Quite as terrible, though far less romantic than the misère of the Bohemian artist and littérateur, is the “misère en habit noir”—the nomenclature is Balzac’s—of the patientless doctor, the briefless barrister, and the unemployed or underpaid teacher and professor.
Your poet, your painter, or your sculptor, is, as a rule, a careless, jolly dog, who has something of the genuine vagabond or adventurer in him. He cannot tolerate anything that is cut and dried, not even prosperity; and he would be infinitely bored by life if its elements of uncertainty were quite eliminated. He prefers agreeable surprises to disagreeable surprises, of course; but he prefers disagreeable surprises to no surprises at all.
Dissimulation is not an indispensable part of his artistic baggage. He may flaunt and vaunt his poverty, swear at it or make game of it, and be none the less considered, at least in his milieu. He is excused from playing the dismal farce of keeping up appearances. He may live in an attic, clothe himself in tattered and seedy raiment, shirk the bath-tub, ignore the very existence of the laundress and the barber, be noisy and reckless, and defy all the canons of the social code without stultifying himself or dishonouring his calling. Best of all, his life is rarely a lonely one. He suffers, but he has the camaraderie of suffering; and this enables him to laugh or shout his misery away.
On the other hand, your so-called professional man—your physician, for instance—must be more than decently lodged; be arrayed, at no matter what hour of the day,—such is the Old World convention,—in a faultless frock-coat and silk hat; be restrained, not to say dignified, in demeanour; assume to be busy when he is weary unto death with inaction,—and all this though hunger be consuming his very vitals.
He must button his suffering securely under his respectable black waistcoat, and wear his professional complacence when his heart is torn with sobs. If the reputable lodging or the reputable bearing fail him, even for a little, he is lost irrevocably.
Four years ago or thereabouts a young physician, one Dr. Laporte, was arraigned before a Paris court for criminal negligence in the practice of his profession. The court condemned him to prison, in spite of the testimony of an eminent specialist in his favour, but with the palliative of the Loi Bérenger.[76]
The condemnation was based on these facts: Summoned to an emergency case already compromised by lay treatment, and not possessing the surgical instrument which it called for, Dr. Laporte cast around for a makeshift tool. He used unsuccessfully the only thing in any way adapted to his purpose that he discovered in the patient’s house; and then, finding his efforts futile, and foreseeing the fatal issue, which was not slow to arrive, he withdrew, saying there was nothing more to be done.
The reasons for the attachment of clemency to the sentence were these: the evidence showed conclusively that he had had no patients for days and perhaps weeks; that he had no money to keep in proper repair the instruments he owned, to say nothing of buying the instrument in question; and that he had not eaten a morsel of food for a full day previous to the emergency visit, and was a prey to the giddiness of hunger at the moment he made his deplorable attempt.
“The police investigation,” said the presiding judge to the culprit while the trial was in progress, “shows you as nervous, excitable, unbalanced, passing quickly from a state of exaltation to a state of the most profound depression.” What wonder!