When he receives his monthly remittance of fr. 208.35, he gives the odd centimes to the first street beggar he meets,—for luck,—and consecrates fifty francs at once to a dinner with one or two of his intimates and the _amie_ of his law-student (?) days, who, still fair, though “fat and forty,” is the prosperous proprietress of a little stationery shop in his street. The balance of the remittance amply suffices him to live thirty days more in his modest fashion and to add a new specimen or two to his collection of books.
I do not know of a person whose life is organised more rationally,—I would say scientically if Gustave did not abhor the word science and all its derivatives; and, in the teeth of the adage which warns us to call no man happy till he dies, I do not hesitate to say that Gustave Berteil is happy, and has been happy from the day of his reconciliation with his sire. Indeed, if I were asked to name the happiest man of my acquaintance, I should answer, “Gustave Berteil,” without a moment’s pause.
Gustave, like the majority of the Bohemians from choice, was a Bohemian by necessity for a time; but the _Quartier_ has always had a sprinkling of brilliant, forceful personalities who have taken Bohemian vows without ever having had to consider the bread-and-butter question.
Such was the deceased artist Henri Pille (associated in his latter days with Montmartre), whose appearance implied utter poverty, but who is said to have had landed property in a southern province which made the fluctuations of the picture market a matter of little concern to him.
Such is, or, perhaps, was, the poet Maurice Bouchor, to whom Richepin dedicated his virile volume, _Les Blasphèmes_. Bouchor, who now devotes almost all his time and energy to the elevation of the working people through reading clubs and the _Universités Populaires_, is regarded by many of his old associates as a renegade from Bohemia. He is confessedly a renegade from many of its livelier and noisier pleasures, as his age and his gentle nature entitle him to be. But he still lives less pretentiously than his means permit, is still “thinking his own thoughts, following the leadings of his own heart, and holding to the realities of life where-ever they conflict with its conventions,” and so has not entirely forfeited his claim, it is to be hoped, to be ranked with the Bohemians of the Quarter.