“When the cocher arrived at the head of the Champs Elysées, and opened the cab door, there was only a corpse upon the cushions. D—— had shot himself full in the heart.”
The last season I passed on the Left Bank of the Seine, the Quartier was deeply moved by the death of one of its faithful devotees, the poet René Leclerc (nom-de plume, Robert de la Villoyo), who poisoned himself with cyanide of potassium.
Leclerc was thirty-two at the time of his death. He had inhabited the Quartier for more than a decade. He had come thither to study medicine in accordance with the wishes of his bourgeois parents; and he had stayed on after all thought of practising as a physician had left him, in order to pursue the literature which had become his passion.
With the funds which his family provided he lived neither too well nor too ill, working steadily, but gaining little, slowly developing a very real, if not very robust, talent. He completed two romances, contributed more or less regularly to La Plume and the minor reviews and literary weeklies of the Left Bank, which are the easier to enter since contributors are paid nothing at all or very little, and placed an occasional poem and chronique in the daily press. Indeed, everything went well with him up to the moment when his family, disgruntled at his persistency in holding to so unprofitable a calling, deprived him of his income. Then he set out bravely to earn his living with his pen. He besieged editors with copy, but succeeded in placing but few articles; and, when he did place them, he was more often than not kept waiting for his pay, and sometimes defrauded out of it altogether. He tried in vain to find a publisher for either of his two manuscript romances. He did difficult and ill-paid hack-work, collaborating on a translation into French of the Norwegian Strindberg and on an adaptation into French verse of the Mandragore of Machiavelli; and he undertook—oh, the bitter pill!—the task of writing a volume on the Côte d’Ivoire, of
which he was as ignorant as he was of the borders of the supposititious canals of the planet Mars. Even this concession to mercantilism—beyond which it is not surprising he was unwilling to go—did not suffice to procure him a living. He ran behind two quarters on his rent, and was threatened with eviction. If not actually destitute, he was on the verge of destitution. And yet to those who were familiar with René Leclerc’s proud and sensitive spirit it seems more likely that it was disgust with his lot rather than terror before the approach of want which drove him to kill himself. It was because he held his art so high that he was unwilling to survive its debasement. He had made concessions that he regarded as enormous,—compromised his ideal, vulgarised his taste, and prostituted (at least so it seemed to him) his talent. It was too much. His last act-could a dying gesture well be finer?—was to reduce to ashes the hateful manuscript of the Côte d’Ivoire and all his other writings that he held unworthy.
And journalists were found contemptible enough to censure him, to call him coward, because he was too fastidious to stoop to their own corrupt, degrading practices, even to save his life.
Among the works he left, as having his affection and which by one of those ironies so common with the law went to his unappreciative family (who might have saved him), was a collection of sweet and delicate poems, entitled La Guirlande de Marie, dedicated to her who had shared his prosperity and remained the faithful friend of his adversity.