[Illustration: Suicide of the Latin Quarter]
With the funds which his family provided he lived neither too well nor too ill, working steadily, but gaining little, slowly developing a very real, if not very robust, talent. He completed two romances, contributed more or less regularly to _La Plume_ and the minor reviews and literary weeklies of the Left Bank, which are the easier to enter since contributors are paid nothing at all or very little, and placed an occasional poem and _chronique_ in the daily press. Indeed, everything went well with him up to the moment when his family, disgruntled at his persistency in holding to so unprofitable a calling, deprived him of his income. Then he set out bravely to earn his living with his pen. He besieged editors with copy, but succeeded in placing but few articles; and, when he did place them, he was more often than not kept waiting for his pay, and sometimes defrauded out of it altogether. He tried in vain to find a publisher for either of his two manuscript romances. He did difficult and ill-paid hack-work, collaborating on a translation into French of the Norwegian Strindberg and on an adaptation into French verse of the _Mandragore_ of Machiavelli; and he undertook—oh, the bitter pill!—the task of writing a volume on the _Côte d’Ivoire_, of which he was as ignorant as he was of the borders of the supposititious canals of the planet Mars. Even this concession to mercantilism—beyond which it is not surprising he was unwilling to go—did not suffice to procure him a living. He ran behind two quarters on his rent, and was threatened with eviction. If not actually destitute, he was on the verge of destitution. And yet to those who were familiar with René Leclerc’s proud and sensitive spirit it seems more likely that it was disgust with his lot rather than terror before the approach of want which drove him to kill himself. It was because he held his art so high that he was unwilling to survive its debasement. He had made concessions that he regarded as enormous,—compromised his ideal, vulgarised his taste, and prostituted (at least so it seemed to him) his talent. It was too much. His last act-could a dying gesture well be finer?—was to reduce to ashes the hateful manuscript of the _Côte d’Ivoire_ and all his other writings that he held unworthy.