, than to his having sung in the streets with Mme. Eugénie Buffet for the benefit of the poor[102] (his cabaret is also known as _Le Cabaret du Chanteur des Cours_) and to his having been haled into court by Bruant for plagiarising his costume. The court decided in this _cause célèbre_ (Bruant _vs._ Alexandre) that the top-boots, velvet jacket, scarlet scarf, and mountaineer’s felt which Bruant wore professionally were his trade-mark, so to speak, and that the professional costume adopted by Alexandre—which, without being an exact copy, was as close a copy as the word “Bruyant,” for example, is of Bruant—constituted a palpable infringement. And it granted Bruant an injunction restraining Alexandre from appearing therein. The judgment was reaffirmed upon appeal.

In his first burst of rage over the result, Alexandre threatened to sing without any costume whatsoever; but he thought better of that. What he did do was to defy the court. Swearing there was not force enough in France to undress him, he persisted in wearing the prohibited garb.

These strained relations with the law of the land made a hero of Alexandre, in a small way. He became thus a sort of Jules Guérin, and his cabaret a sort of Fort Chabrol. He elucidated the situation to his audiences nightly in a speech that ran somewhat like this:—

“What do you say to a republic where you can’t wear, so that they be decent, any clothes you like? This business has cost me more than ten thousand francs already. Every day—and it’s seventeen months now it’s been going on—the sheriff appears. ‘Still in the costume, Alexandre?’ And that means twenty francs! Twenty francs a day—to say nothing of the costs—counts up. Well, what of it? Let the bill swell! Let them come as often as they please! It’s their right! But I keep on wearing the clothes all the same.

“Not that I don’t recognise in Bruant, for all the harm he’s trying to do me, my _cher maître_. What should I be without him? Nothing at all. Oh, yes, I’m ready enough to admit that. I am no ingrate. For the man who is ruining me, I have something _there_, at the heart, which abides, and which nothing can take away.

“When I began to wear the costume, Aristide didn’t object. Not he. He thought me beneath his notice, I suppose. But, when he sees I am succeeding, then he brings me up in court.

“The truth of it is, he dreads my competition. I frighten him. My glory throws him in the shade. He says to Alexandre, ‘Get out of my light!’

“The Law has smitten me in the name of Bruant: the Law does not know me. Since I have sung, I have gleaned upon the public places, in the streets, twenty-two thousand francs for the poor; and I am ordered to strip off my trousers. There’s justice for you!

“Now on with the music! Twenty francs to pay every time I dare to don the forbidden costume, the costume Bruant. It’s cheap at twenty francs. I don the costume, and I pay.”

The law is effective, it would seem, in preventing Alexandre from appearing publicly in the costume outside of his own cabaret.

Out of the medley of monologists and _chansonniers_ (largely, of course, made up of mediocrities) who practise their professions in the cabarets of Montmartre, several of genuine poetical talent have emerged; and, of these, at least three are characterised by a thoroughly lawless or revolutionary spirit. These three are: Aristide Bruant, who exhibits a reality, a virility, a brutality, a grim humour, a picturesqueness of epithet, a boldness of imagery, and a tragic quality in caricature which make him (in a narrow field) a sort of French Kipling, with an honest devil-may-care quality by the side of which Kipling’s bravado seems fustian; Jehan Rictus, less facile, less humorous, and less insolent than Bruant, but his equal in realism and his superior in sentiment; and Maurice Boukay (retired, and now a deputy), who lacks the grip on reality of Bruant and Rictus, but who atones partially for this lack by a wealth of stirring appeal.

Boukay’s point of view is that of the _lettré_, the social philosopher, the reformer, the enlightened friend of the poor. His words are words of faith, trumpet-calls from the heights instead of gibes or moans from the depths. They ring true of reasoned and righteous revolt. His _Chansons Rouges_ are neither narrative nor descriptive; not _chansons vécues_,—that is, _chansons_ based on his own experience,—but symbolic poems,—symbolic in both language and thought, what he himself might call “_chansons d’humanité multiple et objective_.”

“They were all written,” says M. Boukay in his introduction, “in a complete independence of spirit, at a time when, not yet having entered political life, I listened to the great voice of the people, and endeavoured to seize its hidden meaning.... My master Verlaine said: ‘The _chanson_ of love is blue. The _chanson_ of dreams is white. The _chanson_ of sadness is grey.’ The _chanson sociale_ is red.... It is the colour of the glass of wine that your good heart offers the vagrant to comfort him on the high road of life. It is the colour of the rising sun towards which your ardent, hopeful eyes yearn. It is the most intense hue of the tricolor flag, which lies close to the heart of all the miseries, which waves in the wind of all the liberties.

“‘Stop there!’ exclaims some timorous spirit. ‘Do you not fear, singer of fraternity, to deepen the regrets and inflame the anguish of the people under pretext of describing them?’

“But, my good critic, will voicing the plaint of him who travails and suffers, always, then, be to wound the sanctimonious egoisms of him who digests and does nothing else? Would you resemble the iniquitous rich man,—tolerate the stretching forth of the hand, silent and ashamed, to beg, and forbid the quivering lips to groan? If you do not hear the groan, how can you console it? If you do not see the sore of poverty stripped of all its bandages, how will you know how to cure it?... Be brave and be just, good critic! Open thine eyes! Open thy heart!... The love of woman has for its necessary complement the love of humanity. Is this your belief? If yes, you will sing these _Chansons Rouges_. If no, you will let the people sing them. In any case, you will understand.”

The titles of the _Chansons Rouges_ bear out the promise of this foreword: _Le Soleil Rouge_, _Le Coq Rouge_, _Le Noël Rouge_, _L’Etoile Rouge_, _La Cité_, _La Chanson du Pauvre Chanteur_, _Fille et Souteneur_, _La Chanson de Nature_, _Le Mot Passé_, _La Dernière Bastille_, _La Madeleine_, _La Femme Libre_, _Les Rafles_, _La Chanson de Misère_; and the songs bear out the promise of their titles.

Note the thrilling refrain of _Le Soleil Rouge_,—

“_Compagnon, le vieux monde bouge: Marchons droit, la main dans la main! Compagnon, le grand soleil rouge Brillera, brillera demain_,”—

and the poignant, threatening _Chanson de Misère_:—

LA CHANSON DE MISÈRE

I

_J’ai chanté l’amour à vingt ans, Et j’ai perdu l’une après l’une, Blonde ou brune, au clair de la lune, Mes illusions et mon temps. Mon cœur oubliait la Misère, Lire lon laire, Pourtant la Misère était là, Lire lon la!_

II

_C’était un matin de rancœur, Que de ma tristesse accrue, Je butai du pied, dans la rue, Un pavé rouge comme un cœur. C’était le cœur de la Misère, Lire lon laire, Entre deux pavés planté là, Lire lon la!_

III

_Le pavé, se dressant vers moi: “Combien j’ai vu de barricades, Combien j’ai reçu d’estocades De par la lettre de la loi!” Passant, prends garde à la Misère, Lire lon laire. Son cœur n’est pas mort. Halte là! Lire lon la!_

IV

_Je saigne à chaque iniquité, Je suis le pavé de souffrance, Je suis rouge du sang de France Répandu pour l’humanité. Fleur de pavé, fleur de Misère, Lire lon laire, L’héroisme a passé par là, Lire lon la!_

V

_Egoïsme, arrière! Je veux Te marquer de ma chanson rouge. L’espoir grandit. Le pavé bouge. Debout, clairon! Sonne les vœux! C’est la chanson de la Misère, Lire lon laire. La Justice viendra par la Lire lon la!_

There is not a character of the Paris underworld nor a phase of its life about which Bruant has not cast the glamour of his suggestive _argot_: beggars and vagabonds; semi-vagabond acrobats, rag-pickers, and sandwich-men; thieves, thugs, _maquereaux_,[103] and murderers; foundlings and the lowest grades of prostitutes, a veritable Maxim Gorky galaxy; starving, shivering, loafing, sinning, and suffering men and women; attractive sloth, picturesque horror, piquant degradation and savoury crime,—all in a lurid setting of teeming faubourg streets, public balls, all-night restaurants, bagnios, prisons, and the guillotine!

“_Le Philosophe_,” the opening poem of Bruant’s published volume, _Dans la Rue_,—

“_T’es dans la rue, va t’es chez toi,_”—

the songs of the different faubourgs,—_A Batignolles_, _A la Villette_, _A Montpernasse_, _A Belleville_, _A Ménilmontant_, _A Montrouge_, _A la Glacière_, etc.,—_Le Guillotine_, _A la Roquette_, _Le Rond des Marmites_, _A Mazas_, _Casseur de Gueules_, _Le Grelotteux_, _Marcheuses_, _Les Quat’ Pattes_, and _Pus de Patrons_ are absolutely convincing as literature and as studies of society, and, to be appreciated, have no need of their author’s dramatic delivery. His most widely known _chanson_, _A St. Lazare_, is one of the poems of a generation; and his _A Biribi_[104] has probably done more to rouse the common people against the army than all the anti-militarist meetings of the socialists and anarchists combined. But propriety, alas! forbids their presence—and the presence of most of the best of Bruant’s work in this volume.

The monologues of Jehan Rictus (_Soliloques du Pauvre_, _Doléances_, and _Cantilènes du Malheur_) are conspicuous among the poems of poverty for their absolute and abject despair. Jehan Rictus is a man who has done many kinds of hard manual labour, if report speaks true, and who knows the wretchedness of extreme penury by long and cruel experience. “A strange and highly typical figure; a pale, emaciated head we seem to have seen somewhere before. Where?—in church paintings, perhaps; sad, lean, narrow-chested, tall, ‘long as a tear,’ and an expression so weary! He does not essay a gesture. He has only his voice, the anguish of his face, and the feverish gleam of his eyes with which to move us. His hands, held always behind him, twitch ineffectually as if trying to burst invisible bonds.”

In portraying the physical discomforts of poverty, the racking coughs, raging thirsts, aching bones, the nights without shelter or sleep, the days without food, the tears that scald and the tearlessness that deadens, Jehan Rictus has only done what has been done a score of times in prose and verse. Surely, an empty heart keeps close company, more often than not, with an empty stomach, and it is in portraying vividly the mental and spiritual aspects of poverty that his work is fresh and unique. The humiliation of poverty’s uniform,—unkempt hair, missing shirt, drafty shoes, outlandish and threadbare garments,—of the pavement bed, of the paroxysms of hunger attributed to intoxication, of the unsuccessful search for work, of debarment from places of public resort, of silent submission to insult and gibe; the disgust with filth, vermin, vulgar noise, endless monotony, enforced celibacy, patronising pity, petty deceits improvised to hide destitution, and hilarity improvised to keep back tears; the hatred of those who practise injustice and hypocrisy; the scorn of those who bestow and those who accept charity; the incipient madness of starvation, at once impelling to a shedding of the blood of the guilty and raising a horrid dread of confounding the innocent with the guilty; the regret for loss of respectability, courage, ambition, energy, talent, faith; the oppressive lonesomeness; the yearning for fresh distractions, innocent joys, cleanly living, for kindly words, sympathetic hand-clasps, kisses, caresses, companionship, friendship, love, precious responsibility; the stolid indifference to death,—all these, the underlying sentiments of poverty, have never before been given in poetry, at least not without the blight of palpable literary effort or factitious emotionalism.

Equally unique and equally powerful with the exhibition of the multiform woes of the destitute is the poet’s satirical exposure of the inconsistencies, insincerities, vanities, and refined cruelties of the various sorts of people who exploit the destitute. With an ironical pretence of rendering deserved homage to poverty, he elaborates the important part it plays in the social scheme. Thanks to it, the employees of the _Assistance Publique_ are able to maintain their families in comfort; magistrates to attain a rotund and tranquil old age; economists (deferring to it as a dignified entity) to win professional chairs and academic honours; politicians to get the public ear; socialistic and anarchistic bawlers to finish out their careers as dawdling, alcoholic deputies; poets, painters, and novelists to swim in glory and good wine, and found luxurious establishments for their offspring.

The arrival of winter, which clots the blood of one class, stimulates the circulation of all the others. Then reputable benevolence drums a réveille on hollow stomachs; burial companies wax radiantly bustling; salons, languishing for want of something to talk about, revive promptly; the tourist in the Midi and the bourgeois, smug and snug by his fireside, daily commiserate suffering—after dinner—in a manner both magnificent and ample; society gambols at charity fêtes and balls; the press “rediscovers distress”; journalists sob, weep, and implore—at three sous a line. In a word, pitying the unfortunate is a profession like another; and, if the day should ever arrive when there were no more poor in the world, “many people”—to render idiom for idiom—“would be badly in the soup.” Such satire stings and routs by virtue of the moral force behind it: it is the whip of small cords plied by the man with a soul.

Satire broadens to rollicking humour in depicting the abject terror of a conscience-stricken bourgeois shopkeeper before the embarrassing spectre of a hungry man:—

“_Avez-vous vu ce misérable? Cet individu équivoque? Ce pouilleux, ce voleur en loques, Qui nous r’gardait manger à table? Ma parole! on n’est pus (plus) chez soi, On ne peut pus digérer tranquille— Nous payons l’impôt, gn’a (il y en a) des lois! Qu’est-ce qu’y (ils) font donc, les sergents d’ ville?_”

I laughed almost to tears when I came upon this picture, because I knew that same bourgeois shopkeeper—in Boston—during the historic famine winter of 1893-94, when a great press formed a syndicate for the dissemination of lies, when the authority of a great state was appealed to, and a great governor received congratulatory despatches from the confines of a great country for prompt and decisive action in a great emergency, and all because a few half-starved devils took a notion to show themselves without washing their hands and faces or changing their clothes.

But to return to France. Jehan Rictus loves the white apparitions of the “first communicants,” loves sunshine, lilacs, and watercress, birds and little children. Mrs. Browning’s memorable “Cry of the Children” is feeble and conventional by the side of his “_Farandole des Pauv’s ‘tits Fan-Fans_.” Charles Lamb was not sweeter, tenderer, daintier, in his tear-compelling reverie, “Dream Children,” than Rictus in dealing with his dream loves,—his “cemetery of innocents” he calls them, his “poor little heap of dead.”

“_Et la vie les a massacrés, Mes mains les ont ensevelis, Mes yeux les ont beaucoup pleurés._”

His “_Espoir_,” in which he dreams of a sweetheart, is a veritable Eugène Carrière in verse.

Another poem containing much of the same sad, tender beauty, strangely commingled with piquant malice, mischievous _esprit_, broad humour, and bitter satire; a poem which, in spite of startling liberties of vocabulary, rhythm, and rhyme, is said to have brought honest tears to the eyes of the impeccable De Hérédia, is “_Le Revenant_.” The “_Revenant_” is Jesus Christ. The appearance of Christ in nineteenth-century Paris is a much-worn _motif_ in French literature and painting; but the slum poet’s handling of it is so new, bold, and strong that it seems to be altogether fresh.

“_Le Revenant_” is in three parts.