He may, quite regardless of his bent, hawk toys in the street on fête days, play the races (under sealed orders) for a friend too busy to attend, fish tadpoles in the suburbs for the reptiles of menageries, help out a small shopkeeper with his book-keeping, back envelopes for a big bazaar, perform the duties of a valet under the euphuistic title of secretary, and advertise wares by demanding them insistently where they are not kept. He may even make himself a printer’s, house painter’s, mason’s, blacksmith’s, or carpenter’s assistant, a market porter, or a _déménageur_ (mover). In all these contingencies, however, the immediate need having been satisfied, he takes up again his normal autonomous existence. He has not bound himself to lasting servitude. He has not sold his soul, and it is a rare thing that he is seriously demoralised by his half-humorous concessions. On the other hand, he has touched life at new points, deepened his sentiments, broadened his human sympathies, and lifted his horizon without lowering his ideal.
“Implacable sausage!” cries the author of _Le Dimanche d’un Jeune Homme Pauvre_. “We do not give sufficient credit to the influence of the hog on literature! I know men of letters _en route_ for the Academy who ate kilometres of _boudin_ [blood pudding] during the hard years of their novitiate.” This is merely a highly concrete way of saying that the French Bohemian is much less exercised over the savouriness of food than over its staying power. The problem he has to solve oftenest is not how most to tickle his palate, but how to give his system the maximum of bracing at the minimum of expense. To the solution of this problem, the _Montmartrois_ brings an address that is amazing. So long as he can keep in the good graces of his _restaurateur_ or of his butcher, baker, grocer, and sausage-man by painting handsome portraits of them and of their families or by flooding them with inscribed copies of his poems, the equation is a simple one, and all goes easily enough. But when the inevitable day of reckoning comes for him, when credit is withdrawn, and all relations with these well-nigh indispensable individuals are incontinently snapped; when, furthermore, he has dined with his friend the interne, J——, at the hospital table with his friend the sergeant, K——, in the sub-officers’ mess, and with his former classmates, the Baron Y—— and the leather merchant X——, in their homes, and when he has made the round of the _cénacles_ at which he is welcome for the verses he recites, the stories he tells, or the songs he sings,—then the simple equation becomes an affected quadratic one, and a lugubrious change comes over the spirit of his dreams. Then bread and _boudin_, bread and cheese, bread and a sou’s worth of the meat kept for dogs, or bread helped down with a glass of _vin ordinaire_ at the corner wine-shop, are the most that he can hope to obtain, unless, like Zola, he takes to snaring sparrows on the house-top, and roasting them, spitted on a curtain rod, by way of a brochette.