“Tush! they have books down there, ridiculous printed things to tell them of life! to tell them what other people think of life!... They have museums, dry holes where bits of the dead past are stored in glass cases. They have talk of architecture that is dead and useless architecture—schools are endowed to teach it—nay, schools are endowed to tell of what it used to be.... They hang up armour, and write books about it—about armour!” He laughed loud and long. “They might as well write about cooking-pots and discarded tin cans with holes in them.... They will.... They talk of relics of the past—nay, they worship them—build churches to them. They collect things—coins, postage-stamps, what-not. They will collect spittoons next. They form societies—learned societies to pester each other with things that do not matter. They peer at old pictures that have lost their vital significance, completed their function—build public galleries for them, each room a nightmare of incongruous warring canvases, lost to their original intention over a church’s altar or what not, wrangling together, inadequate, foreign, out of place. As though by the looking upon Cromwell’s bones or Napoleon’s breeches they would learn to rule the world! Students pay to see these things—spend the precious years of youth poring over them, even copying them! The delirious years of youth!... They call it culture. Gods! culture!... To the Latin Quarter, to the professors, dandruff-collared, to the gaping student, life is this dusty dull study of what is dusty and dull and stupid and dead.... We of the Hill of Martyrs, it is we who know what is life. Stand at your doors in our steep streets, climb you up yonder to the top of the hill, up with you to the topmost scaffolding of the preposterous cathedral of the Sacred Heart that is a-building, topped with cupolas that shall stand like giant onions to acclaim the sins of garlic-eating burgess France, and look down—condescend to Paris. Between us and the river, with Latin Quarter beyond, glitter the lights of a different Paris, another world—a Paris that knows as little of us of the hill as of the professors of the Latin Quarter yonder—a Paris of the boulevards, a Paris of the aristocrat and of the burgess—a world that knows little of poetry or of learning, and tries to forget what it knows; a world that despises us as we despise it; that shuns us as we shun it. There the burgess, with sole ambition the desire to best his neighbour, plods in glum respectability his mean inglorious day, yet once in a blue moon struts his holiday, his limbs cramped with lack of use to live, his only law of life a fear of his neighbour’s opinion, his object in life to put a number of coins in a bank, to grow full-bodied in the doing, and marry a wife and reproduce his ignoble species. His furthest ambition to grow very old. God! what a life! Yet is his end like ours who live one long holiday—to die and rot like any lousy beggar, or prince, or cardinal. For the avoidance of this his bank cannot serve—he can write no letter of credit that shall avail him beyond his length of earth.”
“Ay, André—they exist; they do not live,” cried a young fellow of pallid countenance, whose hand, thin, and white, and delicate as a woman’s, shook as he raised his glass of absinthe to his lips.
André Joyeux laughed in his stride:
“Ay, comrades,” said he—“it is we on the Hill of Martyrs who live.... Climb Montmartre, and you are in a rare atmosphere—get you up amongst the scaffolding a-top of it, and you may touch the clouds—the air is light, vivacious, exciting as wine—solemn things and dull talk fall away from you—you must stoop if you would kiss the hand to Paris, stoop to hail her, stoop to see her. Here we condescend to the world. We are amongst the clouds—breathe the air the gods have breathed. We have here no rare inclinations to riot—here life is a riot. Down there they toil and moil all day through, all the months, to snatch infrequent glimpses of life, that they have not the habit to enjoy. Tush!” He laughed. “They call it a holiday! Ho, Ho, Ho! a holiday!... They lie down at the ticking of a clock—sleep at the bidding of their task-masters—awake at the striking of a clock to work their fingers to the bone for a shabby grave. Worse still, work others’ fingers to the bone, even the fingers of woman and child, this pitiful scourged crew, to make rich the brutish vulgarians whom they so fantastically serve. God! what a hell’s stew!... With the darkness they lie down and go to sleep—to awake with the daylight to further toil and moil again. A Russian grand-duke steals their prettiest daughter for a week or more, then takes another. The rich, who are their idols, misuse their beautiful women; so they look up to the rich.... But we! we live all the while. If we’ve a mind to it, we rejoice in the night—we sleep when we will—live whilst we may. Life’s but for a few flitting years at best. These others are so mad they think us mad who know them mad.... If we are mad——”
He stopped a waiter who passed with a tray of tumblers filled with absinthe. His hand shook so that he spilled some liquor as he raised a glass:
“If we are mad, then here’s to madness!”
They roared with laughter, banged their fists upon the board, raised their glasses and drank with him. He emptied the glass and flung it to a waiter.
“If theirs be sanity to huddle in foul dens, feed on the Mad Cow of Hunger, scowl sullenly at life from work-stunned eyes, all to fill the purse of pot-bellied tradesmen, to build with their blood and toil the vulgar habitations of their pretentious vulgarity, then ’twere better to be mad.... And no worse than Sanity.... We too have tasted the flesh of the Mad Cow, but we have not sold our souls for bread, nor our lives to be allowed to rummage on a dunghill.” He held out his hands and grasped the air, adding with hoarse passion: “We live, I say—we live.”
He stood proudly, and gazed at the applause.
They called to him to sing; and he stood there and sang the song that held Paris; and as he sang the refrain, they all burst into the chorus: