“No, old.”
“And dead—how?” Caracal asked. “From drink?”
“No, of starvation. She was keeping alive the four children of a neighbor who was palsied; and she killed herself working.”
“Old and poor! but that’s not interesting; it’s only tiresome!”
And he went on with the conversation, in which music, poetry, love, sculpture, and crime made a horrible mixture.
Phil, coming up from the province, was made gloomy by all this noise. These never-ending dissertations made his head turn. It was the invasion of his brain by a world whose existence he had never suspected, of whose virtues and vices he had no idea.
When his work was over, the copains took walks with him through Paris and showed him such “Parisian” places as the Rue Mouffetard and the Rue Saint-Médard.
Paris proper did not count; you had to cross its whole width and go as far as Montmartre to become really Parisian. All had a single ambition—to be the painter of the wretchedly poor, and of street-women, an easy art brought into fashion by a few noisy successes. They initiated Phil to their Paris, to the Paris of the fosses aux lions, of leprous quays, of rag-pickers’ alleys, where children played hide-and-seek behind heaps of refuse. When Phil wished to go and dream by the banks of the Seine, they led him to the banks of the Bièvre, stinking like a charnel-house.
“Hein! Don’t you see it’s beautiful in color?” they said to him. Phil acknowledged, as he sniffed, that the Bièvre diffused an “artistic atmosphere.”
The truth is, Phil soon had enough of such loafing. Of course, he wasn’t a genius like the others—nothing came to him easily. An organism like Socrate, painter-poet-philosopher, was incomprehensible to him. Such a man, doing a colossal work on the Louvre and studying the social question in cafés, seemed great to him. As for himself, he was conscious that he had not such gifts. For him work was necessary, a great deal of work, and he set himself to it resolutely: studies at the life-class, sketches in the street, libraries, museums—he went everywhere and did a little of everything. He prepared ardently for his admission to the studio; he frequented the schools and appeared but seldom at the Deux Magots.