A CAVEAU OF THE LATIN QUARTER
has been said of late years about the change which has taken place in the Pays Latin and in the student character. The “old boys” tell us, with sneering superiority or quavering regret, that the Quartier Latin is no longer what it was. Some evoke the revels and the grisettes depicted in Louis Huart’s Physiologie de l’Etudiant, Musset’s Mimi Pinson, and Mürger’s La Vie de Bohème, and others the rebellious souls of the student martyrs of 1789, 1830, 1848, and 1871.
According to the former, the contemporary student is a morose, prudent, selfish, woman-hating, digging prig, with no higher dreams than pettifogging politics and bourgeois comfort, and the étudiante a scheming, avaricious adventuress. According to the latter, he is snobbish, extravagant, and dissipated, a brainless spendthrift, gambler, debauchee, and drunkard, and his amorette, aside from differences of sex, his perfect counterpart.
There is truth in these somewhat conflicting charges, since both these types of student do exist. The curious thing is that similar complaints have been made by the alumni out in the world for almost as long as there have been alumni. It is not easy to go back far enough into the history of the Quartier Latin to escape caustic aspersions on its ignoble present and fond reversions to its fine and proper past.
If there is one period that is vaunted to-day above another as the golden age of the Latin Quarter, it is the period portrayed in the writings of Mürger, De Musset, and Nestor Roqueplan,—period when “le vin était spirituel et la folie philosophique”; period of innumerable drolleries and of two revolutions; and yet each of these three writers, even the happy-hearted Mürger, had recourse to that necessary, if puerile, vanishing point of the perspective of thought,—an anterior golden age.
A person who did not know their authorship would take the opening chapters of De Musset’s Confession d’un Enfant du Siècle to have been written in this year of grace 1904 by a disgruntled university alumnus, who was casting longing, lingering looks behind him to De Musset’s time. As, for instance, this passage: “The ways of the students and the artists—ways so fresh, so beautiful, so full of buoyant youthfulness—felt the effects of the universal change. Men, in separating from women, had muttered a word which wounds unto death,—disdain. They plunged into wine, and ran after courtesans. The students and the artists did likewise. They treated love as they treated glory and religion: it was a hoary illusion. They haunted low places. The grisette so imaginative, so romanesque, so sweet and tender in love, found herself left behind her counter. She was poor, and she was no more lovable; she must have hats and gowns; she sold herself. O shame! The young man who should have loved her, whom she would have loved, he who formerly escorted her to the forests of Verrières and Romainville, to the dances on the greensward, to the suppers in the shady coverts, he who came to chat by the lamp in the back shop during the long winter evenings, he who shared the morsel of bread steeped in the sweat of her brow and her poor but sublime love,—he, this very man who had deserted her, found her, during some night of orgy, within the lupanar, pale and livid, utterly lost, with hunger on her lips and prostitution in her heart.”
A sight-seeing visitor to the highways of the Quartier is apt to feel that the grumbling of the elders is well grounded. The conventional, imperturbable, faultlessly attired fils à papa, and the over-dressed, over-breezy, blondined young (?) women he observes on the café terraces and in the public places, seem to have little or nothing in common with the students and grisettes of poetry and romance he is out for to see.
The Quartier Latin has changed along with the rest of the world, of course, in the last thirty eventful years. The humiliating memory of the Franco-Prussian war and the failure of the Third Republic to fulfil its promises of social equality and freedom have necessarily rendered the student somewhat more reflective; the analytic fearlessness of science has made him more relentlessly introspective; the growing fierceness of the struggle for existence occasioned by the overcrowding of the professions and the obligatory military service has forced him, in his own despite, to be somewhat more practical; the phenomenal expansion of industry, commerce, and finance, and their disillusionising tendencies, have not, in the nature of things, left him entirely untainted; and the equally phenomenal spread of luxury has instilled some absurd and deplorable sybaritic notions into his head.
There has been a net loss in the Quartier—and where has there not been?—in picturesqueness and spontaneity. But the vapouring cads and the stolid “digs” who call down the wrath of the elders are not representative: they are at the extremes of the student body. Taken all in all, the student has changed less than the big world about him, not only during the last thirty years, but even during the centuries which have elapsed since he came to his class with a bundle of straw under his arm for a seat and his professor lectured sub Jove, liable to the interruptions of passing washerwomen and street porters.