The chiffonnier, however, despised as he is, figures a good deal in literature. A moving drama from the pen of M. Felix Pyat, and a vaudeville by MM. Frédéric de Courcy, Sauvage, and Bayard, have reproduced on the stage his manners and customs. One chiffonnier named Liard passed for a philosopher, and has been treated as such by more than one writer, and by at least one distinguished artist. He had descended from a higher station in life, and had suffered misfortunes. He would come out with Latin sentences on occasion. Scorning the wicker basket, he carried a simple wallet on his shoulder. Having collected his scraps from the gutter, he would pensively study them and draw philosophical reflections therefrom. The chiffonniers, too, sketched by Gavarni are not mindless tramps but profound reasoners.
Let us glance at the character of the Paris rag-picker as represented by a French writer of keen observation. “This chiffonnier,” he says “carries in him the stuff of a Diogenes. Like the latter he is content in his nomadic life, in his endless peregrinations, in his ragged independence. He regards with infinite contempt the slaves who are shut up from morning till night in a workshop, or behind a counter. Let others, mere living machines, measure out their time by the hands of the clock, he, the philosophical rag-picker, works when he likes, rests when he likes, without recollections of yesterday or thoughts of the morrow. If the north wind is icy, he warms himself with a few glasses of camphor, or a cup of petit noir; if the heat inconveniences him, he throws off part of his rags, lies down beneath the shadow of his basket, and goes to sleep. If he is hungry, he hastens to earn a sou or two, and then feasts like a Lucullus on bread and Italian cheese. If he is ill, that matters nothing to him. ‘The hospital,’ he says, ‘was not built for dogs.’ Diogenes threw away his basin; the chiffonnier has no less a disdain for the goods of this world. It was a drunken chiffonnier, uncoifed by his own lurchings, who addressed to his battered felt hat, lying on the ground, this apostrophe full of logic: ‘If I pick you up, I fall; if I fall, you will not help me up again. I shall leave you!’ Subjected to all kinds of privations, the chiffonnier is proud because he feels himself free. He treats with haughtiness even the rag merchant to whom he brings the sheaves which he has gathered, and from whom he occasionally receives slight advances. ‘If you don’t want to buy of me, well and good; I shall go elsewhere,’ he says, making a gesture as if to depart. Through the multitudinous holes in his coat his pride is visible. He will say to the great of the earth: ‘Get out of my daylight.’”
The Chiffonnier de Paris, Felix Pyat’s drama, first produced at the Porte-Saint-Martin Théâtre in 1847, is admirable not only for its story and its dramatic power, but also for the fidelity with which it reproduces the life of the rag-picker. Let us glance at this piece, in which Frederick Lemaître, as the chiffonnier, achieved so great a triumph. In the prologue are represented two chiffonniers, who happen to meet on the Quai Austerlitz, lantern in hand, for it is evening. These men have begun life very differently. One has assumed the crook and basket after having recklessly squandered his patrimony. He has {363} known the most sybaritic luxury, and now, in the position to which he has sunk, feels a disgust for life and wishes to have done with it. The other has never known anything but rags and tatters. Just as the former is going to leap into the dark waves of the Seine, which splash at his feet, his comrade, though drunk and scarcely able to stand, suspends his hiccoughs and rushing towards him prevents the accomplishment of the fatal purpose. Then he reasons with the would-be suicide, and his bacchanalian eloquence prevails with the wretch, who, in a paroxysm of despair, cries: “No, I will not kill myself—but I will kill!” At that moment a bank cashier, laden with money, passes by. The excited chiffonnier springs forward, seizes him by the throat, assassinates him, robs him, and flies. Father John, as the drunkard is called, has tried to prevent the tragedy, but the murderer, with a blow from his fist, has sent him rolling in the mud. When he gets up, sobered by the horrors of the moment, he hears the sound of an approaching patrol, and escapes in order to avoid unjust suspicion. And now the curtain rises. Twenty years meanwhile have elapsed. Father John, a virtuous and pensive rag-picker, has not moistened his lips with wine since that fatal night, of which the memory pursues him like a nightmare. In expiation for the drunken fit which prevented his staying the murderer’s hand, he has set himself the task of watching over the daughter of the victim, Marie Didier, left alone and penniless in the world. Marie occupies a little room, bare of furniture, and near the sky, and here she struggles for a livelihood with her needle. She has nothing to divert her weary life but the visits of her neighbour, Father John, who occupies the adjoining room, both apartments being exhibited on the stage. The first scene shows us on one side Marie toiling at a ball-dress which she has to finish for one of her customers, and on the other the chiffonnier starting out upon his nocturnal explorations. It is the last night of the Carnival, and the streets resound with songs and laughter. Marie, as she stitches on and on, dreams of the pleasures which beneath the gauze-like garment she is preparing the rich wearer will experience, and then, in a moment of childish playfulness, tries whether the narrow corset will fit her own slender and graceful waist. As she is looking at herself sideways in the glass a number of young girls come trooping gaily upstairs into the room, disguised in different fancy costumes. They are Marie’s companions and fellow-workers, who, at the risk of having no bread to eat during Lent, are revelling in the Carnival. Laughing, singing, dancing, they would drag Marie to the ball. She has no costume? they say. Then let her wear her customer’s. She is surrounded, and despite a partial resistance is dressed in the twinkling of an eye. Timid in her beautiful attire, she allows herself to be carried off by the friendly revellers, and just afterwards Father John comes back from his midnight prowl, and proceeds to examine the contents of his basket. His reflections as he turns over the different and multitudinous objects, now a letter beginning: “Dearest Angel,—My blood, my life, my blood, my soul, I will sacrifice all for you”—now a printed police ordinance, “Rag-pickers are forbidden to tear placards from these walls”—now the fragment of a pie—form one of the most admirable passages in the play. Towards the end of the examination, as he is raking about with his crook, he comes across a little bundle of thousand-franc notes, ten in number. “What poor devil has lost these?” he exclaims. The idea of appropriating the treasure never once occurs to him. “If there is an honest reward to be had,” he says, “I shall buy a new basket.” Henceforth he will not close his eyes until he has discovered the possessor.
To return to Marie. The stage is transformed into a sumptuously decorated saloon. Around a table sparkling with wax tapers and crystals the joyous companions of Henri Berville are performing the obsequies of his bachelorhood, for he is shortly to be married. Henri alone resists the general gaiety. He neither eats nor drinks, and the champagne bubbling in the glass or discharging its corks against the ceiling is powerless to relieve his melancholy. Suddenly the door opens and the band of laughing grisettes who have carried off Marie from her dreary room enter to the movement of a polka. Marie follows them, but feels ashamed and bewildered; so much so that she crosses her hands over her mask as though it did not sufficiently disguise her. Her companions, however, are ready enough to lift their masks to anyone who will admire their neat little noses or roguish eyes; and presently one of the guests fastens himself on to the bashful Marie, and carries his insolence so far as to unmask her. In trying to escape, moreover, from his violent hands she tears a part of that precious robe which a year’s toil would scarcely pay for. Henri Berville interposes and indignantly reproaches his friend with such behaviour. The friend replies with insolence, and a duel becomes inevitable. Marie, meanwhile, half mad with shame and {364} fear, has fled. During her absence a mysterious woman has penetrated into her chamber and deposited on the bed an infant. This woman had been paid to kill the innocent child, but shrinking at the last moment from so great a crime, has simply got rid of it as best she could. The fee she had received was ten thousand francs, and this was the sum, in bank-notes, which the rag-picker had discovered at the end of his crook. In her eagerness to escape she had lost the precious paper. Now Marie enters the room with her torn dress, still deeply vexed at the affront she has received. But if she has been grossly insulted, she has likewise found a noble defender; and for this young man, as brave and generous as his companion was cowardly, she begins to feel the flame of an impossible love, which simply mocks her, whilst a thousand regrets disturb her gentle breast. How can she replace this torn dress? In despair she determines to put an end to her life. But, on the point of doing so, she hears a plaintive cry in the room. She goes to the bed and discovers the child. The sight of it changes her resolution, and when Father John appears he finds his protégée nursing the little one whom she proposes to adopt. In a later scene Marie pays a visit to the mansion of Baron Hoffman in order to present her bill to Mademoiselle, the baron’s daughter. The little dressmaker is very ill received, and tries to excuse her importunity by explaining the circumstances in connection with the child she has to support—at which the daughter seems strangely disquieted and the father enraged. The truth is that Mlle. Hoffman herself has brought this child into the world, and has confessed her shame to the baron, who thereupon wished to get rid of the little creature for a very particular reason. Baron Hoffman is the rag-picker who assassinated Marie’s father twenty years before. For the whole world he would not have had an obstacle arise to the marriage of his daughter with Henri Berville; nor is his anxiety on this point unintelligible. Henri Berville is the son of the banker whose cashier the ex-rag-picker has killed, and with whom, subsequently, he has entered into partnership. Dreading every moment of his life that some traces of his crime may be discovered, he wishes, by marrying his daughter to the banker’s son, to identify the interests of Henri Berville with his own. From what is said during her visit {365} to Mlle. Hoffman by the unsuspecting Marie, who does not dream that she is addressing the mother of the foundling, the baron sees that his grandchild is not dead. The woman who has already received one fee of ten thousand francs is now presented with another of like amount, and this time she executes her mission to the letter. The infant is found murdered in Marie’s room. Marie is arrested on suspicion and imprisoned, and Father John swears to discover the true assassin. Fortune assists him. He discovers the owner of the bank-notes in his possession, visits her, perceives her guilt, and, working partly upon her cupidity, partly upon her fear, obtains from her a compromising letter. Then, armed with damnatory evidence, he calls upon Baron Hoffman, who, recognising him, gets his lackeys to make him drunk. An abstinence of twenty years has not destroyed his liking for wine, and he now in a weak moment sacrifices so unreservedly to Bacchus, that the baron has no difficulty in wresting from him as he lies inebriated the documentary evidence of his guilt. Instead of accuser he has now become the accused, and Baron Hoffman has him arrested for complicity with the murderer of the bank cashier. Having ridded himself of this dangerous witness, the baron goes to Saint-Lazare to see Marie, who is in detention there, and manages to make her believe that she will be the cause of Henri Berville’s ruin by preventing his marriage with Mlle. Clara Hoffman. Between Marie and Henri an undeclared passion already exists. Since their first meeting at the masked ball, Henri has sworn that he will marry her and no one else; for indeed he has never loved Clara, whose hand was forced upon him, and who already has another less chivalrous lover, as events have only too painfully proved.
Marie, deceived by the baron’s representations, now resolves to sacrifice herself to Henri’s welfare, and signs a false confession which has been prepared for her, and by which she lays claim to a crime of which she is guiltless. Meanwhile Father John, brought before the commissary, is concerned with nothing but the demonstration of Marie’s innocence. He speaks with such eloquence and grief, his accents are so real and heartrending, that the hesitating magistrate consents to make experiment of a proof which the chiffonnier proposes. “Lend me thirty thousand francs!” he cries. At this demand everyone present thinks him insane, with the exception of Henri, who promptly furnishes the loan. With the aid of this sum the chiffonnier obtains from the murderess of Clara’s child conclusive evidence of Marie’s innocence and the baron’s guilt. Hoffman is brought to justice, and no obstacle remains to the union of Marie and Henri Berville. “But how can we reward devotion like yours?” ask Henri and his friends of Father John; who, a true chiffonnier to the last, replies, “Give me a new basket!”
CHAPTER XXXV.
THE BOHEMIAN OF PARIS.
Béranger’s Bohemians—Balzac’s Definition—Two Generations—Henri Mürger.
ANOTHER extremely interesting type of character in Paris—likewise of the vagrant nature—is the Bohemian. According to the definition of a French lexicographer the Bohemian is “a gay and careless man who laughingly endures the ills of life.” Béranger has written a charming poem upon the Bohemians of his day—describing the wandering and eccentric life of bronzed-faced, brilliant-eyed men of athletic stature, with their free amours and their romantic slumbers, during summer nights, beneath the canopy of heaven. But Béranger did not dream of any analogy between poets or artists in search of a supper and a cheap bed, and those simple mendicants whose existence he idealised. The comparison, however, soon began to assert itself. A new sense, peculiar and fascinating, was given to the word Bohemian; and George Sand, the first writer who seems to have applied it, finishes her novel entitled “La Dernière Aldini” with the exclamation, “Vive la Bohème!” Balzac, in his “Prince de la Bohème,” presents an admirable definition of the intellectual Bohemians. “They are young men,” he writes, “of any age over twenty, but not yet in their thirtieth year; men of genius in their respective walks of life, little known hitherto, but who will make themselves known and conquer fame. In this class {366} you may find diplomatists who could overthrow the projects of Russia if supported by the power of France. Authors, too, administrators, warriors, journalists, artists, belong to the order of Bohemians.” A less flattering notion, however, of the Bohemian is given by Xavier de Montépin, who in his “Confessions d’une Bohême” describes the adventurer thus: “A lost child of this great Paris, where all the vices have temples and all the bad passions altars and priests, the Bohemian cultivates, with dangerous skill, the worse side of human nature. Sometimes he is really clever and succeeds in deceiving the whole world, which for a moment accepts him. Then he is brilliant and proud, delicately gloved and fastidiously shod; he has horses, mistresses, gold. Of this lying edifice, so elaborately constructed, not one stone, perhaps, will to-morrow rest upon another.” It is to be hoped that Montépin was, in this case, generalising from a few very bad specimens.
Like his counterpart in London, the Bohemian of Paris has usually long to wait for his hour of triumph. He has to pass through years of struggles and privations, to hunger and to thirst. He does not surrender, however; for he has an ardent faith in himself, and never loses the sheet-anchor of hope. The life he leads has, moreover, its seductive side, without which the bravest soul could not support it—hours of delightful illusion, the pleasures of study, the buoyant companionship of others engaged in the same warfare, and a free vent for the explosive gaieties of youth. Then there are the periods of discouragement and anguish, the unkindnesses of friends, the physical frame yielding even whilst the spirit defiantly holds out; then, perhaps, despair or even death. Such things as these constitute the chequered life of the Bohemian. The Bohemia of Paris, according to Henri Mürger, is “the stage of artistic life; it is a preface to the Academy, to the hospital, or to the Morgue.” This inevitably reminds an Englishman of the old Grub Street Bohemian, the man of talent or genius who, in a few exceptional instances, struggled on, like Johnson, to greatness, but who, as a rule, thought Fortune had smiled when he could fill the vacuum in his stomach with four-pennyworth of shin of beef; who, after months of toil in his garret, would take his work to the bookseller’s and return with a pocketful of guineas, only to be penniless again on the morrow, to starve for another twelvemonth, and perhaps to end his career, heartbroken and forgotten, in a pauper’s grave.