Jules Vallès.
FIFTY odd years ago, in a volume of short stories,—little read in France nowadays, and quite unknown, I fancy, elsewhere,—Le Roman de Toutes les Femmes, Henry Mürger, author of the universally known and loved La Vie de Bohème, narrated, under the title “La Biographie d’un Inconnu,” the life history of a young sculptor who died of “the malady to which science does not dare to give its true name, la misère.”
Joseph D——, born in a provincial town of poor, hard-working, respectable parents, manifested a strong vocation for sculpture from his early boyhood. His father having decided to put him to the carpenter’s trade, Joseph, who had no notion of becoming a mechanic, went secretly to the Free School of Design. The professor of the school procured him a place as pupil with a government architect, which his father, under the impression that carpentry and architecture were very much the same thing, allowed him to accept. Joseph made such progress that he paid his way at the end of a month, and at the end of six months earned his seven or eight francs a day. But he was getting no nearer to sculpture by this work; and he left the architect’s office, in the face of his father’s opposition, and entered a sculptor’s atelier for study, paying a month in advance for his teaching. He took part in a competition for admission to the Beaux-Arts, and failed. Having no money with which to pay for lessons, he was forced to leave the atelier, but was received—about the only bit of good luck in his whole career—by the great master, Rude. He lodged at this time in the rue du Cherche-Midi, over a cow stable, where he was warmed only by what heat ascended through a hole in the floor.
Finding he could not pay for the models and materials necessary to enter the Salon competitions, he assisted for a year, without entirely neglecting his studies, a noted ornament-worker, and put by enough to enable him to pursue his art studies to good advantage. Working by night in a cold workshop, he contracted a sickness which confined him to his bed for a time, and which swept away all his savings. As soon as he was well again, he went back to work for his first employer (the architect), designing ornaments whose execution was intrusted to others. He thus gained a little pile—about 1,200 francs—with which to compete for the Salon. It was stolen by a roof-worker who, while repairing an adjacent building, had seen him counting it.
This “mischance”—to go on in Mürger’s own language—“was a terrible blow to Joseph. ‘There are some people who have no luck,’ he said, ‘who would lose with all the trumps of the pack in their hands.’ ‘Never mind,’ he resumed, brightening, ‘I will attempt the assault of the Louvre[74] with what little I have left. I will enter there with plaster instead of bronze or marble.’”
All his courage had returned. He tried making fanciful statuettes, which he could prepare without the expense of hiring models; but he had little success in selling them.
“La Misère returned, and knocked at his door. She entered, terrible and pitiless, like a vanquished foe whose turn has come to triumph, and who uses without mercy the right of reprisal. Joseph’s destitution reached such a point that, when one of his friends invited him to dinner, he answered naïvely, ‘I’m afraid it will put me out: it’s not my day.’ For tobacco he smoked walnut leaves, which he gathered in the forest of Verrières, then dried, and chopped up fine.
“His sole hope was the coming Salon. In a room without a fire,”—the odorous days of the calorific cow stable must have seemed a paradise in retrospect,—“in a Siberian temperature, he worked during three consecutive months on a Saint Antoine, for he had been forced to renounce his group of Galatea, the too costly execution of which he had deferred to better times. Clay, in spite of its moderate cost, was too dear for his empty purse, this same purse which had held almost a fortune; for, by a strange irony, the thief who had taken his money had left him his purse. He dug his clay himself, therefore, in some fields of the banlieue. A rag-picker of the rue Mouffetard whom he had met, I know not where, gave him sittings at five sous an hour; and three-quarters of the time the worthy man invented angelic ruses to avoid being paid.