“‘You’re joking. I bet you the franc you can’t eat as many as you say.’
“‘I take you up,’ cried the Parnassien, with starveling enthusiasm; and he precipitated himself upon the stall, and devoured the gingerbreads,—would have eaten of them for still greater, for enormous, sums,—taking pains to choose the pieces without almonds, which were poorer in quality, but which were bigger for the price. It was thus that he did not die of hunger.”
It is said that Ibsen in his early days of poverty before the publication of Brand made it an invariable rule to take a long walk at noon, whether he had the money for a meal or not, in order not to lose caste—and hence credit—with his landlady by revealing that he could not dine as often as every day. Similarly the Montmartre Bohemian displays a fine pathetico-humorous ingenuity in making others believe he has eaten when he has not, and even—supreme prestidigitation!—in making himself believe it: as when he passes the day in bed or puts his watch back to cheat his appetite; when he takes his déjeuner in the middle of the afternoon, not only to get a dinner at the price of a déjeuner, but to afford himself the illusion of having both; or when he makes the Heaven-sent apéritif that should precede or the gratuitous cigar that should follow a dinner, stand him in the stead of the dinner itself.
His so-called affectations and poses—bizarre accoutrement
MONTMARTRE TYPES and outlandish speech—are, in the last analysis, so many devices for cheap living, so many expedients for disguising the completeness of his destitution from his fellows and from himself, so many talismans for metamorphosing a hard necessity into an idiosyncrasy of genius, or so many modes of whistling, so to speak, to keep up his courage. Thus Goudeau, under the stress of exceptional ill-hap, consecrated himself solemnly to playing practical jokes in a phalanstère; and the rotund and rippling Raoul Ponchon flaunted a splendid Breton costume at the very time he had nothing better than a wash-house to sleep in.
If the Montmartrois carries his hat in his hand with a distrait, philosophical air, it is certain that the last piece of head-gear Providence has vouchsafed him is either too large or too small for his head. If he speaks feelingly of his old aunt, he is referring indubitably to the pawn-shop, whose quotations are of far more moment to him than are those of the Bourse. If you detect him in a railway station, waiting more than half an hour for a train, it is that the shelter of the café has been, for some reason or other, temporarily denied him. And, if he appears more than half a mile from his lodging in dressing-gown and slippers, with a salad or a bunch of radishes under his arm, it is either because dressing-gown and slippers are, for the nonce, the sum of his wardrobe or because he has put on the dressing-gown to match compulsory slippers or the slippers to match a compulsory dressing-gown. You may be sure he has carried the salad or radishes ever since he set out, and that he will renew them when they have become too withered to serve his deceitful end.
THE REAL MONTMARTRE