“It took a rugged faith in the future to pass the evenings—without a fire—polishing verses, after having painted all day long interminable registers.”—Emile Goudeau, in Dix Ans de Bohème.
“If an artist obeys the motive which may be called the natural need of work, he deserves indulgence, perhaps, more than ever. He obeys then neither ambition nor want. He obeys his heart: it were easy to believe that he obeys God. Who can know why a man who is neither vain nor in want of money decides to write?”—Alfred de Musset.
“How much of priceless life were spent With men that every virtue decks, And women models of their sex, Society’s true ornament,— Ere we dared wander, nights like this, Through wind and rain, and watch the Seine, And feel the Boulevard break again To warmth and light and bliss!” Robert Browning.
“Say I’m weary, say I’m sad, Say that health and wealth have missed me, Say I’m growing old; but add—Jenny kissed me.” Leigh Hunt.
THE persons organically connected with the University of Paris—the students and the professors—are only the nucleus, the rallying-point, so to speak, of the intellectual population of the Latin Quarter. About them, and quite as numerous as the thousands the university at any one time enrolls, are gathered those students in the largest sense of the word—painters, sculptors, architects, poets, novelists, critics, journalists, historians, philosophers, philologists, scientists, inventors, and bibliophiles—who need the help of lectures, museums, laboratories, and libraries in their daily tasks, or who, dependent on that indefinable something called atmosphere for productiveness, can hardly conceive being at their scholarly or artistic best anywhere in the world but in this particular corner of it which has given them their training and inspiration.
About the university as a centre are also grouped those alumni who, quite independently of their callings, cling to the Quartier as a cockney clings to the town for reasons gay or serious, trivial or weighty, fantastic or rational,—attachment to a lodging, a café, a club, a restaurant, to the Luxembourg Gardens or the quays of the Seine, to book-stalls or shops of antiquities, to a chum or a mistress,—from any of the various motives of habit, taste, sentiment, or passion.
Finally, the Quartier retains those alumni who, cut off (whether by the achievement of a degree or the failure to achieve one) from the convenient parental remittances, are dismayed by the risks of a penniless plunge into the great, unfamiliar world. In the Quartier, where they are known, they can count on a modicum of credit for a modicum of time from tailors, restaurateurs, and landlords, and on the unusurious loans of a little knot of friends. “One knows,” wrote Richepin, apropos of this matter, in his Etapes d’un Réfractaire, “that at such an hour in the rue de l’Ecole de Médecine or at the head of the rue Monsieur-le-Prince an easy-chair holds out its arms to him, a tobacco pouch opens its heart to him, a friend lets him bellow his verses. These are so many consolations. What do I say? They are so many resources,—sometimes the only ones.”