René Leclerc, though no mere dawdler, as the twelve sizable manuscripts he left behind him prove, was not endowed with either the mental or the physical endurance to perform the Herculean labour which Balzac both preached and practised. No more was Louis M—— nor D——; no more was the brilliant Gérard de Nerval, who was found one winter morning in the rue de la Vieille Lanterne hanging from a window-bar, nor the precocious Escousse and Lebras, who at nineteen and sixteen respectively killed themselves because a first phenomenal success with a drama was followed by failures; no more was Chatterton in England. Few artists are. With most of them ample time for revery is a prerequisite condition of production. And yet the record seems to show that suicides are relatively rare among poets and artists.
Perhaps this is because the record does not occupy itself with the poets and artists, the Louis M——s and the D——s, who are not known as such to the world at large. Or, perhaps, it is because so many die in the hospital, like Gilbert, Malfilâtre, Hégésippe Moreau, and the Joseph D—— of Mürger’s tale; and so many others are claimed by Charenton, like Jules Jouy, Toulouse de Lautrec, and André Gill (for bedlam is another Bohemian resort), that suicide has no need to assert its rights. In any event, two cardinal qualities of the artistic temperament are distinctly hostile to self-destruction; namely, faith in the sure emergence and supremacy of genius, and a Hamlet-like irresolution that prefers pouring out woes on paper to ending them by an energetic trigger-pull.
The despair of the victims of the _misère en habit noir_, who are less able to sustain themselves by faith and who are more capable of decisive action, is, like their dress, much blacker and more austere; and suicides are far commoner among them.
[Illustration: THE PONT DU CARROUSEL AT NIGHT]
“_If there is a fill of tobacco among the crew, for God’s sake pass it round and let us have a pipe before we go._”—ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
“_‘Lord, my dear,’ returned he, with the utmost good humour, ‘you seem immensely chagrined; but, hang me, when the world laughs at me, I laugh at all the world, and so we are even.’_”
“_Stupeur du badaud, gaîté du trottin, Le masque à Sardou, la gueule à Voltaire, La tignasse en pleurs sur maigres vertèbres Et la requimpette au revers fleuri D’horribles bouquets pris à la poubelle, Ainsi se ballade à travers Paris Du brillant Montmartre au Quartier-Latin Bibi-la-Purée, le pouilleux célèbre, Prince des crasseux et des Purotains._”