“The Law has smitten me in the name of Bruant: the Law does not know me. Since I have sung, I have gleaned upon the public places, in the streets, twenty-two thousand francs for the poor; and I am ordered to strip off my trousers. There’s justice for you!
“Now on with the music! Twenty francs to pay every time I dare to don the forbidden costume, the costume Bruant. It’s cheap at twenty francs. I don the costume, and I pay.”
The law is effective, it would seem, in preventing Alexandre from appearing publicly in the costume outside of his own cabaret.
Out of the medley of monologists and chansonniers (largely, of course, made up of mediocrities) who practise their professions in the cabarets of Montmartre, several of genuine poetical talent have emerged; and, of these, at least three are characterised by a thoroughly lawless or revolutionary spirit. These three are: Aristide Bruant, who exhibits a reality, a virility, a brutality, a grim humour, a picturesqueness of epithet, a boldness of imagery, and a tragic quality in caricature which make him (in a narrow field) a sort of French Kipling, with an honest devil-may-care quality by the side of which Kipling’s bravado seems fustian; Jehan Rictus, less facile, less humorous, and less insolent than Bruant, but his equal in realism and his superior in sentiment; and Maurice Boukay (retired, and now a deputy), who lacks the grip on reality of Bruant and Rictus, but who atones partially for this lack by a wealth of stirring appeal.
Boukay’s point of view is that of the lettré, the social philosopher, the reformer, the enlightened friend of the poor. His words are words of faith, trumpet-calls from the heights instead of gibes or moans from the depths. They ring true of reasoned and righteous revolt. His Chansons Rouges are neither narrative nor descriptive; not chansons vécues,—that is, chansons based on his own experience,—but symbolic poems,—symbolic in both language and thought, what he himself might call “chansons d’humanité multiple et objective.”
“They were all written,” says M. Boukay in his introduction, “in a complete independence of spirit, at a time when, not yet having entered political life, I listened to the great voice of the people, and endeavoured to seize its hidden meaning.... My master Verlaine said: ‘The chanson of love is blue. The chanson of dreams is white. The chanson of sadness is grey.’ The chanson sociale is red.... It is the colour of the glass of wine that your good heart offers the vagrant to comfort him on the high road of life. It is the colour of the rising sun towards which your ardent, hopeful eyes yearn. It is the most intense hue of the tricolor flag, which lies close to the heart of all the miseries, which waves in the wind of all the liberties.
“‘Stop there!’ exclaims some timorous spirit. ‘Do you not fear, singer of fraternity, to deepen the regrets and inflame the anguish of the people under pretext of describing them?’
AT ALEXANDRE’S