Glatigny never got entirely free of poverty, and it was of disease produced by hunger and exposure that both he and his wife died.
_O Muse de Montmartre, ouvrière aux doigts fins Qui saurait broder d’or l’azur des Séraphins Et qui daignez sourire aux larmes des poètes, Salut! Salut! pour t’applaudir nos mains sont prêtes._
_Te voici parmi nous, vagues chercheurs de rien, L’un sculpteur, l’autre peintre, un tel musicien, Guettant un idéal parmi les âpres cimes, Songeurs des formes et des rhythmes et des rimes. Te voici parmi nous! Tes levres de corail Nous chantent le couplet sublime du travail._
At the height of his fame the critic Gustave Planche was often without money enough to go to the barber-shop,—if Vallès is to be believed,—and occupied an attic at twenty-five francs a month. He never earned more than four thousand francs a year, and rarely as much as three thousand francs,—a sum which was destitution, nothing more nor less, for a person whose vocation forced him into the world and whose inability to walk necessitated a perpetual outlay for carriage hire.
In a striking passage of his novel, _La Faiseuse de Gloire_, Paul Brulat writes: “An old man approached the desk timidly, and stammered something in a low voice. The editor, annoyed at being interrupted, repelled him with cruel words. ‘Oh, say now, won’t you ever stop coming here begging?’ The old man moved off with a senile shake of the head. He bore a great name in literature. He was called Villiers de l’Isle-Adam.”
Henry Becque, whose _Corbeaux_ was refused by ten theatres before it was accepted by the _Théâtre Français_, “lived on a seventh floor, under the roof,” says his friend and admirer, Henri Bauer. “The furnishings of his single room were an iron bed, an unpainted table, and three straw-bottomed chairs.” And this was long after Becque’s masterpieces had been given a hearing, at a time when he was regarded by a large and influential group of his contemporaries as the greatest French dramatist the last half of the nineteenth century had produced.
Berlioz, Millet, Verlaine, and Hégésippe Moreau ate of the _Vache Enragée_, more or less regularly, all their lives. So have many other artistic natures, not the least worthy and not the least celebrated.