Paris and the Social Revolution: A Study of the Revolutionary Elements in the Various Classes of Parisian Society by Alvan Francis Sanborn

Author:Alvan Francis Sanborn [Sanborn, Alvan Francis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, Religion & Spirituality, New Age, History, Fiction & Literature
ISBN: 9781465575821
Google: N3r6nQEACAAJ
Goodreads: 9155787
Publisher: Library of Alexandria
Published: 2021-02-24T05:00:00+00:00

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THE persons organically connected with the University of Paris—the students and the professors—are only the nucleus, the rallying-point, so to speak, of the intellectual population of the Latin Quarter. About them, and quite as numerous as the thousands the university at any one time enrolls, are gathered those students in the largest sense of the word—painters, sculptors, architects, poets, novelists, critics, journalists, historians, philosophers, philologists, scientists, inventors, and bibliophiles—who need the help of lectures, museums, laboratories, and libraries in their daily tasks, or who, dependent on that indefinable something called atmosphere for productiveness, can hardly conceive being at their scholarly or artistic best anywhere in the world but in this particular corner of it which has given them their training and inspiration.

About the university as a centre are also grouped those alumni who, quite independently of their callings, cling to the Quartier as a cockney clings to the town for reasons gay or serious, trivial or weighty, fantastic or rational,—attachment to a lodging, a café, a club, a restaurant, to the Luxembourg Gardens or the quays of the Seine, to book-stalls or shops of antiquities, to a chum or a mistress,—from any of the various motives of habit, taste, sentiment, or passion.

Finally, the Quartier retains those alumni who, cut off (whether by the achievement of a degree or the failure to achieve one) from the convenient parental remittances, are dismayed by the risks of a penniless plunge into the great, unfamiliar world. In the Quartier, where they are known, they can count on a modicum of credit for a modicum of time from tailors, restaurateurs, and landlords, and on the unusurious loans of a little knot of friends. “One knows,” wrote Richepin, apropos of this matter, in his Etapes d’un Réfractaire, “that at such an hour in the rue de l’Ecole de Médecine or at the head of the rue Monsieur-le-Prince an easy-chair holds out its arms to him, a tobacco pouch opens its heart to him, a friend lets him bellow his verses. These are so many consolations. What do I say? They are so many resources,—sometimes the only ones.”

In the Quartier, with these resources, a fellow will not starve in one month or two, as he might elsewhere. Besides, if the worst comes to the worst, there is the familiar and friendly Seine near by and the sweet, clean “Doric little morgue,” where he is bound to feel at home and where he will be speedily recognised.

A good proportion of these post-graduate denizens of the Quarter are either by choice or by necessity Bohemians. To the former class (Bohèmes par goût) belongs my friend B——, whom for conveniences’ sake we will call Berteil,—Gustave Berteil.

In a dingy hôtel of the rue Racine, just off the Quartier’s highway, the Boulevard St. Michel, in a room which costs perhaps forty francs a month, perhaps forty-five, and which has nothing about it to distinguish it from the room of a student who arrived in Paris yesterday, except for a shelf of original and other editions of the elder French dramatists, M.

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