Genius, alas, is but poorly paid in this Bohemia! There are so many who can draw, so many who can sing, so many poets and writers and sculptors. To many of the cleverest, half a loaf is too often better than no bread.
You will find often in these cabarets and in the cafés and along the boulevard, a man who, for a few sous, will render a portrait or a caricature on the spot. You learn that this journeyman artist once was a well-known painter of the Quarter, who had drawn for years in the academies. The man at present is a wreck, as he sits in a café with portfolio on his knees, his black slouch hat drawn over his scraggly gray hair. But his hand, thin and drawn from too much stimulant and too little food, has lost none of its knowledge of form and line; the sketch is strong, true, and with a chic about it and a simplicity of expression that delight you. You ask why he has not done better.
THE SATIRIST
“Ah!” he replies, “it is a long story, monsieur.” So long and so much of it that he can not remember it all! Perhaps it was the woman with the velvety black eyes—tall and straight—the best dancer in all Paris. Yes, he remembers some of it—long, miserable years—years of struggles
and jealousy, and finally lies and fights and drunkenness; after it was all over, he was too gray and old and tired to care!
One sees many such derelicts in Paris among these people who have worn themselves out with amusement, for here the world lives for pleasure, for “la grande vie!” To the man, every serious effort he is obliged to make trends toward one idea—that of the bon vivant—to gain success and fame, but to gain it with the idea of how much personal daily pleasure it will bring him. Ennui is a word one hears constantly; if it rains toute le monde est triste. To have one’s gaiety interrupted is regarded as a calamity, and “tout le monde” will sympathize with you. To live a day without the pleasures of life in proportion to one’s purse is considered a day lost.
If you speak of anything that has pleased you one will, with a gay rising inflection of the voice and a smile, say: “Ah! c’est gai là-bas—and monsieur was well amused while in that beautiful country?” “ah!—tiens! c’est gentil ça!” they will exclaim, as you enthusiastically continue to explain. They never dull your enthusiasm by short phlegmatic or pessimistic replies. And when you are sad they will condone so genuinely with you that you forget your disappointments in the charming pleasantry of their sympathy. But all this continual race for pleasure is destined in the course of time to end in ennui!
The Parisian goes into the latest sport because it affords him a new sensation. Being blasé of all else in life, he plunges into automobiling, buys a white and red racer—a ponderous flying juggernaut that growls and snorts and smells of the lower regions whenever it stands still, trembling in its anger and impatience to be off, while its owner, with some automobiling Marie, sits chatting on the café terrace over a cooling drink. The two are covered with dust and very thirsty; Marie wears a long dust-colored ulster, and he a wind-proof coat and high boots. Meanwhile, the locomotive-like affair at the curbstone is working itself into a boiling rage, until finally the brave chauffeur and his chic companion prepare to depart. Marie adjusts her white lace veil, with its goggles, and the chauffeur puts on his own mask as he climbs in; a roar—a snort, a cloud of blue gas, and they are gone!
There are other enthusiasts—those who go up in balloons!