“Ah, yes, it has been a long journey!” sighs the wife. Her husband corroborates her, as they explain to the patronne of the café and to the cocher that they left their village at midday. Anything over two hours on the chemin-de-fer is considered a journey by these good French people!
As you continue on to your studio, you catch a glimpse of the lights of the Boulevard Montparnasse. Next a cab with a green light rattles by; then a ponderous two-wheeled cart lumbers along, piled high with red carrots as neatly arranged as cigars in a box—the driver asleep on his seat near his swinging lantern—and the big Normandy horses taking the way. It is late, for these carts are on their route to the early morning market—one of the great Halles. The tired waiters are putting up the shutters of the smaller cafés and stacking up the chairs. Now a cock crows lustily in some neighboring yard; the majority at least of the Latin Quarter has turned in for the night. A moment later you reach your gate, feel instinctively for your matches. In the darkness of the court a friendly cat rubs her head contentedly against your leg. It is the yellow one that sleeps in the furniture factory, and you pick her up and carry her to your studio, where, a moment later, she is crunching gratefully the remnant of the beau maquereau left from your déjeuner—for charity begins at home.
[ CHAPTER X]
EXILED
Scores of men, celebrated in art and in literature, have, for a longer or shorter period of their lives, been bohemians of the Latin Quarter. And yet these years spent in cafés and in studios have not turned them out into the world a devil-me-care lot of dreamers. They have all marched and sung along the “Boul’ Miche”; danced at the “Bullier”; starved, struggled, and lived in the romance of its life. It has all been a part of their education, and a very important part too, in the development of their several geniuses, a development which in later life has placed them at the head of their professions. These years of camaraderie—of a life free from all conventionalities, in daily touch with everything about them, and untrammeled by public censure or the petty views of prudish or narrow minds, have left them free to cut a straight swath merrily toward the goal of their ideals, surrounded all the while by an atmosphere of art and good-fellowship that permeates the very air they breathe.
If a man can work at all, he can work here, for between the working-hours he finds a life so charming, that once having lived it he returns to it again and again, as to an old love.
How many are the romances of this student Quarter! How many hearts have been broken or made glad! How many brave spirits have suffered and worked on and suffered again, and at last won fame! How many have failed! We who come with a fresh eye know nothing of all that has passed within these quaint streets—only those who have lived in and through it know its full story.