XIX
Between the Boulevard exterieur, "Boulevard des Crimes" as the popular voice has named it, and the Buttes Montmartre, stretches a quarter of Paris which is behind the Rue Ravestein in remoteness from the world, but far surpasses it in wretchedness. No mournful redeemer here stretches out his crucified arms to mankind, as if he would say: "I would have warmed you all in my bosom, but you have nailed my hands fast!"
No colored church windows glimmer changefully here, amidst misery and depravity. The old Montmartre church is broken up,--they are building on the new one!
In a temporary wooden tower on the Buttes Montmartre, hangs a shrill bell that sounds like the bell of a railroad or a factory, and at certain hours of the day, it tinkles a little despairing Catholicism down into the empty republican clatter below.
One junk shop crowds another here, and wooden booths full of second-hand rubbish and guarded mostly by poodle dogs stand in the wind.
One thing is especially noticeable in the Faubourg Montmartre. Every article one buys there is handed to him wrapped in old drawings, old manuscripts, or old copied music. On everything lies the mould and dust of defunct artist existences, and the debris of fallen air castles. The countless miserable lodgings swarm with young artists who never will accomplish anything, with old ones who never have accomplished anything. Against a background of impudent vice and grumbling poverty are drawn the relaxed figures of enthusiasts weary into death.
In his "petits poems en prose," Bandelaire described three people sinking from fatigue, yet without revolting against their burdens, carrying on their backs three enormous, grinning chimeras, whose claws are fastened in their patient shoulders. Every artist in the Faubourg Montmartre bears his chimera. His burden holds him upright; when that disappears he disappears with it. Whole troops of pretentious non-geniuses are to be met there, but also here and there among these eccentric jack fools, a really great, although long ruined artist nature making its last attempt to live and writing its name with trembling hand in the dust. There they dream, and peer across to the Boulevard, the high road of fortune, listening and waiting, with the vigor-and reason-devouring hope of the gambler.
* * * * *
One morning a man climbed up to the humblest lodging of Rue de Steinkerque in the Faubourg Montmartre; Gesa von Zuylen. He had come to Paris partly to escape from the Rue Ravestein, and partly because Paris is supposed to be the California of artists.
A tenor, whom he met on the railroad gave him the address of this lodging; he said it was a place where a man could work.
And Gesa wanted to work! He had a thousand francs in his pocket, the price of an Amati, once presented him by a distinguished patron. The violin was thrown away at a thousand francs. But what of that? He needed money and would have sold the blood from his veins to compass this sojourn in Paris.
He still heard the thundering tribute of applause paid to his work, and saw de Sterny's complacent bows. His clenched nails dug into the palms, but he forced himself back to calmness. He would work, he must work, that he might tear away his stolen royal mantle from the shoulders of the traitor! Surely for every genuine talent the hour of triumph strikes at least once in a life time, and he, he was no man of talent, he was a genius! How freely he breathed after that first day after his arrival in Paris. His new acquaintance, the tenor, had asked him "if he would like to take a walk to the real Boulevard." He meant the Boulevard between the New Opera House and the Madeleine. But Gesa shrank from the bustle and confusion--and while the tenor, with the haste of a newly-arrived provincial hurried off into the heart of Paris, Gesa crept slowly up the hill of Montmartre. There was a shabby public garden on the top, with newly set forlorn vegetation, a slippery flight of wooden steps led up to it. Lean, badly nurtured children, not in the least resembling the elves in the Champs Elysées and the Park Monceau, tumbled about in the crowded walks. Behind the garden was some waste land where grass covered with chalky dust stretches up to the doors of some miserable little huts. Paris seemed far away.
He seated himself on a bench. Shrill children's voices, in whose strident tones could already be heard the curse of the factory hand, and the coarse laugh of the paissarde surrounded him. He was deadly tired. In other times he had not even noticed the little journey from Brussels to Paris. His head sank on his breast. He dreamed that he was walking under the sleepy rustling trees of the park in Brussels, Annette Delileo was on his arm. The blue sky mirrored itself in an enormous pool, whereon some red poppy leaves were floating, and he told Annette how that "he was a genius, and was going to do something great."
He felt the tender nestling of her warm young form against him. Suddenly he started up. Little cold fingers touched his, a small girl in a white cap and large blue apron stood beside him, and said--"Monsieur, they are closing the garden."
The Angelus was tinkling through the air as Gesa descended. Damp odors pervaded the slippery hill; great ragged streaks of fog settled slowly down on the wretchedness of Montmartre.
* * * * *
Once more in his apartment, Gesa made a light, and looked around him, shivering a little at the comfortless room. In the grey marble chimney-place, stood an iron stove. The orange and blue flowers of the carpet had long taken on a uniform covering of dirt. Two offensive terra-cotta images stood on the mantelpiece. The tenor who was well acquainted in the Rue Steinkerque, and had mounted to the lodging with Gesa before, had explained that these were the work of a certain Vaudreuil, a second Michael Angelo, whose genius was broken in pieces against the hard stupidity of the public.
"Genius!" How the misuse of the word angered him! "Genius! The man has no trace even of talent," Gesa had cried, looking at the disgusting figures.
"Si! Si!" rejoined the tenor. "He spent all his means in trying to convert the world to 'high art,' chiseled and ecce homo--but what will you have? Marble is dear--he grew melancholy, took to drink--and then--il a fini par faire cela."
Whereat Gesa asked shuddering, "What became of him, did he kill himself?"
"No, but he works no longer--his daughter supports him, vous savez! Les filles d'artistes! cela a quelquechose dans le sang. At one time he cursed her and turned her out of doors. But he does not remember that any more, he doesn't remember anything any more. So long as he has his warm room, his game of billiards and his glass of absynthe, he is contented. He lives in the Hotel de Nancy, here on the corner. You can make his acquaintance to-morrow if you like. The young artists treat him sometimes, to hear him spout about art,--it is very funny!"
The Michael Angelo of the Hotel de Nancy was the first thing that occurred to Gesa when he returned to his miserable room. His look sought the two terra-cotta statuettes. He examined them with a morbid curiosity. He took one of them and held it close to his dimly burning lamp in order to see it more distinctly. His artist eye recognized in the figure the traces of very great powers gone astray.
A terrible sob unmanned him, the figure shook in his trembling hand. He let it fall and it broke into a thousand pieces. But they did not charge it in his weekly reckoning. It had no value for any one.
* * * * *
He drank no longer. A nameless dread clutched his heart; red clouds floated before his vision, a fearful lassitude enervated him--but he drank no more and he worked.
And at first it seemed as if the completion of his opera would be accomplished with perfect ease. He covered piles of music paper with great celerity, and when his power of invention suddenly ceased it did not frighten him, for he remembered that, even in his best days, the inspiration had suffered such moments. He proposed while waiting for a fresh impulse, to polish that which was already written; but when he came to examine it, it was a chaos, which even he himself could not understand. Whole bars were wanting, the accompaniment was perfectly incoherent. Here and there certainly, were places of striking beauty, quite isolated however, like splendid ruins in heaps of rubbish.
Another thing disquieted him. Many of the technical signs of orchestration had escaped him, he could no longer write a regular score. He spent the whole night in looking over a work on composition. Next morning he began his work anew.
To carry out with perfect clearness one miserable little phrase caused him the most painful effort. The faculty of concentration seemed lost to him. But he shirked no pains, no fatigue--"Patience! Patience! It will all come!" he said to himself, and at the same time his tears fell on the paper.
He imposed the most fearful privations upon himself in order to eke out his means to the farthest possible extent. He moved from the orange-yellow room to an attic--he ate once a day.
He grew grey, his hands trembled and he stammered in his speech. The children on the hill, whither he crept, of an afternoon, for air, all knew him and tripped in a friendly way up to the bench where he cowered, muttering to himself, a note-book on his knees, a pencil in his hand, and wished him good-day. He stroked their cheeks, took them on his lap and rejoiced that they were not afraid of him. He would gladly have told them stories--but the words would not come.
One day he brought his violin up to the Buttes Montmartre. Anxious to please the children's taste, he played them little dances. His fingers had grown stiff since he had so suddenly renounced the inspiring indulgence of drink. The bow wavered in his trembling hand. He was ashamed before the children. But for them his playing was exactly right. Soon a large audience had assembled around him. Some of the little people gazed at him with earnest attention, their heads slightly thrown back, their hands clasped behind them--others danced gaily with one another.
This pleased him. He held up his head before the children. He felt as if he would like to improvise; then it seemed to him as if the tune that sprung from under his fingers was strangely familiar--it was the same which he had played nearly thirty years before in the circus on the "Sablon."
And now every day he shuffled with his violin up to the shabby garden. The poor children's applause had become a necessity.
* * * * *
He grew more and more intimate with the Tenor. The latter, after having been refused at the opera--thanks to a vile conspiracy--had arrived at the practical conviction that this Grand Opera was a decaying institution, with which he would scorn to have any relations, and had accepted an engagement in a café chantant of the Faubourg Montmartre, where he earned a comfortable subsistence.
At first Gesa would not hear of playing anything from his opera to the Tenor, but later, when he began to despair in secret over his work, an urgent desire to confide in some one overcame him. He played for hours to the Tenor after that, on a lamentable old piano, and wheezed the Arias at times, in a ghostly, hollow voice, only for the sake of hearing from some one the assurance, "cela sera superbe!"
Then he would talk himself into an unnatural excitement, his eyes would flash, and he would cry, flourishing his clenched fist in the air--"It has the grand manner, has it not?"
Once he had been so modest!
His means were almost exhausted. He sold his books, his watch. He always treated the Tenor patronizingly, like a dependant--and the Tenor indulged him as one whose mind was weak.
But once, as the two were sitting opposite each other before the fire in the singer's room, the latter said, passing his fingers through his hair, "My dear friend, ton genie ne te fera pas vivre!"
Gesa stared gloomily at the speaker.
"Well, well," said the Tenor, hastening to pacify him, "I only mean that the mere inception of such a grand work must require a long time. How would it be if you should occupy yourself a little hereabouts, meanwhile?"
Gesa sighed. "I could compose something small," said he. "Romances, for example."
"Unhappily that would amount to nothing unless you allied yourself with a singer or an actress, who would bring you into fashion. And then--even so it would be a dreadful pity to divert you from your chief end--to fritter you away. No, you ought to seek a place in an orchestra."
"Yes, at the opera," said Gesa, and thought of his stiff fingers with a shudder. However, as he would on no consideration have confessed this infirmity he added, with some embarrassment. "Everything is so complicated there,--so many rehearsals,--one is busy till late at night."
"No!" replied the other, "you should not undertake such absorbing work as that. That would be treason to your muse. I was thinking of a comfortable place in an orchestra that makes no big flourishes and does not rehearse a great deal."
"Well!" muttered Gesa.
"I made the acquaintance lately at the Hotel de Nancy, of a clown, a splendid fellow, who works in a circus on the Boulevard Rochechonart. Not a first-class circus, but a very respectable circus for all that. I told the clown about you. They just happen to need a first violin and"--
Gesa sprang hastily up and left the room. From that moment he never spoke to the Tenor again.
* * * * *
His lassitude and weakness increased with every day. The blood crept in his veins like cold lead--there was always a mist before his eyes, and in his ears a sound like the flapping of an exhausted butterfly. The miserable nourishment which was all he could afford himself, did not suffice to keep him up any longer, he could not leave his room, then he took to his bed.
Because he was universally liked his fellow lodgers did him all the kindnesses they could, and even the hostess herself brought him food, made his bed, and borrowed newspapers for him. He thanked them all with the same timid smile, the same far-off look, and spent nearly the whole day in a sad, drowsy condition, falling from one light slumber into another.
But one afternoon it seemed to him as if a soft hand passed tenderly over his forehead. He opened his eyes. Above him bent a handsome old face, decently framed in grey hair, and a voice that sounded from the far distance murmured "Gesa!" He roused himself. "Gesa!" she cried again. It was his mother!
Yes, his mother, whom he had not seen for nearly five and twenty years. She had married the acrobat Fernando. The circus on the Boulevard Rochechonart belonged to them--they were prosperous. The light-minded woman was not so bad as one might have thought her. She had kept herself secretly informed about Gesa for a long time after leaving him, and convinced herself that he was well cared for and "among quality people," as she said, and this latter circumstance had deprived her of courage to approach him. But she had often rejoiced at the sight of him from a distance. Then, slowly he disappeared from her horizon. And now the Tenor, Monsieur Augusti, whose acquaintance she had lately made, after talking a great deal of his friend, had only yesterday spoken his name. All this Margaretha imparted to her son, weeping the while, straightening his miserable pillow and smoothed the bed clothes. He suffered it all quietly, murmuring sometimes a grateful word, and observing her, half stupefied, half astray. He could not realize this sudden meeting.
But when she, embarrassed by his passiveness, went on--"I heard you play, years ago,--long years ago,--at Nice. Oh! I was proud of you! And I bought your piece, the one where your picture is on the cover:--such a handsome picture!"--then the violinist buried his face in the pillow and groaned like a dying man. His anguish overcame the shyness which held his mother back--"Poor boy!" she whispered, caressingly, stroking the rough grey hair of the broken man, as in times long past she had smoothed the child's soft locks.
"You must not take your trouble so to heart. I know all, what a great genius you are, and how cruelly the world has used you. We will nurse you well again, and then all will be right. You shall come to us; we will not disturb you; not one of us; only take care of you. You shall have a little room of your own where you can work as much as you will."
He looked up slowly, a heavy cough shook his sunken breast. The mother passed her arm under his thin shoulders and raised him up a little to ease his breath, his tired head rested on her bosom.
"How fallen away you are," she said, half weeping, "and your poor shirt, all in pieces. To-morrow I must bring you fresh linen. And now try to take something; you must get strong." And she gave him a cup of broth that she had warmed for him. He did as she bade him, silently,--he even relished the broth. His bitter grief, his deep degradation were forgotten in the feeling of being once more cared for. Drowsy, quiet, lazy contentment overcame him. Dumb, but grateful, he kissed his mother's hand.
Her eyes lighted up. "I must go now," she said. "The ticket-office of the circus opens at six; I must be there. Good-bye. I shall get free about eight and can come to you then. Now you will sleep a little."
She pressed her lips to his temples and disappeared.
The violinist fell asleep. A memory glided into his soul, a long forgotten memory,--not of his dead bride, his faithless friend,--no, a painless memory of his first return to the Rue Ravestein.
A dreamy, narcotic odor hovered around him, and he saw a bunch of brilliant-hued poppies. He heard the light rustle of the dying leaves as they fell on the marble gueridon.--He sprang up. His heart beat as if it would burst his breast.--A nameless terror seized him, as of one who finds himself sinking contentedly into a bog.
He collected himself--he would flee--he would seek death. He seized his clothes,--but the garments slipped from his hands,--he reeled and sank back powerless on his bed. The resignation, the sleepy intoxication of ruined souls, who are grown too weary for despair, mastered him. A dark genius hovered for a moment in the bare attic, the genius of the hopeless. He carried a cluster of red poppies in his hand.
* * * * *
Days passed, weeks, months. On the Boulevards Rochechonart and Clichy, peopled by artist workers of all kinds, one often meets a tall, elderly man with grey hair, that hangs disorderly about his cheeks.
It is Gesa von Zuylen.
His face is still handsome--but the expression is dull. Sometimes he stops, places his hand to his ear, as if listening to something at a distance. Then he shakes his head, sighs impatiently and goes his way. He lives with his mother, and is treated by her and by his stepfather, and his half-brothers with much deference.
Carefully tended, neatly dressed, and well fed, he does not feel himself unhappy. He enjoys his meals and every one calls him, "Le Raté de Montmartre."