Few of the Bohemians who have been intimately associated with the Quarter during the last twenty-five or thirty years have been able to make shift with their literature or their art alone. In order to keep body and soul together, most have been constrained to resort to compromises which are humiliating and disillusionising, but which are not necessarily demoralising, and which stop a long way this side of absolute surrender. Mallarmé taught English in the _lycées_ nearly all his life, and conducted alone, during a short period, a journal entitled _La Dernière Mode_. Verlaine was long an employee of the _Hôtel de Ville_, had periods of teaching, and even tried his hand at farming. Edmond Haraucourt,[72] Camille St. Croix, Léon Dierx, Emile Goudeau, Canqueteau, and Trimouillat have been at one time or another petty functionaries. Nearly all have dabbled in journalism. The happiest compromise, however, the most independent form of dependence, so to say, has been hit upon by Jacques Le Lorrain, poet and author of _L’Au Delà_, who set up as a cobbler in 1896 in the rue du Sommerard, close by the Cluny Museum.[73]
It is no infrequent thing for the loyal Bohemian to “arrive” too late to profit by his success because his spirit has been imbittered or his constitution ruined by the hardships he has undergone.
“The maimed heart, the heart poniarded in this mute struggle for life,” says Jules Vallès in his _Réfractaires_, “cannot be taken out of the chest and replaced by another. There are no wooden hearts in the market. It remains there, bleeding, the poniard at its centre. Rich one day, famous, perhaps, these victims of obscure combats may perfume their sores if they will, sponge up the blood, wipe away their tears; memory will tear open the wounds, strip off the bandages. A word, a song,—joyous or sad,—will be enough to raise in these sick souls the phantom of the past.”
Jehan Rictus more recently, in his terrible _Soliloques du Pauvre_, has expressed the same thought in another fashion:—
_“Même si qu’un jour j’ tornais au riche Par un effet de vot’ Bonté, Ce jour-là j’ f’rai mett’e une affiche, On cherche à vendre un cœur gâté.”_
The following poem embodies the experience of a Latin Quarter Bohemian whose hard-won victory came too late because his health was gone:—