“One of them swell cocottes, eh?” replied the friend, “she seemed to take quite a shine to you, Bill.”
“Hell,” guffaws the portly one, importantly. “I never give ’em no encouragement.” And the two stumble down the narrow stairs that lead to the rue Pigalle. In the chilly street the portly one fumbles for his cigar case.
“Smoke one of them light ones, Charley,” he says, as the two roll into the cab and the fat one slams the door.
Happily there are other types of Montmartrois than the noctambules and noceurs who frequent the Rat Mort and Tabarin.
Thousands of domestic honest bourgeois live on the Butte whose lives are spent in stores and workshops and in caring for their wives and children. There are many conservative old families besides these whose children are well brought up and well educated, by a rigid economy on the part of parents whose daily bread has been earned by a long and patient fight.
Many of these parents are in the employ of the government; teachers in the public schools and in the bureaus of the administration where they work hard and are but poorly paid. Theirs are the houses which the stranger rarely if ever sees. They remind one of the most domestic and conservative homes of New England. They seem an anomaly in this Latin civilization.
Paris is one of the easiest places in the world in which to empty one’s pocket, and one of the most difficult in which to earn an honest penny. It is the want of money among Parisians and the difficulty of earning it which in late years has deadened much of the extravagant gaiety which once existed. Parisians are content to adapt their pleasures to their purses.
There are scores of men in Montmartre who began life talented beyond the average in the arts, and who have sunk by idleness into poverty and oblivion. Talent alone is not sufficient; one must improve it and drive it, and many of these long-haired velvet-cloaked geniuses of the Butte are too lazy by nature to do this. Instead, they adopt a genre of their own, and despise all other schools of art, never departing from their methods in spite of the fact that their incomprehensible creations seldom bring them a sou. So they wrap themselves up self-satisfied in their cloaks, go through life without a hair-cut, tell you all other art is rot—and starve.
This afternoon I followed one of these dream painters to his studio. The way led up a crooked street, down a narrow alley, into a court full of rubbish, up a flight of dingy stairs, down into another court (this one as dark as the stairs), up another rickety flight, and so to his door.
A feeble light struggled through the cobwebbed panes of the studio skylight, and the room was in a state of dirt and disorder. Tumbled in one corner were a lot of unfinished canvases, and dumped in another was a pile of unwashed dishes. A dirty divan canopied after the fashion of the Roman emperors served as a bed of state for the great man.