“Implacable sausage!” cries the author of Le Dimanche d’un Jeune Homme Pauvre. “We do not give sufficient credit to the influence of the hog on literature! I know men of letters en route for the Academy who ate kilometres of boudin [blood pudding] during the hard years of their novitiate.” This is merely a highly concrete way of saying that the French Bohemian is much less exercised over the savouriness of food than over its staying power. The problem he has to solve oftenest is not how most to tickle his palate, but how to give his system the maximum of bracing at the minimum of expense. To the solution of this problem, the Montmartrois brings an address that is amazing. So long as he can keep in the good graces of his restaurateur or of his butcher, baker, grocer, and sausage-man by painting handsome portraits of them and of their families or by flooding them with inscribed copies of his poems, the equation is a simple one, and all goes easily enough. But when the inevitable day of reckoning comes for him, when credit is withdrawn, and all relations with these well-nigh indispensable individuals are incontinently snapped; when, furthermore, he has dined with his friend the interne, J——, at the hospital table with his friend the sergeant, K——, in the sub-officers’ mess, and with his former classmates, the Baron Y—— and the leather merchant X——, in their homes, and when he has made the round of the cénacles at which he is welcome for the verses he recites, the stories he tells, or the songs he sings,—then the simple equation becomes an affected quadratic one, and a lugubrious change comes over the spirit of his dreams. Then bread and boudin, bread and cheese, bread and a sou’s worth of the meat kept for dogs, or bread helped down with a glass of vin ordinaire at the corner wine-shop, are the most that he can hope to obtain, unless, like Zola, he takes to snaring sparrows on the house-top, and roasting them, spitted on a curtain rod, by way of a brochette.

If the bread and cheese and the bread and wine also fail, if the boudin has to be put into the category of the unattainable along with beefsteak, and if the sparrows are coy, he may join the cats, dogs, and rag-pickers in exploring the garbage boxes at the break of morning; but he usually prefers—perhaps because he does not easily accommodate himself to early rising—some less direct, more diplomatic proceeding, such as tasting the stock of the market and street venders with the fastidious air of an intending buyer. Thus, walking up to a barrow of strawberries: “Your strawberries look good. How do you sell them?” “Four sous a pound.” “May I taste them?” “Certainly.”

He munches and savours two or three berries attentively, as if almost convinced of their merit, puts his hand into his pocket and draws out his purse as if to order, but, tasting another berry as he does so, makes a wry face, and ejaculates, “No, no, they’ll never do at all: they’re too sour,” and moves on to another barrow.

Berry by berry, slowly, but surely, he amasses a meal, as the miser amasses his hoard; and, if he has the luck to get a sou’s worth of bread with which to punctuate his butter, cheese, and fruit tastings, the result is not half a gastronomic failure. Happy, however, the taster whose crisis of penury coincides with the opening of the “Ham Fair”!

Picking petty quarrels for the sake of the substantial festivity that is likely to accompany the making up and betting on its eating capacity are other favourite ways for penniless hunger to satisfy itself.

Catulle Mendès, who made the acquaintance of the Vache Enragée during the brief period when his family were unsympathetic with his aims, tells of a poet, presumably himself, who after thirty-six hours of abstinence succeeded in breaking his fast by making a gingerbread bet:—

“The poet eyed the sweets wistfully, eyed them long.... He was just going away, I know not where, in the direction of the river perhaps, when he heard his name called. It was some one he scarcely knew, a young man also, not a poet, met somewhere by chance.

“‘How hard you look at that gingerbread!’ he said. The poet replied with gravity, ‘It is because I adore it.’

“‘Really?’

“‘Yes, to distraction. There are days when I could eat a franc’s worth at a sitting.’