“Moi, c’est moralement que j’ai mes élégances. Je ne m’attife pas ainsi qu’un freluquet, Mais je suis plus soigné si je suis moins coquet. Je ne sortirais pas avec, par négligence, Un affront pas très-bien lavé, la conscience [260] Jaune encore de sommeil dans le coin de son œil, Un honneur chiffoné, des scrupules en deuil. Mais je marche sans rien sur moi qui ne reluise, Empanaché d’indépendance et de franchise; Ce n’est pas une taille avantageuse, c’est Mon âme que je cambre ainsi qu’en un corset, Et tout couvert d’exploits qu’en rubans je m’attache, Retroussant mon esprit ainsi qu’une moustache, Je fais en traversant les groupes et les ronds, Sonner les vérités comme des éperons.”
The device, Vache Enragée, cavalierly adopted as their catchword by the painters, sculptors, poets, and musicians of Montmartre, was taken directly from the title of a Montmartre romance by Emile Goudeau, who was named on that account honorary president of the festival; but the phrase had long been current in French conversation and literature to designate the poverty of the prolétariat artistique et littéraire. Thus, the great Daudet wrote regarding one of the characters of Jack:—
“Then commenced for him this terrible ordeal of the vache enragée, which either breaks you at once or bronzes you forever.
“He became one of the ten thousand poor devils, famished and proud, who rise in Paris every morning giddy with hunger and ambitious dreams, nibble surreptitiously a sou loaf, which they keep hidden away in the bottoms of their pockets, blacken their clothes with penfuls of ink, whiten their shirt collars with billiard chalk, and warm themselves over the registers of the libraries and churches.... Art is such a wizard! It creates a sun which shines for all, like Nature’s sun; and those who approach it, even the poor, even the ill-favoured, even the grotesque, carry away a little of its warmth and its radiance. This celestial flame, imprudently ravished, which the unsuccessful guard in the depths of their eyes, renders them redoubtable sometimes, oftenest ridiculous; but their existence gains from it a grandiose serenity, a contemptuous indifference to misfortune, and a grace in suffering that other kinds of poverty do not know.”
The Montmartre Vache Enragée, you see, is the same old Latin Quarter Misère under another label, the “Bohemian road by which every man who enters the arts without other means of existence than art itself will be forced to travel, ... the training school of the artistic profession, the preface to the Academy, the Hôtel-Dieu, or the Morgue.”[87]
Over the stony and thorny route of the Vache Enragée a large part of the literary, artistic, and musical celebrities of France have at one time or another passed.
Millet painting signs at Cherbourg and hasty portraits for the soldiers at Havre—Vache Enragée!
Barye forced to go about as a pedler in order to vend his now priceless statuettes—Vache Enragée!
Hector Berlioz, ridiculed for wanting the courage to put a bullet through his brain, accepting newspaper work to live, failing to write a symphony the theme of which came to him in a dream, because he would not have money enough to bring it out if it were written—Vache Enragée!
Audran and Charles Lecocq (who took prizes, the one in composition, the other in fugue, at the Conservatoire and the Niedermeyer School respectively) writing opéra bouffe to keep the wolf from the door—Vache Enragée!