Old and New Paris: Its History, Its People, and Its Places, v. 1

Constantly engaged in political agitation, the students of Paris bore a formidable part in the Revolution of 1830. On the 26th of July the famous Ordonnances were issued. The same day secret meetings were held by the students, at which they resolved to take up arms. In the evening, at the Chaumière ball, the quadrilles were stopped in virtue of the new decrees. A thrill of indignation ran through the assembly. The orchestra played the Marseillaise, and all present sang it in chorus. Hands were grasped, and vows uttered to conquer or die for liberty. The day afterwards intrepid students denounced the ordonnances in the public streets and called the citizens to arms. The pupils of the Polytechnic School passed the night in improvising implements of war, and with Vanneau, a bold spirit, at their head, scaled the walls and hurried to the barricades, where the students of the capital were mingled with the people. Already several had fallen dead. One student of medicine, named Papu, seeing his column, composed of youths and working men, disperse before a murderous musketry fire, sprang forward and cried – “I will show you how to die!” He was almost shattered to pieces, though he managed before expiring to gasp an exhortation to his comrades to continue the struggle. Rennes, his native town, honoured him with a monument. At the attack on the Hôtel de Ville another medical student, Labarbe, had both his legs broken, dying two days afterwards from the effects of the amputation, which he had undergone with a pipe in his mouth. Many a deed of heroism was done at this juncture by the Paris students, fighting like the populace for a Republic, which they did not obtain, and for which a disappointing compromise was furnished in the person of Louis Philippe.

The political history, however, of the Paris students is too formidable to trace in anything like detail. In modern times these once ardent youths have shown themselves comparatively indifferent to politics, and have sought diversion from their studies rather in the cigar than in the sword or musket.

The Paris student’s general history, like that of everyone and everything French, consists largely of anecdotes. One of the best is a legend of a medical student who was not accustomed to pay his landlady. Tired at length of waiting for her money, she paid him a visit at his rooms. The student, forewarned, received her with perfect self-composure. “Sir,” she exclaimed without circumlocution, as she crossed his threshold, “pay me or go.” “I prefer to go,” was the reply. “Very well then; go at once.” “Precisely, madame; and I shall go all the faster if you will consent to assist me.” Thereupon he went to his chest of drawers, and from the top drawer took out a large skeleton. “Would you,” he said, “be kind enough to place this at the bottom of my portmanteau?” “What is it?” cried the lady, retreating a few paces. “What is it? Why, it is my first landlady. She had the indiscretion to demand three quarters’ rent which I owed her, and then – mind you don’t break it. It is No. 1 in my collection.” “Sir!” exclaimed the lady, turning pale. The student, without replying, opened another drawer, and extracted a second skeleton. “This,” he said quietly, “is my landlady of the Rue de l’École-de-Médecine, a most admirable woman, who, in like manner, had applied to me for two quarters’ rent. Place it carefully on the other – it is No. 2. This,” continued the student, “is No. 3, an excellent woman, whom I had ceased to pay. Let us now pass on to No. 4.” The landlady fled, and her tenant was never thenceforth inconvenienced with applications for rent.

CHAPTER XXXIV

THE RAG-PICKER OF PARIS

The Chiffonnier, or Rag-picker – His Methods and Hour of Work – His Character – A Diogenes – The Chiffonnier de Paris.

PERHAPS the most distinct type of character in Paris is the chiffonnier. Every evening, towards eight o’clock in the summer, and somewhat earlier in the winter, the streets of the capital are scoured by a class of individuals of both sexes, clad in sordid garments, who carry on their back a wicker basket, in their left hand a lantern, and in their right a stick with an iron hook at the end. A provincial or a foreigner might ask with curiosity what part these persons, so strangely armed, play in the social system; but Parisians, to whom they have long been familiar, and to whom they are indeed historical, know them as the chiffonniers or rag-pickers. An observer, if he follows one of these wretched adventurers, will see him stop at every dust-heap lying along the thoroughfares, previously to their being cleared away by the city scavengers. He rummages in these heaps, turning their contents over and over, and with the aid of his stick picks up and thrusts into his basket whatever objects will find a sale in his peculiar market. Not content with collecting those rags or chiffons from which he seems to have derived his name, he gathers up old papers, corks, bones, nails, broken glass, human hair, and even cats and dogs, which, contrary to the regulations, have been flung dead into the streets. Some of the more enterprising of these explorers will, in defiance of the law, strip the walls or hoardings of their placards. Occasionally it happens that the rag-picker finds objects of value, silver spoons, jewels, or even bank-notes, which have accidentally got swept into the rubbish. In these cases he is obliged, under the severest penalties, to surrender the treasure-trove to the nearest commissary of police. The old papers and rags are employed in the manufacture of paper and cardboard; the glass is melted again; the bones are turned into animal black; the nails are thrown in with old iron; the cats and dogs are stripped of their skins, and the hair reappears – according to a vivacious, and, let us hope, imaginative writer – upon the heads of the fashionable, in waving tresses or other elegant forms of coiffure. But this human ferret, who may be seen every night at work in the corners of the Paris streets, is only the emissary of a more exalted chiffonnier: the lord of the iron crook, who does not quit his palace, but simply purchases the nightly harvests, which he afterwards “tests,” sorts, and classifies, so as to sell again to the various trades which may have a use for such merchandise. Everything picked up serves some commercial purpose; each of those vile objects unearthed from the dust-heaps is a chrysalis to which industrial science will give an elegant form and transparent wings. The prices paid by manufacturers of paper and cardboard, who are the chief buyers of rag-pickers’ produce, vary from something under a sou per pound for dirty old rags and papers, to five sous for rags of the very best description.

The rag-picker does not exercise too nice a faculty of discrimination whilst filling his basket. The sifting is the business of the “tester,” a special functionary employed to classify the harvest. He evolves order from the chaos of disgusting rubbish which the opulent rag merchant will presently convert into odourless gold. The professional “testers” enjoy but a short career. The scents exhaled by the accumulated abominations which they handle are so many virulent poisons. It is said that even the lamps go out in the horrible dens where they toil.

The chiffonnier who scours the streets is always a miserable object; the master chiffonnier who buys the contents of his basket is often a millionaire, and splashes with his carriage wheels as he returns from the theatre those wretches who next day will go and sell to him what the city has thrown into the gutter.

Upon the rag-pickers of Paris the law, as might be imagined, keeps an eye; and sundry ordinances regulating their profession have at different periods been issued. The oldest of these forbade them to wander in the Paris streets except by daylight, so that they might not be suspected of participation in night robberies and brawls. In the present day the chiffonnier is required, whilst exercising his profession, to wear an official docket, duly numbered, and attached conspicuously to his indispensable basket. The municipal law prohibits him from walking the streets between midnight and five in the morning. As the reaping of the gutter harvest begins at 8 p.m., and the scavengers do not clear the rubbish away till between 7 and 9 a.m., those rag-pickers who have been carried by their explorations too far from home are obliged to pass the interdicted hours in such filthy hovels as are left open for them.

The chiffonniers of Paris can boast a history. They have played a part in their time, and once they were even invested with civil functions, though these functions were of a sad nature. In 1826 M. Delavan commissioned them to kill in the streets all dogs they could find attached to bakers’ and greengrocers’ carts; and they executed the order with downright ferocity. In 1832, when the cholera invaded Paris, they figured amongst the licensed murderers who massacred those luckless persons whom ignorance and superstition had accused of poisoning the fountains. At the same period they smashed a number of newly-invented dust-carts, intended to clear the streets instantly of rubbish, so that they could only explore it at the depôt where it was shot. The rag-pickers won the day. The authorities yielded before their violence and projected the relegated reforms into the future.

No one would expect to find among the Paris chiffonniers a high moral standard; their work can scarcely have other than a degrading influence upon them. Their numbers are recruited as a rule from the most infamous regions of the capital, and from a social stratum only just above that of the vilest criminality. It has often been said that counts and marquises have sunk, by means of wine, cards, and so forth, into the ranks of the chiffonniers, even as a certain fraction of the English aristocracy are popularly supposed, after driving recklessly through life four-in hand, to end their career on the perch of a hansom cab. In London, it is true, such things have happened, and men of title have been known to adopt even less heroic methods of livelihood than that of driving a hackney vehicle for hire; they have – there is at least one contemporary instance – ground barrel-organs. But these are the very rarest exceptions; and in Paris, although it is not theoretically impossible for an aristocrat to find himself reduced to the basket and crook of the rag-picker, such a case would be an exception infinitely rarer still. So disgusting an occupation would be absolutely the last to which a ruined gentleman would resort.

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 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 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 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 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.