“The date set for sending to the Salon was near. It was time to think of taking the plaster cast of the statue. Michelli, Fontaine, and the other moulders who worked for the artists, when they saw Joseph’s destitution, were unwilling to venture credit. All he could obtain from one of them was the furnishing of the necessary plaster. Aided by several friends, Joseph took the cast of his statue himself. The operation lasted two days, and turned out well.

“It was the eve of the day on which the jury was to begin its sittings and on which the works to be passed upon must be at the Louvre, by midnight at the very latest. During the night it came on cold, and Joseph, to minimise the action of the frost upon his statue, the still damp plaster of which had not acquired the solidity which dryness gives, wrapped his only blanket about it, and piled up on it, as a cuirass of warmth against the darts of the cold, all his clothing, playing thus, towards Saint Antoine, the rôle of Saint Martin.

“The next forenoon two or three friends came to aid Joseph in transporting his statue to the Louvre. The wagon arrived four hours too late. Nor was this all. At this point, fatality intervened in the person of an absurd concièrge, who declared that he would let nothing leave Joseph’s room before the back rent was paid. The artists explained to the concièrge that a statue was not a piece of furniture, and that the law did not permit him to hold it back. He would not listen to reason, and, stony in his stubbornness, demanded a written permit from the landlord. They hurried to Passy, where the landlord lived, and did not find him. He would not be in before dinner. They returned at the dinner hour. He had just gone out. It was already eight o’clock in the evening. They decided to apply to a justice of the peace. The justice turned them over to the commissary of police, who began by sustaining the concièrge, but who decided, on Joseph’s representations of the injury that would be done him if he were made to miss the Salon, to authorise the removal of the statue. It was then eleven o’clock. They had barely an hour to get to the Louvre. A dangerous coating of thin ice rendered the streets impracticable. Vehicles could only advance at a walk. The artists needed three hours at least, and they had only one. Furthermore, repairs which were being made on the sewers forced them to take the longest route. In crossing the Pont-Neuf, Joseph and his friends heard it strike the half-hour.

“‘It’s half-past eleven,’ said Joseph, who was sweating great drops in spite of the fact that the thermometer marked a north-pole temperature.

“‘It’s half-past twelve,’ volunteered a young man who detached himself from a band of painters who were returning with their pictures because they had arrived at the Louvre too late. They were making the best of it, and were singing gaily, ‘Allons-nous-en, gens de la noce! etc.’

“Joseph and his friends retraced their steps.

“A little later Joseph exposed his Saint Antoine and a statuette of Marguerite at the Exposition du Bazar Bonne Nouvelle (corresponding to the modern Salon des Réfusés), and sold the two to the Museum of Compiègne for 150 francs.

“This paltry sum enabled him to drag himself about some time,—a year almost. Then he entered the hospital through the intervention of an interne, for he had no characterised malady. He died there of exhaustion at the end of three months....

“Joseph D—— died at the age of twenty-three, without rancour or recrimination against the art that had killed him, as a brave soldier falls on the field of battle, saluting his flag.”

If I have reproduced here with much fulness this old story of Mürger’s, it is because Joseph D—— stands to the Bohemians of the Quartier as a kind of saint, Saint Joseph de la Dèche,[75] patron of poor artists, and because the half-century during which civilisation is supposed to have been advancing with enormous strides has made no appreciable difference in the hardships of the needy artist or in the bravery with which he faces them. Parents are still too often dull-witted, narrow, and unsympathetic where their offspring are concerned. Rents are still hard to pay, and art materials and models, food, clothes, and fuel hard to be had just when they are most needed. Luck is as capricious, the concièrge as officious, winter as brutal, warmth as coy, and death as chary of reprieves as ever. Joseph D—— is as strictly up to date as if he had been born in 1881 and died in 1904. One hesitates to depict the slow starvation of one’s acquaintances and friends, even under assumed names; and the fateful career of Mürger’s Joseph is so perfectly typical of the careers of the poor devils of artists in the Quartier of the present period that there is no necessity of depicting it.