Oliver Goldsmith, Beau Tibbs at Home.
“Stupeur du badaud, gaîté du trottin, Le masque à Sardou, la gueule à Voltaire, La tignasse en pleurs sur maigres vertèbres Et la requimpette au revers fleuri D’horribles bouquets pris à la poubelle, Ainsi se ballade à travers Paris Du brillant Montmartre au Quartier-Latin Bibi-la-Purée, le pouilleux célèbre, Prince des crasseux et des Purotains.” Jehan Rictus.
“Much good might be sucked from these beggars.”—Charles Lamb.
“Mieux vaut goujat debout qu’empereur enterré.”—Emile Goudeau.
THE dislike of and contempt for the bourgeois felt by the Bohemian students and the other Bohemians who have elected to reside in the Quartier Latin pale into insignificance before the absolute detestation of the bourgeois displayed by the Quartier’s chevaliers d’industrie, the hangers-on and camp-followers of its littérateurs and artists, who bear about the same relation to their principals that a side-show bears to a circus or the capering monkey to the hand-organ and its grinder.
As the lackey of the nobleman often holds himself above the commoner far more than does the nobleman himself, and as he will rather put up with poor living and poor wages in the service of an indigent aristocrat than demean himself by serving in the households of tradesmen, so these ne’er-do-wells of the Quartier Latin—ragged retainers of the threadbare gentry of arts and letters, pinched flunkeys of the straightened lords of thought, seedy clients of needy Latin patricians, tatterdemalion cup-bearers to tattered Parnassians, supernumeraries to the protagonists in the melodrama of cultured poverty, chorus to the soloists of the Learned Beggars’ Opera—would be humiliated and miserable outside of the atmosphere of letters. They would rather be door-keepers, to paraphrase a familiar text, in the house of the intellectual élite than to dwell in the tents of vulgarity.
If there is more comedy and less tragedy in the existences of these satellites than in the existences of their controlling luminaries, it is not because their physical hardships are fewer,—for, parasites, sycophants, trencher-friends, pick-thanks, and toad-eaters though they be, theirs is but sorry hap,—but because they are mostly ambitionless or feeble-minded and so not as susceptible to the mental torture of disenchantment.
They “carry the half of their mattresses in their hair,” after the fashion of the nephew of Rameau described by Diderot. They don the cast-off garments and retail the worn-out epigrams of their fétiches, who are amused by and therefore endlessly indulgent of them. They strut and smirk and rant like children masquerading in the attic frippery of their elders, make as clever displays of superficial knowledge as the most up-to-date members of the most up-to-date women’s clubs, and revert constantly to a previous connection with the university which is not always imaginary. As individuals, these pseudo-connoisseurs and savants come and go in the Quartier Latin: the class goes on forever.