The free atmosphere which surrounded his wooden shop apparently inspired the artist in leather with a passion for joyous rhymes and a love of literary works, together with a certain fund of satire which attracted men of letters towards him.
The most celebrated Paris cobbler of the eighteenth century was Henry Sellier, whose shop stood in the Rue Quoquereau, to-day the Rue Coq-Héron. This shop was a vile hut of rotten planks, the roof of which, a piece of oil-cloth held up by a couple of broom-handles, was riddled like a sieve. Nevertheless, the proprietor wrote spirited verse, and the success of his poems was such that Louis XIV. received a copy of them, together with their author, in his château at Fontainebleau. The effusions of Sellier, moreover, gained the approbation of Fontenelle, whose good opinion brought them greatly into fashion, and even excited the jealousy of contemporary poetasters. One of Sellier’s critics published a couplet charging him with being assisted by famous collaborators; to which the cobbler, who, whether poet or not, was always ready with a repartee, penned in reply another couplet to the effect that the absence of wit and every other quality from the verses of his accuser sufficiently proved that he, at least, wrote everything himself.
In 1789 the cobbler’s shop promptly and proudly bore aloft the tricolour cockade; it became a rendezvous for patriots, and a political cabinet in which more than one great popular resolution was passed. When the legislative assembly had declared that the country was “in danger,” all the young shoemakers hastened to enlist; the paternal artists in leather offered their children to France. In those battalions of volunteers which were sometimes disdainfully described as an army of “vagabonds, tailors and cobblers,” the last-named contingent, a numerous one, fought heroically enough.
Under the Restoration the hut of the cobbler was a political and secret rendezvous for the Bonapartists and the Republicans. Much whispering and much writing went on there; many a song, penned by a literary cobbler, issued thence in manuscript, to travel rapidly from workshop to workshop and inflame the political sentiments of partisans. After 1830 the cobbler openly showed his disapprobation of the citizen royalty. The interior of his shop was completely papered with political caricatures; one manuscript satire or cartoon, torn down by the police to-day, was succeeded by another to-morrow. The police, however, were so vigilant that the cobbler at length found it advantageous not to meddle too much with politics, and developed a tendency for frequenting cheap taverns, in which his songs[{267}] and conversation procured him a satisfactory measure of admiration. He did not become a drunkard, but he sought inspiration in moderate potations. A celebrated advocate had lived for sixteen years in the Rue Coq-Héron, and just beneath the walls of his mansion a cobbler had long been accustomed to hammer at the soles of shoes. A provincial visitor one day asked this cobbler whether he knew the advocate in question. “No, sir,” was the imperturbable reply. The advocate overhead was told of it, and, mystified at such an instance of ignorance, came down to reproach his humble neighbour. “You do not know me?” he said, “and yet we have lived sixteen years side by side!” “Just so,” answered the cobbler, without the least embarrassment; “you have been next door to me for sixteen years, and have not once asked me to drink with you.”
Among the shops and other establishments that have disappeared from Paris may be mentioned the ancient “café,” properly so-called, where coffee was served but smoking forbidden, and the “café estaminet,” where smoking was permitted. Every café is now a café estaminet; though it is the latter term, not the former, which has gone out of use. The serving of beer at cafés was of course an innovation; but the drinking of beer has become so general in Paris that there are now numbers of so-called “brasseries” (literally “breweries,” which these places are not), where beer is the principal if not the only beverage served. In a history of cafés the introduction of music and the development of the café concert—the French music-hall—would have to be noted. Of late years, too, music of a certain kind—especially the music of the Hungarian gipsies—executed by members of the gipsy race more or less authentic, has been introduced into restaurants.
BOOKSTALLS ON THE QUAI VOLTAIRE.
