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Microbiology For Dummies®
Published by: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street,
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Microbiology For Dummies®
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Table of Contents
Cover
Introduction
About This Book
Foolish Assumptions
Icons Used in This Book
Beyond the Book
Where to Go from Here
Part 1: Getting Started with Microbiology
Chapter 1: Microbiology and You
Why Microbiology?
Introducing the Microorganisms
Deconstructing Microbiology
Chapter 2: Microbiology: The Young Science
Before Microbiology: Misconceptions and Superstitions
Discovering Microorganisms
The Future of Microbiology
Chapter 3: Microbes: They’re Everywhere and
They Can Do Everything
 Habitat Diversity
Metabolic Diversity
The Intersection of Microbes and Everyone Else
Part 2: Balancing the Dynamics of Microbial Life
Chapter 4: Understanding Cell Structure and
Function
Seeing the Shapes of Cells
Life on a Minute Scale: Considering the Size of Prokaryotes
The Cell: An Overview
Scaling the Outer Membrane and Cell Walls
Other Important Cell Structures
Divining Cell Division
Tackling Transport Systems
Getting Around with Locomotion
Chapter 5: Making Sense of Metabolism
Converting with Enzymes
In Charge of Energy: Oxidation and Reduction
Breaking Down Catabolism
Stacking Up with Anabolism
Chapter 6: Getting the Gist of Microbial Genetics
Organizing Genetic Material
Assembling the Cellular Machinery
Making the Right Amount: Regulation
Changing the Genetic Code
Chapter 7: Measuring Microbial Growth
Getting Growth Requirements Right
Observing Microbes
Calculating Cell Division and Population Growth
Inhibiting Microbial Growth
Part 3: Sorting Out Microbial Diversity
 Chapter 8: Appreciating Microbial Ancestry
Where Did Microbes Come From?
Understanding Evolution
Studying Evolution
Classifying and Naming Microbes
Climbing the Tree of Life
Chapter 9: Harnessing Energy, Fixing Carbon
Forging Ahead with Autotrophic Processes
Using the Energy in Light
Getting Energy from the Elements: Chemolithotrophy
Chapter 10: Comparing Respiration and
Fermentation
Lifestyles of the Rich and Facultative
Seeing the Big Picture
Digging into Respiration
Figuring Out Fermentation
Chapter 11: Uncovering a Variety of Habitats
Defining a Habitat
Understanding Nutrient Cycles
Microbes Socializing in Communities
Discovering Microbes in Aquatic and Terrestrial Habitats
Getting Along with Plants and Animals
Tolerating Extreme Locations
Detecting Microbes in Unexpected Places
Part 4: Meeting the Microbes
Chapter 12: Meet the Prokaryotes
Getting to Know the Bacteria
Acquainting Yourself with the Archaea
Chapter 13: Say Hello to the Eukaryotes
Fun with Fungi
 Perusing the Protists
Chapter 14: Examining the Vastness of Viruses
Hijacking Cells
Making Heads or Tails of Bacteriophage
Discussing Viruses of Eukaryotes
How Host Cells Fight Back
Part 5: Seeing the Impact of Microbes
Chapter 15: Understanding Microbes in Human
Health and Disease
Clarifying the Host Immune Response
Relying on Antimicrobials for Treating Disease
Searching Out Superbugs
Knowing the Benefits of Prebiotics and Probiotics
Attacking Viruses with Antiviral Drugs
Chapter 16: Putting Microbes to Work:
Biotechnology
Using Recombinant DNA Technology
Providing Therapies
Using Microbes Industrially
Chapter 17: Fighting Microbial Diseases
Protecting Public Health: Epidemiology
Identifying a Microbial Pathogen
Understanding Vaccines
Part 6: New Frontiers in Microbiology
Chapter 18: Teasing Apart Communities
Studying Microbial Communities
Observing Communities: Microbial Ecology Methods
Getting the Hang of Microbial Genetics and Systematics
Looking for Microbial Dark Matter
Chapter 19: Synthesizing Life
 Regulating Genes: The lac Operon
Designing Genetic Networks
The Synthetic Biologist’s Toolbox
Part 7: The Part of Tens
Chapter 20: Ten (or So) Diseases Caused by
Microbes
Ebola
Anthrax
Influenza
Tuberculosis
HIV
Cholera
Smallpox
Primary Amoebic Menigoencephalitis
The Unknown
Chapter 21: Ten Great Uses for Microbes
Making Delicious Foods
Growing Legumes
Brewing Beer, Liquor, and Wine
Killing Insect Pests
Treating Sewage
Contributing to Medicine
Setting Up Your Aquarium
Making and Breaking Down Biodegradable Plastics
Turning Over Compostable Waste
Maintaining a Balance
Chapter 22: Ten Great Uses for Microbiology
Medical Care: Keeping People Healthy
Dental Care: Keeping Those Pearly Whites Shining Bright
Veterinary Care: Helping Fido and Fluffy to Feel Their Best
 Monitoring the Environment
Making Plants Happy
Keeping Fish Swimming Strong
Producing Food, Wine, and Beer
Science Hacking
Looking for Microbes in Clean Rooms
Producing Pharmaceuticals
Index
About the Authors
Advertisement Page
Connect with Dummies
End User License Agreement

List of Tables
Chapter 4
TABLE 4-1 Differences between Prokaryotes and Eukaryotes
TABLE 4-2 Differences in Phospholipid Structure of Archaea
Chapter 8
TABLE 8-1 Differences in the Fundamental Structure between
Bacteria and Archaea
TABLE 8-2 The Classification of Four Microorganisms
Chapter 15
TABLE 15-1 Functions of Antibody Classes
Chapter 17
TABLE 17-1 Tests Used to Differentiate Gram-Positive Bacteria
TABLE 17-2 Tests Used to Differentiate Gram-Negative Bacteria
Chapter 18
TABLE 18-1 Fluorescent Dyes Used to Label Microbial Cells for
Microscopy
List of Illustrations
Chapter 1
FIGURE 1-1: Types of microorganisms.
Chapter 2
FIGURE 2-1: Pasteur’s experiments that disproved the theory of
spontaneous gener...
FIGURE 2-2: Antibacterial property of the fungus Penicillium.
Chapter 3
FIGURE 3-1: Genetic relationships among life forms on earth today.
FIGURE 3-2: Microbial consortia such as lichen and Pelochromatium
roseum.
FIGURE 3-3: Four types of host–microbe relationships.
Chapter 4
FIGURE 4-1: Cell morphologies.
FIGURE 4-2: Comparison of cell sizes.
FIGURE 4-3: The structure of the phospholipid bilayer.
FIGURE 4-4: The structure of peptidoglycan.
FIGURE 4-5: Structure of Gram-positive and Gram-negative cell
walls.
FIGURE 4-6: (a) The molecules within Gram-positive and Gram-
negative cell walls ...
FIGURE 4-7: The steps involved in cell division.
FIGURE 4-8: Mechanisms of transport across the membrane.
FIGURE 4-9: Flagellum structure and placement on bacterial cells.
Chapter 5
FIGURE 5-1: Lysozyme cleaves its substrate peptidoglycan.

FIGURE 5-2: NAD+/NADH cycling.

FIGURE 5-3: Storage molecules.
FIGURE 5-4: Membrane-bound electron carriers.
 FIGURE 5-5: The citric acid cycle.
FIGURE 5-6: The common structure of all amino acids.
FIGURE 5-7: Nucleotides.
FIGURE 5-8: An example of a hexose and a pentose sugar.
FIGURE 5-9: An example of bending in a fatty acid chain.
Chapter 6
FIGURE 6-1: The structure of DNA.
FIGURE 6-2: DNA replication.
FIGURE 6-3: Different methods of replication on each strand in the
replication f...
FIGURE 6-4: Replication of a circular chromosome.
FIGURE 6-5: Eukaryotic chromosomes.
FIGURE 6-6: Meiosis and mitosis.
FIGURE 6-7: Transcription in bacteria and eukaryotes.
FIGURE 6-8: The three-dimensional structure of tRNA.
FIGURE 6-9: The codons.
FIGURE 6-10: Translation.
FIGURE 6-11: Negative control of gene expression.
FIGURE 6-12: Positive control of gene expression.
FIGURE 6-13: The effects of point mutations.
FIGURE 6-14: Recombination.
Chapter 7
FIGURE 7-1: The method for streaking out isolated bacterial
colonies.
FIGURE 7-2: Serial dilution.
FIGURE 7-3: The Gram stain.
FIGURE 7-4: Cell division by binary fission.
FIGURE 7-5: Growth phases of a microbial culture.
Chapter 8
FIGURE 8-1: Endosymbiosis.
FIGURE 8-2: The tree of life, including endosymbiotic events.
 FIGURE 8-3: Lineages arise due to evolution.
FIGURE 8-4: Ecotypes.
Chapter 9
FIGURE 9-1: The steps of the Calvin cycle.
FIGURE 9-2: The reverse citric acid cycle.
FIGURE 9-3: Chlorophyll a with substitution sites for
bacteriochlorophyll highli...
FIGURE 9-4: Types of phytosynthetic membranes: (a) grana, (b)
lamellae, (c) chro...
FIGURE 9-5: The Z scheme.
FIGURE 9-6: Anoxygenic photosynthesis.
FIGURE 9-7: A Planctomycete cell with the anammoxosome.
Chapter 10
FIGURE 10-1: An overview of respiration and fermentation.
FIGURE 10-2: Classic glycolysis or the Embden-Meyerhof pathway.
FIGURE 10-3: The citric acid cycle.
FIGURE 10-4: Examples of substrate-level phosphorylation.
FIGURE 10-5: The electron transport chain.
FIGURE 10-6: The steps in denitrification.
FIGURE 10-7: The breakdown of lipids and proteins through
respiration.
FIGURE 10-8: The phosphoketolase pathway of heterofermenters.
FIGURE 10-9: The Entner-Doudoroff pathway of ethanol formation.
Chapter 11
FIGURE 11-1: Stratification of a habitat.
FIGURE 11-2: Organic versus inorganic carbon compounds.
FIGURE 11-3: The carbon cycle.
FIGURE 11-4: The nitrogen cycle.
FIGURE 11-5: A biofilm.
FIGURE 11-6: Ocean habitats.
FIGURE 11-7: Soil habitats.
 FIGURE 11-8: Lichen.
FIGURE 11-9: A plant root nodule containing symbiotic nitrogen-
fixing bacteria.
Chapter 12
FIGURE 12-1: The phylogenetic tree of the bacteria.
FIGURE 12-2: Magnetic bacteria.
FIGURE 12-3: Cyanobacteria.
FIGURE 12-4: Anammox bacteria.
FIGURE 12-5: Bacillus thuringiensis endospore with toxin crystal.
FIGURE 12-6: Streptomyces spore formation.
FIGURE 12-7: The phylogenetic tree of Archaea.
FIGURE 12-8: The parasitic Nanoarchaeum living on the cells of
Ignicoccus.
FIGURE 12-9: Sulfur crystals covered in the Sulfolobus (left) and a
closeup of S...
Chapter 13
FIGURE 13-1: Unicellular fungi.
FIGURE 13-2: Types of asexual spores.
FIGURE 13-3: Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (left) and
ectomycorrhizal fungi (righ...
FIGURE 13-4: The ascocarp of a cup fungus.
FIGURE 13-5: The mushroom lifecycle.
FIGURE 13-6: The Plasmodium life cycle.
FIGURE 13-7: Flagellated protists.
FIGURE 13-8: Paramecium.
FIGURE 13-9: Structures and movement in amoeba.
FIGURE 13-10: Cellular slime molds.
FIGURE 13-11: Chloroplast.
FIGURE 13-12: Types of algae.
FIGURE 13-13: Single-celled, colonial, and multicellular green
algae.
 FIGURE 13-14: Diatoms, radiolarians, cercozoans, and
dinoflagellates.
Chapter 14
FIGURE 14-1: Viral structures.
FIGURE 14-2: Uncoating of viral particles during penetration into
the host cell.
FIGURE 14-3: Bacteriophage T4, an example of a lytic phage.
FIGURE 14-4: Stages of infection with a temperate phage.
FIGURE 14-5: The transposable phage Mu.
FIGURE 14-6: The replication cycle of a retrovirus.
FIGURE 14-7: Prion disease.
FIGURE 14-8: Tobacco mosaic virus.
FIGURE 14-9: Restriction enzyme cleavage of a phage genome.
FIGURE 14-10: CRISPR antiviral protection.
Chapter 15
FIGURE 15-1: TLRs of the innate immune system that recognize
PAMPs.
FIGURE 15-2: Activation of T cells and B cells.
FIGURE 15-3: The structure of antibodies.
FIGURE 15-4: Cellular targets of antibiotics.
FIGURE 15-5: Mechanisms of antibiotic resistance.
FIGURE 15-6: The rise and fall of antibiotics to treat Staphyloccous
aureus.
FIGURE 15-7: Inhibition of reverse transcription by nucleoside
analogs.
Chapter 16
FIGURE 16-1: Recognition site and naming convention for the
restriction enzyme E...
FIGURE 16-2: Ligation of two pieces of DNA cut with the same
restriction enzyme.
FIGURE 16-3: Conjugation.
FIGURE 16-4: Homologous recombination of DNA strands.
 FIGURE 16-5: Assembly of long DNA constructs by transformation-
associated recomb...
FIGURE 16-6: Classes of environmental contaminants in order of
ease of breakdown...
Chapter 17
FIGURE 17-1: A flow chart for identification of bacteria based on
staining and c...
FIGURE 17-2: A flow chart for biochemical identification of a Gram-
negative bact...
FIGURE 17-3: Phage typing of a bacterial strain. Clear areas are
shown in black ...
Chapter 18
FIGURE 18-1: Multiple displacement amplification.
FIGURE 18-2: The use of 2D gels and mass spectrometry in
proteomics.
Chapter 19
FIGURE 19-1: The lac operon and controlled induction.
FIGURE 19-2: Engineered protein overexpression in E. coli.
FIGURE 19-3: Bistable switches.
FIGURE 19-4: The repressilator.
 Introduction
The world around us is full of tiny invisible living things that affect
us every day. Diving into the study of that world is what this book
is all about, and we’re happy that you’d like to come along.
Microbiology as a whole can feel overwhelming, but when you
break it down into parts it can be straightforward and even
interesting.
Whether you’re taking a microbiology course for credit or studying
microbiology on your own time, we’ve written this book with you,
the beginner, in mind. This book walks you through the tricky
concepts in microbiology while covering the forms, functions, and
impacts of microbes in nature and on our lives.

About This Book

Microbiology For Dummies is an overview of the material covered
in a typical first-year microbiology course. Some courses cover
more medical, molecular, or environmental microbiology than
others, so we’ve included them all here.
In this book, you find clear explanations of

The characteristics that microorganisms share

The things that make microbes different from one another and
the rest of life on earth
The processes important to microbial life
The diversity of microbial life
How microbes affect us

If you’re a visual learner, you’ll appreciate the many illustrations.

And if you like to organize material into categories, you’ll find the
lists and tables useful. With this book, you’ll be able to explain
 what makes microorganisms unique and identify where and how
they live. You’ll also have the skills to delve into specialized areas
of microbiology that this book covers in an introductory way.
This book is a reference, which means you don’t have to
memorize it — unlike your microbiology course, there is no test at
the end. Use it as a reference, dipping into whichever chapter or
section has the information you need. Finally, sidebars and
sections marked with the Technical Stuff icons are skippable. They
offer a more in-depth discussion of a topic, extra detail, or
interesting cases that are related to the main material of the
chapter.

Foolish Assumptions
We don’t assume that you have any background knowledge in
microbiology except what may be covered in an introductory
biology course. In fact, many of the concepts learned in a biology
course are also presented here, so we don’t expect you to know
much of that, either. We assume that you are new to microbiology
or other science courses where an introduction to microbiology is
beneficial, and we’ve written this will book in a way that will
provide you with the background you need.
The science of microbiology involves knowing a bit of
biochemistry, cell biology, molecular biology, and environmental
science, so we explain those concepts as needed, but you may
like to peruse guides on those topics for a fuller understanding.
Other than that we only assume that you transcend the idea of
microorganisms as “bad” and consider them as important
members of our world, especially because they outnumber us
about 200 million trillion to one!

Icons Used in This Book

 Icons appear in the left margin to draw your attention to things
that occur on a regular basis. Here’s what each icon means:

The Tip icon marks material that’s useful for thinking

about a concept in another way or helping you to remember
something.

The Remember icon highlights concepts that are important

to keep in mind. Often these concepts come up more than
once in the book.

The Warning icon points out places where it can be easy

to get confused. We usually know this because there is
confusion in the general public about the concept or, worse,
in the scientific community. Sometimes the Warning icon
points to areas of debate in microbiology so that you don’t
have to feel confused if other sources disagree with our
explanation.

Nonessential but helpful and interesting information is

marked by the Technical Stuff icon. You can skip these bits of
text if you don’t want to get into the details just yet.

Beyond the Book

In addition to the material in the print or e-book that you’re
reading right now, this book also has some useful digital content,
available on the web.
 Some facts in microbiology are handy to have at your fingertips,
either to study for an exam or to refresh your memory on the
spot. To get the free Cheat Sheet, simply go to www.dummies.com
and search for “Microbiology For Dummies Cheat Sheet” by using
the Search box for tips on identifying microbes, remembering the
basic differences between them, and figuring out the naming
system used in microbiology.
Ever wonder what all the fuss is about fecal transplants or if the
anti-vaccine campaigns are telling you the truth? You can find
articles on these topics and more at
www.dummies.com/extras/microbiology.

Where to Go from Here

We’d like to think that you won’t skip anything, but if you’re
taking a microbiology course right now, then you probably don’t
need an introduction to the topic and can skip Part 1. Even
though each chapter can be read on its own, the material in Part
2 is essential to any student of microbiology and will likely be very
useful when covering more advanced topics.
There are many kinds of microbiology, perspectives from which
will shape how introductory microbiology is taught. For a human
health perspective, focus on chapters in Part 5. For an ecology
perspective, you’ll likely find chapters in Part 3 useful. If you’d like
a reference for specific microorganisms, see Part 4.
No matter where you start or where you end, we hope that you’ll
come away with an appreciation for microbes and a road map for
learning microbiology.
 Part 1
Getting Started with
Microbiology
IN THIS PART …
Get a big-picture view of microbiology, including how
microorganisms impact our lives in ways that we can and can’t
see.
Get acquainted with the history of microbiology from before
people knew that microbes existed to our current use of
sophisticated techniques to study microorganisms.
Gain an understating of the vastness of microbial lifestyles and
how microbes are everywhere living in communities.
Understand microbial diversity and all the different ways these
tiny organisms have figured out to get energy from their
environments.
 Chapter 1
Microbiology and You
IN THIS CHAPTER
Seeing the importance of microbiology
Getting to know microorganisms
Listing the tools used to study microbes

When considering the imperceptibly small, it’s sometimes easy to

lose sight of the big picture. In this chapter, we put the science of
microbiology into perspective for you as it relates to human lives,
as well as how it fits in with the other sciences. The goal is to
give you an idea of the kinds of thinking you’ll use throughout the
rest of the book. Don’t worry, we explain all that pesky
biochemistry and molecular biology as it comes up in each
chapter.

Why Microbiology?
The question of why to study microbiology is a good one — the
impacts of microorganisms on your life may not be immediately
obvious. But the truth is, microorganisms not only have a huge
impact but are literally everywhere, covering all the surfaces of
your body and in every natural and urban habitat. In nature,
microorganisms contribute to biogeochemical cycling, as well as
turnover of material in soil and aquatic habitats. Some are
important plant symbionts (organisms that live in intimate contact
with their host, with mutual benefit for both organisms) whereas
others are important pathogens (organisms that cause disease) of
both plants and animals.
 Although not all microorganisms are bad, the treatment and
prevention of the diseases caused by bacteria, viruses, protozoa,
and fungi have only been possible because of microbiology.
Antibiotics were discovered through microbiology, as were
vaccines and other therapeutics.
Other applications of microorganisms include industries like
mining, pharmaceuticals, food and beverages, and genetics.
Microorganisms are important model organisms for studying
principles of genetics and biochemistry.
Many professions require you to learn some microbiology. You
may already know this because you’re in a micro class as part of
the training for one of them. These professions include but are
not limited to

Nursing
Medicine
Clinical laboratory work
Pharmaceuticals
Brewing and winemaking
Environmental engineering

Introducing the
Microorganisms
So, what are microorganisms exactly? Microorganisms are actually
a diverse group of organisms. The fact that they’re micro isn’t
even true of all microorganisms — some of them form
multicellular structures that are easily seen with the naked eye.
There are three main kinds of microorganisms, based on
evolutionary lines (see Figure 1-1):
Bacteria are a large group of unicellular organisms that
scientists loosely group as Gram-negative and Gram-positive,
but in reality there are many different kinds.
Archaea are another group of unicellular organisms that
evolved along with bacteria several billion years ago. Many are
extremophiles, meaning that they thrive in very hot or very
acidic conditions. Archaea are more closely related to
eukaryotes than to bacteria.
Eukaryotic microorganisms are a structurally diverse group
that includes protists, algae, and fungi. They all have a
nucleus and membrane-bound organelles, as well as other key
differences from bacteria and archaea. All the rest of the
multicellular organisms on earth, including humans, have
eukaryotic cells as well.

Along with the many eukaryotic microorganisms, the

Eukaryotes include all multicellular life on earth, like plants,
animals, and humans.
Viruses are smaller than bacteria and are not technically alive
on their own — they must infect a host cell to survive. Viruses
are made up of some genetic material surrounded by a viral
coat, but they lack all the machinery necessary to make
proteins and catalyze reactions. This group also includes
subviral particles and prions, which are the simplest of life
forms, made of naked ribonucleic acid (RNA) or simply protein.
FIGURE 1-1: Types of microorganisms.

The bacteria and archaea are often talked about together

under the heading of “prokaryotes” because they lack a
nucleus. They do share a few characteristics and aren’t easily
distinguished from one another at first, but they are distinct
groups.

Deconstructing Microbiology
Microbiology involves studying microorganisms from many
different angles. Each perspective uses a different set of tools,
from an ever-improving and changing toolbox. These include

Morphology: The study of the shape of cells. It is analyzed

using stains and microscopy.
Metabolism: How an organism gets energy from its
environment and the waste it produces as a result. Metabolism
is studied using principles from biochemistry.
Growth: How an organism, well, grows. The growth of a
microbe is used to see how quickly the population can divide
and help to distinguish between one microbe and another.
Growth is measured using principles of physics, as well as
good old-fashioned counting. Qualitative measures of how
growth looks are also important.
Genotype: The genetic makeup of a microbial strain. Genes
are studied using genetics, which has recently begun to
involve a lot of molecular biology.
Phenotype: The name of the observable traits of a microbe.
A phenotype is due to the interaction between the
constellation of genes and environmental factors. It’s used to
describe a microorganism and to study the function of genes.
To measure a phenotype, you have to use some microbiology
know-how to see changes in growth and metabolism, as well
as other biochemical processes for communication and
defense.
Phylogeny: The history of the evolution of microorganisms.
Phylogeny is important not only because it helps us identify
newly discovered microbes but also because it allows us to see
how closely related different microbes are to one another. The
study of a group’s phylogeny involves genetics and molecular
biology, as well as evolutionary biology.
When you put all the pieces back together again, you have the
science of microbiology. Microbiologists are some of the most
creative scientists out there — they have many tools at their
disposal that they can use in a variety of ways. The trick is to
think up sneaky ways to study microbes, which is why the field is
always evolving.

The term microbiology is often used to mean the study of

mainly bacteria and archaea because the study of other
microbes are specialties of their own. For example, the study
of viruses is virology, the study of fungi is mycology, and the
study of algae is phycology.
Another Random Scribd Document
with Unrelated Content
It is only a round fifteen years since the students, taking into their
own hands the punishment of the souteneurs of the Quartier,
ducked a number of them in the frog-pond of the Luxembourg.
It is only ten years since the students set all Paris and all France by
the ears because the government had interfered—unwarrantably, as
they believed—with the immemorial usages of the Quat’z’ Arts ball.
The Quartier was flooded with soldiers, blood was shed, and there
was one life lost. The students carried their point. Parliament
intervened, and the proceedings begun in the courts against the
organisers of the ball were dropped. What the consequences might
otherwise have been no one can tell; but it is almost certain they
would have been not local, but national.
It is only six or seven years since it took a strong force of police to
defend against the wrath of the students the director of the Ecole
des Arts Décoratifs, whose offence was nothing more heinous than
favouring the sale, under school auspices, of the drawing materials,
by dealing in which a medical student had hitherto earned the
money to pursue his studies; and this state of things lasted several
days. And only a little over two years ago the students protested as
vigorously against the condemnation of Tailhade for his incendiary
article in Le Libertaire as they had against the condemnation of
Richepin for his Chansons des Gueux a quarter of a century before.
It was in a café of the Left Bank that French volunteers for the Boer
war were recruited; and it was most of all from the students, when
Kruger came to Paris, that the ministry feared the anti-British
demonstrations that might bring international complications,—
demonstrations which it craftily diverted by allowing the student pro-
Boer enthusiasm the fullest scope.
The persecution of the Russian students by the Russian government
aroused among the students of Paris no little sympathy, which was
given expression in indignation meetings. It was probably quite as
much the dread of the student displeasure as of the anarchist bomb
that kept the czar on his last visit to France from entering Paris.
The above illustrations of the students’ irritability are the proverbial
straws that show which way the wind blows, and they might be
multiplied indefinitely.
There is no possible doubt of the student’s growing disgust with the
corruption and hypocrisy of the present republic,—this nominal
democracy that is in reality a plutocracy,—nor of his slowly
crystallising resolution to have either something better than a
republic or a better republic; and, in the long run, he always gets
what he wants. The student strength is out of all proportion to the
student numbers. Let the students take their old place in the streets
of the Quartier to-morrow—5,000 or 500 strong—with a real rallying
cry, and thrills of joy and shudders of apprehension will traverse the
length and breadth of France.

THE PANTHÉON

“The Quarter knows that the student is its aristocracy,—an aristocracy that gives
more than it gets, against whom the Carmagnole or the ‘Ça Ira’ could not be sung,
whose spirit is democratic and of the people.”
Gilbert Parker.
 Chapter XI

BOHEMIANS OF THE LATIN QUARTER

“It took a rugged faith in the future to pass the evenings—without a fire—polishing
verses, after having painted all day long interminable registers.”—Emile Goudeau, in
Dix Ans de Bohème.
“If an artist obeys the motive which may be called the natural need of work, he
deserves indulgence, perhaps, more than ever. He obeys then neither ambition nor
want. He obeys his heart: it were easy to believe that he obeys God. Who can
know why a man who is neither vain nor in want of money decides to write?”—
Alfred de Musset.

“How much of priceless life were spent

With men that every virtue decks,
And women models of their sex,
Society’s true ornament,—
Ere we dared wander, nights like this,
Through wind and rain, and watch the Seine,
And feel the Boulevard break again
To warmth and light and bliss!”
Robert Browning.

“Say I’m weary, say I’m sad,

Say that health and wealth have missed me,
Say I’m growing old; but add—Jenny kissed me.”
Leigh Hunt.

T
HE 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. Berteil (Gustave Berteil, simple Gustave
to his friends), bachelor, aged forty-three, has lived continuously
ever since his salad days.
Twenty-three years ago Gustave came up to Paris from a Provençal
town, where his father was a wealthy notary, to prepare himself, in
pursuance of the paternal desire, for admission to the bar. He was
equipped with so much knowledge of life as the average provincial
youth has at twenty, so much book knowledge as the average
provincial lycée affords, a close acquaintance with the old French
drama, for which the lycée would have shuddered to be held
accountable, and a consuming desire to write for the contemporary
stage.
During as many years as are ordinarily required for taking a degree
in law, Gustave devoted the pleasant days to foraging for old
dramatists in the book-stalls and along the quays, the rainy days to
play-writing and to perusing, repairing, and fondling his yellowed,
tattered, worm-eaten acquisitions in his room,—where he had his
meals served him,—and his evenings (whatever the weather) to the
auditoriums or stage entrances of the theatres and to the cafés
where the cabotins (actors) most do congregate.
His relations to the law were limited, so far as is known, to the bona
fide purchase of expensive legal text books, which he invariably
bartered, after a decent interval, for editions of his favourites,—a
device, less ingenious than ingenuous, for at once quieting his
conscience and obtaining larger remittances from home.
When the time came for Gustave (supposed young advocate) to
return to the Côte d’Azur and there assist his father in handling
testaments and deeds, he made a clean breast of it by post.
Thereupon the father cut off the son’s allowance, thinking thus “to
starve the rascal,” as he bluntly expressed it, “into submission.” He
very nearly succeeded in the starving part of his programme, as he
discovered to his genuine horror,—for he was at bottom not a bad
papa,—when, at the end of an anxious year without tidings from the
boy, he came to Paris and found his novel prodigal out at heels and
elbows, hollowed in at stomach, and rickety at the knees; with
absolutely nothing quite intact in fact about his person or
surroundings—except the shelf of old dramatists, which would easily
have procured him food and fuel. Berteil père was mollified, if sadly
disillusionised, by this ocular demonstration of pluck on the part of
Berteil fils. He settled on his unnatural offspring an allowance of
2,500 francs a year, to be trebled whenever he should abandon
Bohemia for legitimate business, and left him to live his own life in
his own way.
This way has not turned out to be greatly different from the way of
Gustave’s nominal student days, and for at least ten years it has not
varied from one year to another by the value of a hair.
Every morning at ten, winter and summer, the hôtel garçon enters
M. Berteil’s room, without rapping, to bring him his coffee and to
inform him of the weather. If the garçon reports that it is really
pleasant,—and the garçon knows from long experience, you may be
sure, what M. Berteil considers really pleasant, —M. Berteil spends
the day book-hunting on the quays, where every bouquineur and
bouquiniste greets him cordially as an old acquaintance. If the
garçon’s weather bulletin is unfavourable, he orders his déjeuner and
dinner sent up to his room, and spends the day in the society of his
old dramatists and such of his friends, whose name is legion, as may
chance to call. He still haunts, evenings, as he did in the beginning,
the cafés affected by the cabotins, with whom he passes for the
most brilliant conversationalist on theatrical matters in or out of the
“profession.” But he abjured long ago theatre auditoriums and stage
entrances, the latter because he can now meet histrionic celebrities
on an equal footing, the former because he holds modern plays
trash and modern methods of interpreting old plays tinsel. He also
put away long ago his youthful, disquieting ambition to write for the
contemporary stage, because he despaired of matching the old
dramatists in their manner and disdained the manner of the new.
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.
Such also is Jean Richepin, in spite of his sumptuous establishment
on the Right Bank, a sort of Parisian Menelik, whose barbaric
costumes and audacious exploits have entered as completely into
the legendary lore of the Quarter as the explosive inconsistencies of
Jules Vallès and the alternate aspirings and back-slidings of Paul
Verlaine. In the early eighties, when he paraded the fantastic title of
Roi des Truands (King of the Vagrants), Richepin wore a talismanic
bracelet and a curiously-shaped hat, as badges of his rank. “There
was even,” says his fellow-Bohemian, Emile Goudeau, “an epic
struggle between Jean Richepin and the poor but great caricaturist
André Gill [a Bohemian by necessity] as to which of the two would
root out of the hatteries of Paris the most bizarre head-dress. Now
Gill and now Richepin had the advantage. The illustrious Sapeck was
the judge of last resort, and awarded the palm to the victor.” It
would take a long chapter to describe the costumes which have
played a part in Richepin’s numerous and strange avatars. At one
time, if the narrative of a friend can be trusted, he remained in
hiding for almost a fortnight because his wardrobe was reduced to a
simple window curtain; and his adventures have been so
 extraordinary that this ludicrous incident,
improbable as it sounds, does not defy
belief.
Richepin, Bouchor, and Paul Bourget,
returning from “The Sherry Cobbler” one
night, halted under the arcade of the
Odéon, named themselves Les Vivants, and
solemnly pledged each other eternal aid
and fidelity. This was the period when
Bourget’s ambition was poetry, when he
wore pantaloons of water green, and
JEAN RICHEPIN imitated the miraculous cravats of Barbey
d’Aurévilly and the mode of living of Balzac.
“Bourget submitted himself,” says Goudeau, “to a ferocious Balzacian
régime. He dined very early, went to bed immediately after, and had
himself called on the stroke of 3 A.M..... The poet-recluse then drank
two or three bowls of black coffee, like Balzac, and, like Balzac,
worked until seven. Then he slept again for an hour, rose, for good
this time, and applied himself to the bread-winning activities which
poverty imposes on young littérateurs.”
Bourget, who began thus as a Bohemian from necessity, has ended
as a snob. He is a fair sample of the “arrivé” who disavows his past,
and
“Looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees
By which he did ascend.”

“I shall be adjudged severe, perhaps,” says the poet and

socialist deputy Clovis Hugues; “but I am of those who think
that the sacrifice of the chevelure [long hair] is the most
dangerous of concessions to the modern bourgeoisie.... In
literature there is an affinity between the sudden disappearance
of the familiar mane and the forsaking of the good comrades of
the days of want. The transformation effected, one may still
have much esprit, but one has ceased to be a good fellow.
 Beware, then, of the tribunes and the poets who establish
relations with the garçons coiffeurs!”
I do not know that Bourget ever had any “chevelure” to leave in the
hands of the Delilah of bourgeois respectability, but it would seem
that he had sacrificed on the altar of his parvenu-ship the sincere
soulfulness of which the “chevelure” as well as another thing may be
the visible symbol, since he apparently has no sympathy or helping
hand for his younger painter brother who is bravely struggling up to
recognition against heavy odds.
Even the conceited “arrivés” of literature and the arts are entitled to
a certain respect, especially when they have “arrived,” as has
Bourget, by force of genuine talent and persistent work. However
ridiculous the pretentious airs they assume, they are not cravens.
They have left Bohemia, but they have left it with colours flying, with
all the honours of war. As much cannot be said for the recreants,—
called the “soumis” or, still more expressively, the “moutons,”—who
have forsaken Bohemia, without the excuse of having “arrived,” from
sheer pusillanimity, because they found its paths of hardship,
struggle, and sacrifice too rugged in comparison with the easy
highways of bourgeoisdom. Towards these one’s dominating
sentiment can hardly be other than pity or contempt,—contempt, if
they take greedily to the flesh-pots without regret at selling their
souls to Mammon; pity, if they do regret.
Richepin, who knows this Bohemian world so well, has characterised
the two varieties of “moutons.” Of the first (the unconscious
“moutons,” so to speak) he says, “Having returned to the paternal
roast, married their little cousins, and established themselves
notaries in towns of thirty thousand inhabitants, they have the self-
satisfaction of rehearsing before the fire their poor-artist adventures
with the magniloquence of a traveller who describes a tiger hunt”;
and of the others (the conscious “moutons”), “Wretchedly sad in the
existence into which they have entered against their wishes, in the
intellectual tombs to which they have consigned themselves, they
slowly atrophy. The banal is particularly terrible in this,—that, if one
returns to it after having been disgusted with it, it is to find it more
banal still, and to die of it.”
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.”
 THE TAVERNE DU PANTHÉON ON MARDIGRAS

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:—

I
Do you remember, Marguerite,
How first we met in the Latin Quarter?
I was a poet, far from gay,
And you, well, you were—somebody’s daughter.
You dropped a glove upon the curb,—
Say, was it Fate or yourself who willed it?
I picked it up, a natural thing,
Laid it within the hand that had filled it.
“Merci, monsieur,” was all you said;
But, somehow, I knew from your tone, as you said it,
That, if I kept the hand awhile,
It would not count to my discredit.
216
So, hand in hand, we strolled and we chatted,
Happy as pups whose heads have been patted.
We drank a bock on the Saint Michel;
And, when we parted, I knew you so well
That I even dropped the “Mademoiselle.”
Do you remember I whispered low,
As I gazed in your eyes, so dark, so sweet,
“A bientôt, Marguerite,
Au revoir and à bientôt”?

II
Do you remember, Marguerite,
How we rubbed along in the Latin Quarter?
I Roland, the poet, almost gay,
And you, my mistress and—somebody’s daughter?
There were only a bed and a chair or two
In our tiny chamber under the mansard;
But our thoughts were simple, our hearts were true,
Something in each to the other answered.
Fresh youth was there, and love was there,
My hopes were strong, your face was fair;
And we lived and loved as devoted a pair
As ever old Paris sheltered.
In a worn béret and a faded blouse,
I scribbled for fame. You kept the house,—
That is, as much as there was to keep.
You must, sometimes, have suffered in silence then,—
It was, oh, so little I earned with my pen!—
But you never allowed me to see you weep.
And whenever I left for an hour or so,
My Marguerite, do you remember?
Over and over you made me repeat,
As if you’d a dread I’d get lost in the street,
“A bientôt, Marguerite,
Au revoir and à bientôt.”
217

III
For ten long years, my Marguerite,
Heart has beaten to heart in the Latin Quarter,
The heart of the poet, almost gay,
The heart of the mistress, the—somebody’s daughter.
We’ve hold to each other through thick and through thin,
As the years have gone out and the years have come in;
And we’ve always held to the Latin Quarter.
Now fame has come and my pen earns more,
We have furnishings choice and books in store.
What a change it is from the days of yore!
The starving days when we lived on air!
No more we climb to the hundredth stair;
We have plenty to eat and plenty to wear;
Whenever we wish, we can have a fire.
Once that was the acme of our desire.
We’re as snug and slick as the parvenus;
But it’s come too late for me and for you,
This luck that we prayed for when days were blue.
My work is done in the Latin Quarter.
God bless you, my dear, for your love for me!
Bless God for my love for—somebody’s daughter!

IV
It’s over, over, Marguerite,
The fair, fair life in the Latin Quarter.
I’m dying, dearest; and, when I’m dead,
You’ll be once more just—somebody’s daughter.
But you’ll not be driven to work for bread,
Or worse than work in the Latin Quarter.
Thank God for that! You can hold up your head:
So you’ve funds, it’s enough to be—somebody’s daughter.
All that is mine will be yours, of course,—
The world has been kind these last glad years,—
Don’t be foolish, I beg of you, over my corse,
218
Just give what is natural,—a few real tears.
Be a good girl, don’t yield to regret
For the thing that is gone. What is must be.
You were born for love, don’t you dare to forget!
Make some poor devil happy, as you’ve made me!
It’s the very last thing I shall ask, I ween;
For I feel the whirr of Death’s sickle keen....
I know not what this death may mean,
 For I scarcely credit what churchmen tell
Of a future heaven and a future hell.
Without any future all is well,
If the life that is past has been loving and true,
As the life has been that we have to review;
But my heart is breaking at leaving you.
Well, just because it’s my habit so,
And because it makes it more natural to go,
I’ll say, quite as if we were likely to meet
“A bientôt, Marguerite,
Au revoir and à bientôt.”

THE INSTITUTE

Chapter XII

THOSE WHO STARVE

“Whoever throws himself into the streets of a great city, into the mêlée of
rapacities and ambitions, with a pen for a weapon, takes ‘La Misère’ for a flag.”—
Jean Richepin, in Les Etapes d’un Réfractaire.
“You have the stuff of three poets in you; but, before you become known, you run
the risk of dying six times of hunger, if you count on the income from your poetry
for the means to live.”
Etienne Lousteau to Lucien de Rubempré, in Balzac’s Illusions Perdues.
“Cressot died of want the day want forsook him. He died because his body,
habituated to suffering, was not able to accept well-being.”
Jules Vallès.

F
IFTY odd years ago, in a volume of short stories,—little read in
France nowadays, and quite unknown, I fancy, elsewhere,—Le
Roman de Toutes les Femmes, Henry Mürger, author of the
universally known and loved La Vie de Bohème, narrated, under the
title “La Biographie d’un Inconnu,” the life history of a young sculptor
who died of “the malady to which science does not dare to give its
true name, la misère.”
Joseph D——, born in a provincial town of poor, hard-working,
respectable parents, manifested a strong vocation for sculpture from
his early boyhood. His father having decided to put him to the
carpenter’s trade, Joseph, who had no notion of becoming a
mechanic, went secretly to the Free School of Design. The professor
of the school procured him a place as pupil with a government
architect, which his father, under the impression that carpentry and
architecture were very much the same thing, allowed him to accept.
Joseph made such progress that he paid his way at the end of a
month, and at the end of six months earned his seven or eight
francs a day. But he was getting no nearer to sculpture by this work;
and he left the architect’s office, in the face of his father’s
opposition, and entered a sculptor’s atelier for study, paying a month
in advance for his teaching. He took part in a competition for
admission to the Beaux-Arts, and failed. Having no money with
which to pay for lessons, he was forced to leave the atelier, but was
received—about the only bit of good luck in his whole career—by the
great master, Rude. He lodged at this time in the rue du Cherche-
Midi, over a cow stable, where he was warmed only by what heat
ascended through a hole in the floor.
Finding he could not pay for the models and materials necessary to
enter the Salon competitions, he assisted for a year, without entirely
neglecting his studies, a noted ornament-worker, and put by enough
to enable him to pursue his art studies to good advantage. Working
by night in a cold workshop, he contracted a sickness which confined
him to his bed for a time, and which swept away all his savings. As
soon as he was well again, he went back to work for his first
employer (the architect), designing ornaments whose execution was
intrusted to others. He thus gained a little pile—about 1,200 francs—
with which to compete for the Salon. It was stolen by a roof-worker
who, while repairing an adjacent building, had seen him counting it.
This “mischance”—to go on in Mürger’s own language—“was a
terrible blow to Joseph. ‘There are some people who have no luck,’
he said, ‘who would lose with all the trumps of the pack in their
hands.’ ‘Never mind,’ he resumed, brightening, ‘I will attempt the
assault of the Louvre74 with what little I have left. I will enter there
with plaster instead of bronze or marble.’”
All his courage had returned. He tried making fanciful statuettes,
which he could prepare without the expense of hiring models; but he
had little success in selling them.
“La Misère returned, and knocked at his door. She entered,
terrible and pitiless, like a vanquished foe whose turn has come
to triumph, and who uses without mercy the right of reprisal.
Joseph’s destitution reached such a point that, when one of his
friends invited him to dinner, he answered naïvely, ‘I’m afraid it
will put me out: it’s not my day.’ For tobacco he smoked walnut
leaves, which he gathered in the forest of Verrières, then dried,
and chopped up fine.
“His sole hope was the coming Salon. In a room without a
fire,”—the odorous days of the calorific cow stable must have
seemed a paradise in retrospect,—“in a Siberian temperature,
he worked during three consecutive months on a Saint Antoine,
for he had been forced to renounce his group of Galatea, the
too costly execution of which he had deferred to better times.
Clay, in spite of its moderate cost, was too dear for his empty
purse, this same purse which had held almost a fortune; for, by
a strange irony, the thief who had taken his money had left him
his purse. He dug his clay himself, therefore, in some fields of
the banlieue. A rag-picker of the rue Mouffetard whom he had
met, I know not where, gave him sittings at five sous an hour;
and three-quarters of the time the worthy man invented angelic
ruses to avoid being paid.
“The date set for sending to the Salon was near. It was time to
think of taking the plaster cast of the statue. Michelli, Fontaine,
and the other moulders who worked for the artists, when they
saw Joseph’s destitution, were unwilling to venture credit. All he
could obtain from one of them was the furnishing of the
necessary plaster. Aided by several friends, Joseph took the cast
of his statue himself. The operation lasted two days, and turned
out well.
“It was the eve of the day on which the jury was to begin its
sittings and on which the works to be passed upon must be at
the Louvre, by midnight at the very latest. During the night it
came on cold, and Joseph, to minimise the action of the frost
upon his statue, the still damp plaster of which had not acquired
the solidity which dryness gives, wrapped his only blanket about
it, and piled up on it, as a cuirass of warmth against the darts of
the cold, all his clothing, playing thus, towards Saint Antoine,
the rôle of Saint Martin.
“The next forenoon two or three friends came to aid Joseph in
transporting his statue to the Louvre. The wagon arrived four
hours too late. Nor was this all. At this point, fatality intervened
in the person of an absurd concièrge, who declared that he
would let nothing leave Joseph’s room before the back rent was
paid. The artists explained to the concièrge that a statue was
not a piece of furniture, and that the law did not permit him to
hold it back. He would not listen to reason, and, stony in his
stubbornness, demanded a written permit from the landlord.
They hurried to Passy, where the landlord lived, and did not find
him. He would not be in before dinner. They returned at the
dinner hour. He had just gone out. It was already eight o’clock
in the evening. They decided to apply to a justice of the peace.
The justice turned them over to the commissary of police, who
began by sustaining the concièrge, but who decided, on
Joseph’s representations of the injury that would be done him if
he were made to miss the Salon, to authorise the removal of
the statue. It was then eleven o’clock. They had barely an hour
to get to the Louvre. A dangerous coating of thin ice rendered
the streets impracticable. Vehicles could only advance at a walk.
The artists needed three hours at least, and they had only one.
Furthermore, repairs which were being made on the sewers
forced them to take the longest route. In crossing the Pont-
Neuf, Joseph and his friends heard it strike the half-hour.
“‘It’s half-past eleven,’ said Joseph, who was sweating great
drops in spite of the fact that the thermometer marked a north-
pole temperature.
“‘It’s half-past twelve,’ volunteered a young man who detached
himself from a band of painters who were returning with their
pictures because they had arrived at the Louvre too late. They
were making the best of it, and were singing gaily, ‘Allons-nous-
en, gens de la noce! etc.’
“Joseph and his friends retraced their steps.
“A little later Joseph exposed his Saint Antoine and a statuette
of Marguerite at the Exposition du Bazar Bonne Nouvelle
 (corresponding to the modern Salon des Réfusés), and sold the
two to the Museum of Compiègne for 150 francs.
“This paltry sum enabled him to drag himself about some time,
—a year almost. Then he entered the hospital through the
intervention of an interne, for he had no characterised malady.
He died there of exhaustion at the end of three months....
“Joseph D—— died at the age of twenty-three, without rancour
or recrimination against the art that had killed him, as a brave
soldier falls on the field of battle, saluting his flag.”
If I have reproduced here with much fulness this old story of
Mürger’s, it is because Joseph D—— stands to the Bohemians of the
Quartier as a kind of saint, Saint Joseph de la Dèche,75 patron of
poor artists, and because the half-century during which civilisation is
supposed to have been advancing with enormous strides has made
no appreciable difference in the hardships of the needy artist or in
the bravery with which he faces them. Parents are still too often
dull-witted, narrow, and unsympathetic where their offspring are
concerned. Rents are still hard to pay, and art materials and models,
food, clothes, and fuel hard to be had just when they are most
needed. Luck is as capricious, the concièrge as officious, winter as
brutal, warmth as coy, and death as chary of reprieves as ever.
Joseph D—— is as strictly up to date as if he had been born in 1881
and died in 1904. One hesitates to depict the slow starvation of
one’s acquaintances and friends, even under assumed names; and
the fateful career of Mürger’s Joseph is so perfectly typical of the
careers of the poor devils of artists in the Quartier of the present
period that there is no necessity of depicting it.
Quite as terrible, though far less romantic than the misère of the
Bohemian artist and littérateur, is the “misère en habit noir”—the
nomenclature is Balzac’s—of the patientless doctor, the briefless
barrister, and the unemployed or underpaid teacher and professor.
Your poet, your painter, or your sculptor, is, as a rule, a careless,
jolly dog, who has something of the genuine vagabond or
adventurer in him. He cannot tolerate anything that is cut and dried,
not even prosperity; and he would be infinitely bored by life if its
elements of uncertainty were quite eliminated. He prefers agreeable
surprises to disagreeable surprises, of course; but he prefers
disagreeable surprises to no surprises at all.
Dissimulation is not an indispensable part of his artistic baggage. He
may flaunt and vaunt his poverty, swear at it or make game of it,
and be none the less considered, at least in his milieu. He is excused
from playing the dismal farce of keeping up appearances. He may
live in an attic, clothe himself in tattered and seedy raiment, shirk
the bath-tub, ignore the very existence of the laundress and the
barber, be noisy and reckless, and defy all the canons of the social
code without stultifying himself or dishonouring his calling. Best of
all, his life is rarely a lonely one. He suffers, but he has the
camaraderie of suffering; and this enables him to laugh or shout his
misery away.
On the other hand, your so-called professional man—your physician,
for instance—must be more than decently lodged; be arrayed, at no
matter what hour of the day,—such is the Old World convention,—in
a faultless frock-coat and silk hat; be restrained, not to say dignified,
in demeanour; assume to be busy when he is weary unto death with
inaction,—and all this though hunger be consuming his very vitals.
He must button his suffering securely under his respectable black
waistcoat, and wear his professional complacence when his heart is
torn with sobs. If the reputable lodging or the reputable bearing fail
him, even for a little, he is lost irrevocably.
Four years ago or thereabouts a young physician, one Dr. Laporte,
was arraigned before a Paris court for criminal negligence in the
practice of his profession. The court condemned him to prison, in
spite of the testimony of an eminent specialist in his favour, but with
the palliative of the Loi Bérenger.76
The condemnation was based on these facts: Summoned to an
emergency case already compromised by lay treatment, and not
possessing the surgical instrument which it called for, Dr. Laporte
cast around for a makeshift tool. He used unsuccessfully the only
thing in any way adapted to his purpose that he discovered in the
patient’s house; and then, finding his efforts futile, and foreseeing
the fatal issue, which was not slow to arrive, he withdrew, saying
there was nothing more to be done.
The reasons for the attachment of clemency to the sentence were
these: the evidence showed conclusively that he had had no patients
for days and perhaps weeks; that he had no money to keep in
proper repair the instruments he owned, to say nothing of buying
the instrument in question; and that he had not eaten a morsel of
food for a full day previous to the emergency visit, and was a prey to
the giddiness of hunger at the moment he made his deplorable
attempt.
“The police investigation,” said the presiding judge to the culprit
while the trial was in progress, “shows you as nervous,
excitable, unbalanced, passing quickly from a state of exaltation
to a state of the most profound depression.” What wonder!

THE LOUVRE
“They are logical in their insane heroism, they utter neither cries nor plaints, they
endure passively the obscure and rigorous destiny which they allot themselves.
They die for the most part, decimated by the malady to which science does not
dare to give its true name, ‘la misère.’”
Henry Mürger, Introduction to La Vie de Bohème.

Chapter XIII

THOSE WHO KILL THEMSELVES

“This world’s been too many for me.”

Mr. Tulliver, in George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss.

“Et j’ai grand peur à tout moment

De voir mourir d’épuisement
L’ami d’enfance,
Que pour moins de solennité
J’appelle ici le Chat Botté,
Mais qu’on nomme aussi l’espérance.”
André Gill.

“Tu veux choisir ta mort;

Va sache bien mourir sans crainte niaise:
La lâcheté, c’est le travail sans pain,
Le suicide lent des ruines et des fournaises.
Ne tremble pas, sois fort, de ton dédain,
Et fais grève à la vie, enfant sans pain!”
Francis Vielé-Griffin.

“I have an education.
“‘Now you are armed for the battle,’ said my professor, in bidding me adieu. ‘Who
triumphs at college enters victorious into la carrière’ [career].
“What carrière?
A former classmate of my father’s, who was passing through Nantes and stopped
off to see him, told him that one of their fellow-classmates, he who had won all
the prizes, had been found dead—mangled and bloody—at the bottom of a
carrière [quarry] of stone, into which he had cast himself after having been three
days without food.
It is not into this ‘carrière’ I must enter, I take it,—at least, not head first.”—Jules
Vallès, in Jacques Vingtras—Le Bachelier.

“First came the silent gazers; next,

A screen of glass we’re thankful for;
Last, the sight’s self, the sermon’s text,
The three men who did most abhor
Their life in Paris yesterday,
So killed themselves: and now, enthroned
Each on his copper couch, they lay
Fronting me, waiting to be owned.
I thought, and think, their sin’s atoned.”
Robert Browning.

A
RECENT morning paper contained the following item in its
column of “Crimes and Casualties”:—

“La Littérature qui Tue.

“Enamoured of art and persuaded that he would quickly win a
name in Paris, Louis M——, a young man of twenty-five, left
some six months ago the little provincial city where he was
born.
“Like Balzac’s hero, Lucien de Rubempré, who entered the Latin
Quarter with two hundred and forty francs in money and the
manuscripts of L’Archer de Charles IX. and Les Marguerites, this
young provincial arrived in Paris with a light purse and the bulky
manuscript of a drama in five acts, which he expected to get
performed immediately. Unfortunately, the purse was quickly
emptied, and the drama was refused by all the theatre
managers.
 “As his father was not rich, Louis M—— was unwilling to appeal
to him, and suffered without complaining.
“One day, however, he confessed his desperate situation to
Mme. C——, a friend of his family, who inhabits a comfortable
apartment, rue ——. Mme. C—— promised to see what she
could do for him. In the midst of a conversation with her
yesterday he drew a revolver from his pocket, and before she
could catch his arm fired a bullet into his heart.
“Death was instantaneous.”

Emile Goudeau, in his Dix Ans de Bohème, tells of the picturesque

suicide of a young Latin Quarter poet of his acquaintance:—
“D——, arrayed in a new suit and with his hands full of
bouquets, went up to the cashier’s desk and graciously adorned
the counter and corsage of the cashier. Then, turning to a
medical student, he said to him nonchalantly, ‘My dear fellow, I
have made a bet that the little point of the heart is here
between these two ribs’; and he designated a spot on his vest.
‘Not at all,’ corrected the other, ‘it is lower down. There!’ ‘I have
lost then,’ D—— replied.
“He called a cab, and ordered the cocher to drive him to the Arc
de Triomphe.
“When the cocher arrived at the head of the Champs Elysées,
and opened the cab door, there was only a corpse upon the
cushions. D—— had shot himself full in the heart.”
The last season I passed on the Left Bank of the Seine, the Quartier
was deeply moved by the death of one of its faithful devotees, the
poet René Leclerc (nom-de plume, Robert de la Villoyo), who
poisoned himself with cyanide of potassium.
Leclerc was thirty-two at the time of his death. He had inhabited the
Quartier for more than a decade. He had come thither to study
medicine in accordance with the wishes of his bourgeois parents;
and he had stayed on after all thought of practising as a physician
had left him, in order to pursue the literature which had become his
passion.
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)
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