Note the student’s street masking, dancing, and singing, and his manifold extravagances at the time of the Carnival, the Mi-carême, and the Quatorze Juillet, and on special outdoor festival occasions of his own. Watch his pranks and listen to his magpie chatter in his restaurants, cafés, and brasseries,—not the big, gaudy establishments of the “Boul’ Mich,” where he apes the chic of the bourgeois with whose purse he comes into direct and, for him, disastrous competition, and where, for the matter of that, the bourgeois often outnumbers him; but in the dingy resorts of the back and side streets, where he is quite his harum-scarum self, where he is free to shout, sing, caper, and guy to his heart’s content, play combs and tin horns, and applaud with beer-mugs and canes, use floors for chairs, chairs for hobby-horses, tables for floors and chairs, and sandwiches for missiles, and dance his Mariette upon his shoulder or dandle her upon his knee; and where he can vary the monotony of his dominoes and manille by throwing a somersault or executing a pigeon-wing or by a turn at savate, leap-frog, or puss-in-the-corner. Follow him into the meetings of his bizarre clubs and sodalities; to the spots where he dances for the love of dancing,—not the Bullier, where, except for rare occasions, he merely forms part of a show; to his midnight suppers and masquerades,—Bal des Internes, Bal des Quat’z’ Arts, Bal Julien, and others quite as characteristic because less renowned: in all these places and situations he displays a faculty for impromptu larking, for fabricating jocund pandemoniums at short notice, that prove him no degenerate son of his father and no mean perpetuator of the mirthful prowess of his grandsires and great-grandsires.
Go with him and his Finette, his Blanchette, his Rosette, his Louisette, or his Juliette, for a Sunday picnic at Bois-Meudon or Joinville-le-Pont, and share with them—if your wind is sufficient and your Anglo-Saxon dignity can bear it—their more than infantile or lamb-like gambols over the meadows and under the trees. Keep with him, if you can be so privileged, his or her Saint’s Day. Celebrate with him the Fête des Rois, the Jour de l’An, and the Réveillon. Rejoice with him at the successful passing of his “exams” or condole with him for being plucked. Help him empty the pannier and the cask received from home. Enter into the spirit of his yarns, toasts, gaudrioles, and chansons on these occasions; into the spirit of his betrayal of sentiment and play of wit, of his gallantry and persiflage, his repartee and poetry, his exaggerations and fantasies; of his pas-seuls and pas-à-quatres, his revivals of cancan (not the tame variety), bourrée, and chahut, his imitations of fandangos and jigs, his ceremonious travesties of saraband and minuet, and his impulsive launching of danses inédits. Enjoy with him his accompaniments on glasses and symphonies on plates, his sallies and his salads, his coffee and his antics, his pâtés and his mummeries, his horse-play and his wine. Under their spell you will be convinced, if you have any relish for life in you, that for graces of fellowship, refinements of revelry, and subtleties of tomfoolery the student of the Quartier has not his peer upon the planet.
The memory of Mürger and the cult of merriment under misfortune which his immortal Vie de Bohème symbolises is faithfully cherished. His anniversary is observed every summer about the time of St. Jean by a pilgrimage to his monument in the Luxembourg and a banquet at an average price of fifteen sous in some indulgent cabaret or café. A recent menu was as follows: bread, wine, blood pudding, fried potatoes, almond cakes, cigars for the students and flowers for the étudiantes. One year a thoughtless board of managers committed the indiscretion of elevating the price of the Mürger banquet to something over a franc, whereat the whole Quartier was thrown into a veritable tumult of protest.
The real student cafes and cabarets[67]—which I would not name nor locate for a kingdom, since their obscurity is the one thing that saves them from being spoiled—are the lineal descendants and, mutatis mutandis, the worthy successors of the cafés and cabarets of the students’ fathers and grandfathers and of the taverns of his remote forbears.
There the ancient custom of charcoaling or chalking the walls with skits, epigrams, and caricatures, is kept up.[68]
There long-haired, unkempt poets mount on tables and counters, glass in hand, and flaunt their new-born epics, tragedies, and ballads, or loll in dreamful, languishing poses and intone their elegies and idyls, as did Rutebœuf, Villon, Gringoire, and Cyrano de Bergerac in their respective epochs; Molière, Boileau, Racine, and Crébillon, in the seventeenth century, at the “Mouton Blanc”; as did only yesterday Mérat, Anatole France, Léon Vallade, and Leconte de Lisle at the Café Voltaire; De Banville, Mürger, Daudet, and Paul Arène at the Café de l’Europe; Coppée, Mendès, Rollinat, Mallarmé, Bourget (who began as a poet), Bouchor, Richepin, and Villiers de l’Isle-Adam at “The Sherry Cobbler”; and as did all the versifiers of a generation at the Café Bobino (adjoining the famous little theatre of the same name), “which was,” says Daudet, “the holy of holies for everybody who rhymed, painted, and trod the boards in the Quartier Latin.”
There they fête the victories of their respective poetic sects—Roman, Instrumentiste, Magique, Magnifique, Déliquescent, Incohérent, or Néo-Décadent, as the case may be, just as the Romanticists in their time, and the Parnassians, Décadents, and Symbolists in their times, fêted their victories at the Café Procope. There they burn incense—as it was burned erstwhile at the Soirées and Petits Soupers Procope to Hugo, Baudelaire, and Verlaine—to their divinities who have consented—oh, monstrous condescension!—to foregather with them.
There, too, they blend becomingly philosophy and disputation with good cheer, as did D’Alembert, Voltaire, Condorcet, Diderot, and Rousseau in this same all-absorbent Procope; Corot, Gérôme, Français, Jules Breton, Baudry, Harpignies, Garnier, Falguière, André Theuriet, and Edmond About at the Café de Fleurus; and Thérion, the original of the Elysée Mérant of Daudet’s Rois en Exil, Wallon, the original of Colline in Mürger’s Vie de Bohème, and Barbey d’Aurévilly, as famous for his lace-embroidered neckties and red-banded white trousers as for his caustic wit, at the Café Tabourey.
The student’s lyric gift and penchant for good fellowship find further vent in little cellar (caveau), back-room, or upper-room café-concerts[69] of his own founding, at which, in a congenial atmosphere of tobacco and beer, he sings and recites to sympathetic listeners chansons and monologues of his own composition, and at which he permits the étudiante, who almost invariably fancies herself predestined to a brilliant career on the operatic stage, to dispense, by way of interlude, the popular risqué and sentimental songs of the day.
The editorial staffs of the ephemeral literary journals and reviews (revues des jeunes and journaux littéraires) are so many mutual admiration societies whose business meetings—there is so little business to be done—are very apt to be banquets or soirées littéraires. In fact, more than one sheet of the Quartier has no other business office than the back room of the cabaret its editors frequent.