When he receives his monthly remittance of fr. 208.35, he gives the odd centimes to the first street beggar he meets,—for luck,—and consecrates fifty francs at once to a dinner with one or two of his intimates and the amie of his law-student (?) days, who, still fair, though “fat and forty,” is the prosperous proprietress of a little stationery shop in his street. The balance of the remittance amply suffices him to live thirty days more in his modest fashion and to add a new specimen or two to his collection of books.
I do not know of a person whose life is organised more rationally,—I would say scientically if Gustave did not abhor the word science and all its derivatives; and, in the teeth of the adage which warns us to call no man happy till he dies, I do not hesitate to say that Gustave Berteil is happy, and has been happy from the day of his reconciliation with his sire. Indeed, if I were asked to name the happiest man of my acquaintance, I should answer, “Gustave Berteil,” without a moment’s pause.
Gustave, like the majority of the Bohemians from choice, was a Bohemian by necessity for a time; but the Quartier has always had a sprinkling of brilliant, forceful personalities who have taken Bohemian vows without ever having had to consider the bread-and-butter question.
Such was the deceased artist Henri Pille (associated in his latter days with Montmartre), whose appearance implied utter poverty, but who is said to have had landed property in a southern province which made the fluctuations of the picture market a matter of little concern to him.
Such is, or, perhaps, was, the poet Maurice Bouchor, to whom Richepin dedicated his virile volume, Les Blasphèmes. Bouchor, who now devotes almost all his time and energy to the elevation of the working people through reading clubs and the Universités Populaires, is regarded by many of his old associates as a renegade from Bohemia. He is confessedly a renegade from many of its livelier and noisier pleasures, as his age and his gentle nature entitle him to be. But he still lives less pretentiously than his means permit, is still “thinking his own thoughts, following the leadings of his own heart, and holding to the realities of life where-ever they conflict with its conventions,” and so has not entirely forfeited his claim, it is to be hoped, to be ranked with the Bohemians of the Quarter.
Such also is Jean Richepin, in spite of his sumptuous establishment on the Right Bank, a sort of Parisian Menelik, whose barbaric costumes and audacious exploits have entered as completely into the legendary lore of the Quarter as the explosive inconsistencies of Jules Vallès and the alternate aspirings and back-slidings of Paul Verlaine. In the early eighties, when he paraded the fantastic title of Roi des Truands (King of the Vagrants), Richepin wore a talismanic bracelet and a curiously-shaped hat, as badges of his rank. “There was even,” says his fellow-Bohemian, Emile Goudeau, “an epic struggle between Jean Richepin and the poor but great caricaturist André Gill a long chapter to describe the costumes which have played a part in Richepin’s numerous and strange avatars. At one time, if the narrative of a friend can be trusted, he remained in hiding for almost a fortnight because his wardrobe was reduced to a simple
JEAN RICHEPIN window curtain; and his adventures have been so extraordinary that this ludicrous incident, improbable as it sounds, does not defy belief.
Richepin, Bouchor, and Paul Bourget, returning from “The Sherry Cobbler” one night, halted under the arcade of the Odéon, named themselves Les Vivants, and solemnly pledged each other eternal aid and fidelity. This was the period when Bourget’s ambition was poetry, when he wore pantaloons of water green, and imitated the miraculous cravats of Barbey d’Aurévilly and the mode of living of Balzac. “Bourget submitted himself,” says Goudeau, “to a ferocious Balzacian régime. He dined very early, went to bed immediately after, and had himself called on the stroke of 3 A.M..... The poet-recluse then drank two or three bowls of black coffee, like Balzac, and, like Balzac, worked until seven. Then he slept again for an hour, rose, for good this time, and applied himself to the bread-winning activities which poverty imposes on young littérateurs.”
Bourget, who began thus as a Bohemian from necessity, has ended as a snob. He is a fair sample of the “arrivé” who disavows his past, and