Albert Glatigny, out on a hunt for funds to bury the dead mistress of a friend, swimming the Seine (though he was a poor swimmer and it was late autumn) because he could not pay the small bridge toll which was then exacted—Vache Enragée!
The saturnine De Nerval and the brilliant Gauthier chasing dinners, the first in back alley-ways and the second in the salon of the Princesse Mathilde—Vache Enragée!
Vache Enragée, also, young Balzac living on a few sous a day and writing the inevitable five-act drama in an icy garret, because his father, who had intended the boy for the law, had said to him, “There are people who have a vocation for dying in the hospital,” and his mother, “It seems that monsieur has a taste for misery!”
Vache Enragée—young Daudet arriving in Paris, after an over-long fast, shod only with rubbers (as he has narrated in Trente Ans and Le Petit Chose), and existing there on his share of the seventy-five francs a month his brother Ernest earned!
And Vache Enragée—young Zola stifling in a “room under the roof where one was forced to perform a series of acrobatic feats to sit down—on the bed”; living several days on bread soaked in olive oil sent to him from the Midi, and pitifully imploring the editors of Le Travail (a little Latin Quarter review) to print for him a poem written in the style of De Musset!
Vache Enragée again—Eugène Boudin sighing in his journal: “There are moments hard to bear when on every side you see the impossibility of getting a little money. There is a poor old mother who entreats, there is the rent to pay, there is the necessity of clothes, of brushes, of canvases, which you finally have to get along without. Petty economy and the worry that accompanies it kill you by inches.”
Vache Enragée, in short, the privations of all those for whom liberty is a necessity, and beauty a religion, and with whom a glowing faith in art more than atones for the absence of bread, of fire, and of clothes!
Winter before last a painter, fifty-three years of age, well known in art circles, was detected extracting money out of a church poor-box with the aid of a glue-smeared stick. This revolting sort of infidelity to the hard fare of the Vache Enragée is, it need hardly be said, a rare occurrence; but it is not rare for men to be forced to familiarity with the Vache Enragée after they have become famous.
Glatigny never got entirely free of poverty, and it was of disease produced by hunger and exposure that both he and his wife died.
