He has changed less; and such changes as he has undergone are, for the most part, superficial. His love of laughter, his love of liberty, and his love of love have not been lost. They manifest themselves a little differently, that is all.
His love of liberty is not, for the moment, manifested, as it was in the beginning, when Rutebœuf and Villon played the highwayman and Clément Marot was king of the Bassoche, by forcing the doors of the bourgeois and beating the watch; nor, as it was in 1789, 1830, 1848, and 1871, by mounting the barricade, though there is never a certainty that he will not mount a barricade to-morrow. His love of laughter does not often lead him to the pillaging of taverns and workshops nowadays, as it did the roistering blade of the time of Louis XI., nor to the metamorphosing of himself into a juggler, tumbler, clown, or mountebank. And his love of love rarely blossoms into such dainty idyls as are recounted of the period of the Restoration and Louis Philippe. Perhaps, if the truth were known, it was rarely they so blossomed even then.
The ragged doublets, begging wallets, and pallets of straw have gone forever, as have the street classes exposed to the inclemency of the weather, of which they were the fitting accompaniment. The stiff, ugly fashions of this superlatively ugly age—the cut-away and frock coats, the “plug” and Derby hats, and the close-cropped hair—have, in a measure, replaced the felts à la Rubens and flowing ties and the wavy locks, velvet jackets, and blouses and tasselled Basque bérets of Romanticism. Among the étudiantes the simple muslin caps and chintz, muslin, and gingham frocks have fled alarmed before modish hats and tailor-made gowns. The cancan, a pitiably tame cancan, is danced—in public—only to satisfy the curiosity of sensation-seeking tourists. But, allowing for differences of customs and costumes, for the unavoidable concessions to the more insistent claims of the spirit of the age, the Quartier Latin is still the same old Quartier.
There are numbers who still “live by the grace of God, eat when they can,” not when they would, and “sell their books to the old book dealer for a meal or an evening at the cabaret.” Poverty still stalks through the Pays Latin, and is still bravely cuffed or blithely bluffed out of countenance there. The student demand for rooms ranging from fifteen to thirty francs a month, and the lively, almost fierce student patronage of the crèmeries, bouillons, and little wine-shops (where an à la carte expenditure of 18 sous verges on extravagance), and of the prix fixe restaurants at 22 and 25 sous, are eloquent of a wide-spread scarcity of funds.
“Flicoteaux exists, and will exist,” wrote Balzac in Illusions Perdues, “as long as the student shall wish to live. He eats there,—nothing more, nothing less; but he eats there, as he works, with a sombre or joyous activity, according to his circumstances and his character.”
One cannot have lived in the Quartier long and not have had student friends who had more than a passing acquaintance with hunger and for whom a fire in winter was a festival event. In his mansard, where the student is doomed to freeze in winter and broil in summer, or in his stuffy, windowless cabinet, where he is doomed to suffocate the year round, are enough outward signs of destitution to rive the heart of the most hardened professional charity visitor; and yet, ten to one, this poor devil of a “Jack” has his “Jill,” for the grisette exists.
Yes, countless Jeremiads to the contrary notwithstanding, the grisette exists; under another name or, rather, under several other names,—there are words that defy strict definition; but she exists; changed somewhat, as the student himself is changed somewhat, but unchanged, as he is unchanged, in her love of laughter, her love of liberty, and her love of love. Gracious, graceful, and tender as ever; ignorant and clever, superstitious and sagacious, selfish and self-sacrificing, garrulous and reticent, cruel and kind-hearted, outspoken and deceitful, conscientious and unscrupulous, generous and avaricious, and so forth ad infinitum; inconsequent, inconsistent, capricious, contradictory, bewitching bundle of opposites; best of comrades and sincerest, because ficklest, of mistresses; adorable, ever-changing, and unchangeable grisette!
Greedy of dress, the dance, and the theatre, she will sacrifice them all at the beck of a real affection. Indifferent to fortune when it comes her way, she will go without eating to have her fortune told her. She will ruin a nabob without a twinge, and share her last crust with the poor. She is true to nothing but her latest impulse. She fears nothing but being bored.
Jack nibbles scant bread and cheese, goes without wine and a fire, pawns his overcoat, his watch, and his best hat to provide Jill with a silk petticoat or a new hat. Jill refuses a carriage and pair for love of Jack, and makes merry, coquettish shift, for his sake, with “a ribbon and a rag”; and she will be as ready to go with him to the barricade to-morrow (for she dearly loves a scrimmage) as she is to go with him to a banquet or a ball to-night.
Thanks to Jack (this latter-day Abélard) and almost as much to Jill (this latter-day Héloïse), to their unaffected sentimentalities and innocent deviltries, the Quartier has a luminous atmosphere of gayety and poesy, is, in a word, an adequate emblem of “the folly of youth that amuses itself breaking window-panes, and which is, nevertheless, priceless beside the wisdom of age that mends them.”