That he was once a genius was unquestionable from the evidence of some of his early works. He had been a masterly draftsman and a painter of virility and great richness of color. That is, when he painted, but this he never did so long as he possessed a sou. Many of his subjects I now found difficult to understand, even when he turned them right side up for me.
Some of them seemed prehistoric. Wan wisps of maidens floated dimly through heavy fogs, guided by symbols and illuminated by sacred fires. Some of them had no eyes and trailed their feet along the ground.
This artist was only one of many who cursed the public for their financial appreciation of popular modern art, which he termed “des petites cochonneries!”
There is a large class of poets, painters, sculptors and musicians for whom the wheel of fortune spins capriciously. Their idle hours are spent among their comrades in the cabarets and the little boîtes tucked away in odd corners of Montmartre, where they breakfast and dine, accompanied by their sweethearts.
Of the latter they are a type unto themselves and wholly aloof from the life and night types of the rue Blanche.
Gaston the painter is a disciple of Botticelli, and you find the influence of dress and coiffure of that period asserting itself in the style of clothes and arrangement of hair of his sweetheart, Mariette. With her locks in bandeaux she looks as saintly as a church picture.
Jacques the musician, a composer of sixteenth century pavans and minuets, has dressed the fair Amélie in an old-fashioned frock, cut low about the throat; her pretty face is framed in two curls, and there is a rose in her hair.
Sing, dance and be merry, ye children of the Butte! Ye who have inherited the Paradise of Bohemia, ye who know its every nook and corner, its bright and its dark days, its poverty and its riches! The love and the wealth of camaraderie is yours. To you the rest of the world counts for naught.
To you, Gaston, a health to Mariette. To you, Jacques, a toast to “la Petite Amélie.”
