Other contemporary freaks who help to swell the picturesqueness and gaiety of the Quartier are: the anarchist cobbler chansonnier Père La Purge (author of the Chanson du Père La Purge, quoted in a previous chapter), whose customers (mainly the poets and artists of the Quartier) visit his shop in the rue de la Parcheminerie to enjoy the piquancy of the contrast between his ruddy, contented face and his anathemas against society; Gaillepand, a big, athletic-looking fellow, who, having failed to earn a living by legitimate sculpture, took to making plaster medallions of the celebrities of Paris, especially those of the Quartier, and selling them up and down the Boulevard St. Michel, while his brother “Môme l’Histoire” (now dead) displayed his phenomenal memory by reciting biographies and poems; the Mère Souris (Mother Mouse), so called from her conical head and her funny little walk, ex-proprietor of an artists’ restaurant and present palmist, fortune-teller, and reputed usurer,—in short, a very useful personage to the étudiantes; Victor Sainbault, author, editor, publisher, and book-seller, like Achille Leroy; and the poet Coulet, who gives author’s readings before the terraces of the cafés, and who between times, if hearsay may be credited, provides petty bourgeois families with wedding, christening, and funeral verses at so much per yard.
It is because these freaks take themselves seriously, because they are unconscious humourists and involuntary farceurs, that they are amusing. But the Quartier has always had among its choicer Bohemians a class of conscious, almost professional humourists and deliberate farceurs, called fumistes,[79] who by drolly expressing their very disrespect for life have done much to make life worth the living.
SITE OF THE CHÂTEAU ROUGE
La rue Galande
The most renowned of the Quartier fumistes who practised when those now in middle life were young was unquestionably Sapeck.
“Verily,” says Emile Goudeau, “I owe a taper to Sapeck for having initiated me into this inner folly which manifests itself outwardly by imperturbable buffooneries.... Better to have kept alive, thanks to insouciance, than to have died stoically of misère, wrapped in the cloak of a Byronian hero. If we occasionally exceeded the proper limits of the laugh, at least we did not light the brazier of Escousse nor seek the rope of Gérard de Nerval; and that is something.”
Sapeck is very likely dead now. At any rate, he is dead to the Quarter. But, as he was the successor (according to the archæologists of fumisterie) of Romien and Vivier, so he has his successors, one of whom the rapin Karl, mystifier of Quesnay de Beaurepaire and abductor of the Comtesse Martel (“Gyp”), has almost earned the right to be regarded as his peer. Zo d’Axa, who is less a fumiste than he has it in him to be, because he takes time to be a serious and talented author and to serve sentences in prison for his opinions, perpetrated a fumisterie some five years back that has taken an honourable place among the classics of its kind.
It will be best narrated as he narrated it himself in one of his celebrated Feuilles:—