In the Quartier, with these resources, a fellow will not starve in one month or two, as he might elsewhere. Besides, if the worst comes to the worst, there is the familiar and friendly Seine near by and the sweet, clean “Doric little morgue,” where he is bound to feel at home and where he will be speedily recognised.
A good proportion of these post-graduate denizens of the Quarter are either by choice or by necessity Bohemians. To the former class (Bohèmes par goût) belongs my friend B——, whom for conveniences’ sake we will call Berteil,—Gustave Berteil.
In a dingy hôtel of the rue Racine, just off the Quartier’s highway, the Boulevard St. Michel, in a room which costs perhaps forty francs a month, perhaps forty-five, and which has nothing about it to distinguish it from the room of a student who arrived in Paris yesterday, except for a shelf of original and other editions of the elder French dramatists, M. Berteil (Gustave Berteil, simple Gustave to his friends), bachelor, aged forty-three, has lived continuously ever since his salad days.
Twenty-three years ago Gustave came up to Paris from a Provençal town, where his father was a wealthy notary, to prepare himself, in pursuance of the paternal desire, for admission to the bar. He was equipped with so much knowledge of life as the average provincial youth has at twenty, so much book knowledge as the average provincial lycée affords, a close acquaintance with the old French drama, for which the lycée would have shuddered to be held accountable, and a consuming desire to write for the contemporary stage.
During as many years as are ordinarily required for taking a degree in law, Gustave devoted the pleasant days to foraging for old dramatists in the book-stalls and along the quays, the rainy days to play-writing and to perusing, repairing, and fondling his yellowed, tattered, worm-eaten acquisitions in his room,—where he had his meals served him,—and his evenings (whatever the weather) to the auditoriums or stage entrances of the theatres and to the cafés where the cabotins (actors) most do congregate.
His relations to the law were limited, so far as is known, to the bona fide purchase of expensive legal text books, which he invariably bartered, after a decent interval, for editions of his favourites,—a device, less ingenious than ingenuous, for at once quieting his conscience and obtaining larger remittances from home.
When the time came for Gustave (supposed young advocate) to return to the Côte d’Azur and there assist his father in handling testaments and deeds, he made a clean breast of it by post.
Thereupon the father cut off the son’s allowance, thinking thus “to starve the rascal,” as he bluntly expressed it, “into submission.” He very nearly succeeded in the starving part of his programme, as he discovered to his genuine horror,—for he was at bottom not a bad papa,—when, at the end of an anxious year without tidings from the boy, he came to Paris and found his novel prodigal out at heels and elbows, hollowed in at stomach, and rickety at the knees; with absolutely nothing quite intact in fact about his person or surroundings—except the shelf of old dramatists, which would easily have procured him food and fuel. Berteil père was mollified, if sadly disillusionised, by this ocular demonstration of pluck on the part of Berteil fils. He settled on his unnatural offspring an allowance of 2,500 francs a year, to be trebled whenever he should abandon Bohemia for legitimate business, and left him to live his own life in his own way.
This way has not turned out to be greatly different from the way of Gustave’s nominal student days, and for at least ten years it has not varied from one year to another by the value of a hair.
Every morning at ten, winter and summer, the hôtel garçon enters M. Berteil’s room, without rapping, to bring him his coffee and to inform him of the weather. If the garçon reports that it is really pleasant,—and the garçon knows from long experience, you may be sure, what M. Berteil considers really pleasant, —M. Berteil spends the day book-hunting on the quays, where every bouquineur and bouquiniste greets him cordially as an old acquaintance. If the garçon’s weather bulletin is unfavourable, he orders his déjeuner and dinner sent up to his room, and spends the day in the society of his old dramatists and such of his friends, whose name is legion, as may chance to call. He still haunts, evenings, as he did in the beginning, the cafés affected by the cabotins, with whom he passes for the most brilliant conversationalist on theatrical matters in or out of the “profession.” But he abjured long ago theatre auditoriums and stage entrances, the latter because he can now meet histrionic celebrities on an equal footing, the former because he holds modern plays trash and modern methods of interpreting old plays tinsel. He also put away long ago his youthful, disquieting ambition to write for the contemporary stage, because he despaired of matching the old dramatists in their manner and disdained the manner of the new.