Les Artistes Felix Pyat Nouveau Tableau de 1834

The history of words is like the history of men. Words, if you’ll forgive the analogy, are a great people who live in a country known as Dictionary, which extends from the mountain A all the way to the frontier of Z, and is bordered on all sides by the empire of numbers. Forgive me once again, but the comparison forces me to continue: words are born, and they live and die, in the social world. They respect public order and they have their freedom, their rights and their duties. Some are great French dignitaries and others are working class. Some make a noisy entrance into the world and others edge their way in without even a birth certificate, lowly and ashamed, the orphans of vocabulary. The lords are nouns, and what is an adjective but a valet, a serf, the next thing to a participle, a slave who backs up his master, a zero who has no value unless he’s beside a number, a marshal of the Empire following behind , living forever as a poodle, working under a shadow, a humble servant, a vassal. But the noun, the aristocrat of words, that noble of grammar gives orders and is obeyed. He sends runners out ahead and has followers behind. He sends the submissive pronoun out to march ahead, while the faithful verb remains behind, and then the stupid adverb, the deaf and dumb part of the sentence, always ready, crossing its arms and waiting. There are often revolutions in language, upheavals, violent shocks that redefine its existence, the high brought low and the low raised on high. We have seen common adjectives elevated proudly to the condition of nouns, and we have seen nouns sink first to the middle level of humiliation that is the adjective, then sink lower still to the brutal condition of adverbs – a final degradation from which no word can recover. The fate of words is in the hands of the one who holds all destiny! But words are always like men. Once they have risen up, they become tyrants, usurpers, without shame or restraint, imposing themselves everywhere, taking on the airs of the dictator whose power is absolute, until the tide that carried them up high takes them back down to the lowest depths of the

Pyat 1 student textbook. The despot of today is the word artist. No legitimate king has ever had so many subjects, and no courtesan has ever had so many Alcibiades.1 It is the Venus of the dictionary, an expression that is open to the public, a prostitute who works the streets, who annoys passers-by, and who can be had on the sidewalk by absolutely anyone. Everyone waves its banal flag; it has throngs of followers. Hairdressers, vaudeville performers, glaziers, theater impresarios, pedicurists, café waiters, politicians, shoe polishers, fashion salespeople, the Minister of Fine Arts, countermark dealers, learned dogs, academics, trained elephants, flea circus workers, Franconi’s animals and men2 – everyone wants to be an artist. There are many others: The governor of Algiers, artist. Vidocq, artist. The inventor of the clysopome, artist. Those who spoiled the Tuileries, artists. All those who have touched the hand of Victor Hugo, artists. M. Soult, for his collection of Spanish paintings, artist. M. Edmund Blanc, with a law degree and a medal of honor, artist. If we were to name all those claiming this fashionable adjective, we would never finish the list. Art is almost a cult, a new religion whose arrival was well timed just as god and kings departed. Even money, the real power of our time, has to recognize a rival force. Bankers want to be artists. There isn’t a single rich man, be he deaf, blind and stupid, who does not own a piano, an art collection and a library. M. Séguin, so well known from his connection to Ouvrard3 and from his twenty thousand francs to spend each day, had three hundred and sixty five violins made a year. At the pace this trend is moving in , I do not despair of seeing us all become artists. In the past, artists were few; today they are many, at least in name. Some have incomes of their own, booksellers that they pay, journalists that they entertain lavishly. This is Byronic literature, the school of fine carriages. Others have debts, holes in the elbows of their clothes,

1Alcibiades was known for sexual prowess. 2 Antonio Franconi was founder of a famous Paris circus. 3 A reference to extremely wealthy financiers of the time.

Pyat 2 neglected hands. This is the genre of the lycanthrope.4 The difference between them is only in the form. At one time, it was necessary to be a martyr in order to earn the title of artist. It was necessary to sacrifice body and soul in order to achieve this beautiful name; it was necessary to dare to crucify a man like the painter who needed to suffer agony; to die in prison like Tasso or of hunger like Camoëns. Or like Callot to forget one’s country, fortune, and noble station to go and study in . Or like Vernet, to be tied to a mast in order to paint a realistic storm at sea. But then there was no Minister of Fine Arts, no encouragement for the fine arts, no academy of fine arts. Instead the genie was free and accepted no orders for inspirations twenty feet long and ten across. Today the word is everywhere. One is an artist the way one was a landlord; it’s an occupation ascribed to those who have none. It’s often said that artists in earlier times had beliefs, that Raphael, for example was inspired by his faith – no doubt while using his mistress as a model for the Virgin Mary! But art itself is a belief and the true artist is a priest of this eternal religion which differs from all others because it creates rather than destroying. God was the first artist, for he created the world – and what a work of art it is! What harmony, what scale in this great drama in which the sun and the earth and the ocean take the lead roles! And surrounding these main characters, such extras and walk-on cameos and supporting players! Where can a more beautiful set be found? Or an orchestra more resounding than the thunder? The curtain rises. The sun rivals the ocean for possession of the earth, a bride crowned with flowers. Which is it to be? The moon, a confidant to the sun, serves him when he is away whenever she can, but in vain. The first act ends with torrential rain and the ocean triumphs. But a rainbow appears, sent out by the sun as a promise to his inundated beloved. In the second act, the ocean is in full retreat before the fires of his enemy and leaves the stage. The plot has remained there ever since, despite the treachery of men who help the defeated ocean with all their might, who cut and split and dig and channel the poor earth in every direction in the sincere desire to bring low tide all the way up to the foot of Montmartre. We will see how the last act unfolds.

4 Or werewolf. A term used by Petrus Borel, a member of the pre-Murger bohemian group.

Pyat 3 God created all this and, if we believe Genesis, he created it in six days. On the seventh, being an artist, he became a flaneur and to this day he is still a flaneur. In this, he created the artist in his image. But if God is an artist, the artist is also God since art is life, energy, creation. God is the patron saint of artists just as St. Eligius is for goldsmiths or St. George for soldiers. With such a leader, this is a powerful group! And what does it take to march under such a banner! The bar is set high for those who join such a movement. The term ‘artist’ is not reserved only for painters, for poets, for sculptors, for musicians, for architects, for actors, for dancers; it belongs to all those whose spirits have been creative. Broussais, the physician who developed such admirable ideas about physiology, was he not more of an artist than the architect who recreates Greek columns in France and builds an Athenian temple to house the Stock Exchange in the streets of Paris? Thus, it makes no difference whether you are a king or a carpenter, a lawyer or a doctor as long as you have a spark of the divine power, and as long as you possess an intelligence that discovers and is fertile. On the other hand, you may be a successful painter, an architect to the king, the poet laureate, or the editor of a feuilleton, but if you are an imitator, if you create nothing, you are not an artist. You can stop shaving, you can let your hair grow long, you can die of hunger, you can wear clothes no one else would wear, you can have ink on your face and paint on your fingers – my God, all the carelessness and long hair in the world won’t make any difference. You’ll be no more of an artist than the National Guard who takes care of his leather straps and belts and is a slave to his equipment. No, all these young people who wear old-fashioned hoods, become beggars, talk about the Middle Ages5, and swear by the towers of Notre Dame, who give up their individuality and trust all their future glory to imitation, to copying, to bringing up the rear, to holding the master’s coattails, all these young people are not artists. What happened to the originality, the essential quality of the artist. Look at them: they’re all cut from the same pattern. They all look the same, they all want the same things and they all speak the same language. Like sheep going along the same path,

5 Pyat makes several references to the fascination with all things medieval that was widespread among bohemians at the time.

Pyat 4 one following in the other’s steps, they not only demonstrate the strength of the leader, but also the weakness of those who follow. The common obsession of young artists to desire to live outside their own time, with the ideas of others and the customs of others, turns them into outsiders, eccentrics, places them beyond the law and banishes them from society. These are today’s Bohemians. Thus they have a language of their own, the slang of the artists’ studio, unintelligible to the rest of humanity. This slang consists most often of replacing the last syllable of each word with an ending that is used for all. For example, instead of grocer, they say groce-mar; an artist becomes artis- mar. There are others as well. They use the term bourgeois for anyone who is an outsider, just as the Romans used to refer to barbarians. The most serious insult they hurl would be to call something rococo, French aristocrat, empire, wigged, proper, academy, academy! The highest degree of the bourgeois! Whatever the weather, they never forgive umbrellas. That’s what distinguishes them above all else: comfort is a horror to them. Amongst them, the route of elegance is forbidden. Shirt collars are abolished, never to be restored. Gloves are chimeras, and what Brutus said of virtue they say of soap: it is an empty word. They’ll sell their new suit to buy a worm-eaten armchair and pass up on dinner to buy a broken dish made of painted porcelain. Egotism isn’t normally an active force in them unless their talent is involved. Indeed, fairness and brotherhood and equality, the virtues of children and the poor, are also their virtues. They share their pennies, but would they share their gold? Fortunately they don’t have any! Beranger6 clearly had them in mind when he wrote this philosophical refrain: The beggars, the beggars, They’re happy people Who love each other.

6 Pierre-Jean de Beranger (1780-1857) was a well-known poet and songwriter. The lyrics here are from “Les Gueux” and “La Fortune”

Pyat 5 Long live the beggars! Poverty is their golden calf; they’re proud of it, it pleases them, they worship it. Still, they’re free, gay, living without cares at the age when one sings Bang! Bang! Opportunity knocks, Bang! Bang! I will not open. They’re at that age when life’s material comforts go unrecognized, when Faust is condemned for selling his soul to benefit his body; furthermore, while having no serious political engagement, artists more than anyone hate those who prostitute their beliefs, who change allegiances with the changing winds, who become slaves to money, material goods and coarse pleasures. Their greatest expenditure is imagination and they have so much of it to spend. As powerful as Jesus, they can change the cheapest plonk into the finest and they are capable of getting drunk on filtered water. The riches of royalty, the ministerial dinners, the Rothschild mansions, what do all these matter to people who dream of better things, who find the sun more golden than all the ingots in the world, a band of wandering and inconstant dwellers in a universe that is like an enormous palace, who find enjoyment all over the world, like straws blowing in the wind, like the birds as they sing, like shining rays of sunlight? They care nothing for the smooth pleasures of a comfortable life, a tranquil life, a life that is calm and assured. No, they don’t want a steady flame. They want to be hot and they want to be cold, sometimes rich and sometimes poor, full of promise today and on the street tomorrow, turning as the wheel turns high and low, walking through the mud and the flowers. Everything that holds them here or there they reject. They cast off the soft bonds of affection that make up the charms of ordinary life. They are repelled by family. To be a bastard is best but others rename themselves: if they were christened Jean, they become Jehan, the Edouards become Edwards, and with a cigar they can build an image. What they value most in the world is tobacco, but coarse dark tobacco such as caporal, and they look down on the Turks who smoke roses. Anyone who has seen how they live believes in the five sous of the

Pyat 6 Wandering Jew.7 The ones they pity most are rich men, and after that it’s men with children. In order to understand this class on the margin of Parisian society, it’s necessary to have been present at their work and their pleasures. Their joys are spiritual but coarse, almost in the manner of Odry8, and incomprehensible for anyone not initiated into the mysteries of their Baal. Without a doubt, the first bourgeois to arrive, with all his good schooling and his prizes from the college, his knowledge of the works of Tacitus, his ability to make his fortune and play an honourable part in the world, one of those men who appear to be substantial in their world, such a man would be unable to make any sense of the atmosphere of the studios and would find the artists’ jokes simply idiotic. That’s how they relax. To get an idea of the way a Pole would be received at the court of Russia, how a dog is accepted at a bowling match or a decorated July veteran by Louis-Philippe9, you man of the world, you bourgeois, try going into a painters’ studio! You wish to speak with the teacher perhaps, or a student, it doesn’t matter which; you open the door, so far so good. “Ah! That face!” “Ha! What a face!” “Oh! The face!” “Well! Look at that face!” With an explosion of laughter you are received. You turn red to the tips of your ears. You don’t dare take a step back or forward. “Monsieur, what do you want?” “What can we do for you?” “Would you like to have a tooth pulled?” “Do you need a good pair of suspenders?” “How much do you charge to pose?” “So close the door, you’re smoking.”

7 Legend claims that the Wandering Jew had five sous that were replenished when spent. Here it refers to artists who have nothing but always find a few cents to get by on. 8 Charles-Jacques Odry was an actor known for comic roles. 9 Refers to the way a hero of one regime would be accepted by a subsequent, opposition regime.

Pyat 7 “Does the pipe bother you? Have a seat.” All this is sung to the tune of ‘Oui, l'or est une chimère’from Robert le Diable.10 They could confuse even the Attorney General. If you haven’t lost your head in the midst of this racket, congratulations! But if your patience has reached its limit and, wanting to escape from all this noise, all this confusion, you dare to lose your temper, too bad for you! Because you have no right to be irritated. Anyway, in all this confusion, who can you pin the blame on? In what tone of voice do you respond in the Tower of Babel? Where do you turn for reason among all these madmen? It’s a dilemma and that’s all there is to it. Whether it’s long or short, round of pointy, your nose will entertain them all day. They’ll find ways to use it as a model for all kinds of things in drawings on the wall, a brioche, a knife blade, a pumpkin, a halberd. They’ll talk about your clothes, your hat, they’ll twist your words around and around and you will be quite an object of ridicule. You, who are handsome as Antinous, eloquent as Cicero, stern as Brutus, at their hands you become a Mayeux,11 a prince of the royal family, a Saint-Simonian12, ugly, beastly and ridiculed -- and there, the ridicule is deadly. If you have a child with you at the studio, he will mourn for you. The mythology that so capably takes care of all genealogies would have the artist as the offspring of the grisette13 and the warrior: Same blood, same sense of humour, same gaiety, same impudence, same intolerance. But beyond the studio, in the places where they live, their hospitality is good and true. When their smocks come off, their aggression decreases. The street children don’t always throw stones and the grisettes don’t always laugh at passers-by. That winter, one of them – he was the most spiritual man I know – gave a party that I’ll remember for the rest of my life. It was a masked ball. No women were there. These words were written on the wall: No entry without a pipe, chewing tobacco or cigar. Tobacco smoke had become the air they breathed in there. Imagine a room hidden away at the back of a garden,

10 Translates as ‘Yes, gold is a chimera”. The popular 1831 opera is by Meyerbeer. 11 A caricature figure of the period drawn by Charles-Joseph Traviès de Villers. 12 An important political movement of the time. 13 Grisette referred to the many young women, often single and far from family, drawn to Paris away from the provinces in search of work in the new economy.

Pyat 8 behind the Luxembourg, the favorite neighbourhood of artists. The room was furnished with a piano, for dancing, a skull that hung with a candle in each eye socket for illumination, about twenty church or cabaret chairs, and a large, black antique oak table covered in tinder, phosphorus lighters, tobacco, tea and other consumables. The charcuterie was in the next room, referred to as the buffet room. The orchestra was made up of the immovable piano, a drum, a hunting horn, an army bugle, two trumpets, and the voices of all those who came and went. Think of the harmonies! It was the Sabbath. Our location deep in the Luxembourg was necessary or else the rest of Paris would have heard the nocturnal disturbance of the peace and assumed it must be the end of the world. But down there, no one even raised a complaint. The ball began with dancing medieval monks, ropes around their waists, bare feet on a spit-soaked floor, leaping with a Turkish executioner who was swaddled in red pantaloons. After the monk’s frock came the cowl, the outlaw’s cap, the velvet hat, the feathers and the jewels. Others were pranksters who came dressed as members of the Academy and even as National Guards! As the Academicians entered, they shouted: “Down with Academicians! We blew them up, we shot them, we cut them to pieces.” A discussion of the Academy ensued, then the Academicians and National Guards were forced to dance together, following which they were booed together, some as emissaries from the past and others as representatives of the present, here in a place where there were only men of the future. The men of the future produced a triumph of the Middle Ages. Once we had done all our smoking, all our jumping, all our shouting, all our trumpet playing, we were ready to move on to eating and drinking. The buffet table was ready to collapse under the weight of the meats, surrounded by huge breads and two hundred bottles of wine . . . It was wine by subscription. A bust of Victor Hugo, one of our greatest writers, was there, crowned with leaves like the rest of us and, like the rest of us, with a cigar in his mouth.

Pyat 9 We ate and drank until dawn. Everyone wanted to consume their subscription wine. The two hundred bottles were emptied. We sang all kinds of songs: patriotic, bacchanalian, erotic. A bourgeois who didn’t know any better would be bewildered, would shudder at the things that happened there. If the Academy had the power, it would burn this place down; if the National Guard knew about it, they would be capable of making it another Cloître Saint Mery.14 I believe there was even criticism of Louis-Phillipe I, the Citizen King. After this audacious behaviour, so remarkable in 1833, we went our separate ways. I was so sick of the noise, the smoke, and the Middle Ages, that when I got home I reread Racine and that completely sobered me up and cleared my head. It might have the same effect on those intoxicated young artists who blindly follow paths that have been laid down by determined feet and who fall, almost all of them, under the influence of new masters just as obediently as the academicians they criticize worship the old idols. But no matter what the weather is, no matter what flag is flying, whether Antiquity or the Middle Ages, Racine or Hugo, whatever is done and whatever is said, the great ones set the paths and the lesser ones follow. There are, of course, exceptions, and there are many of them; but what is it that holds the rest of these good young people back from returning to the world that invites them back to become excellent notaries, fine lawyers, worthy fathers with wives and children, doing business, paying taxes and rent, and all that goes on down here in the world in order to live long and happy lives? But instead, what should be the exceptional situation of a few gifted people has become a general rule. How can I put it? It’s a fashion, all the rage, a craze, an epidemic, a contagious disease, spreading quickly, a scourge worse than cholera, like an Oriental plague. It is artistism. Here is a rough list of the well-known symptoms of this disease, which seems to want to spread everywhere among us. The infection initially takes hold of the head, like some kind of cerebral crisis that targets the sense of reason. Overcome by the influence of

14 A reference to the 1832 June Rebellion. The National Guard defeated the insurgents here with heavy casualties on both sides. The event plays a major part in Hugo’s Les Miserables.

Pyat 10 contemporary Paris, the subject first loses all common sense and throws out his razors and soap. With remarkable alacrity, a beard emerges, most often around the lips and on the chin, but in acute cases it emerges all over the face. Thus he is visibly transformed, he is saint-simonized15, he is unrecognizable. His eyes become hollow, his complexion becomes sallow, his hair grows, his voice becomes affected and he forgets the language he grew up with. We have heard diseased subjects say tu-dieu, ventredieu, par saint Jacques-la-Boucherie.16 These are the ones who are in real danger. If the artistism continues, at last the infected person neglects his affairs and his interests, he writes poems, he becomes isolated and has a tendency to stay in bed (which he calls living ‘the horizontal life’), to smoke, to drink punch. He has a serious thirst, he runs up huge debts, he takes on the look of a melancholic, of an asassin, of a fornicator, with a fixed gaze or a sideways look, but never natural. If some drastic remedy is not provided to the patient, the artist can soon no longer see or hear or feel or taste or touch anything the way a healthy person does. The five senses are under attack. In this way, the artist’s perceptions are overcome by some unknown sensations of his own, a bit like the way that a person with jaundice sees everything with a yellow hue. For example, he will see the sky as blue, the sea as blue, the gaze of a woman as blue, the mountains as blue; everything will be blue.17 If the weather is overcast, he sees it as clear; if someone cries, he sings; if you sing, he cries. He will make himself into the dying man or the man seeking life’s pleasures – although recently the pleasure seeker has replaced the consumptive. He writes poems for his Heloise or his Clotilde although it’s clear that the only Heloise or Clotilde he’s ever had were ladies of the evening. For him, illusion is a chronic fever. This disease is capricious in its effects and can often produce quite 15 A reference to the followers of Henri de Saint-Simon, some of whom adopted radical ideas that were reflected in their personal appearance. 16 The meanings are less important than the existence of a particular language usage among these artists, a characteristic of bohemian and subcultural groups that has remained constant ever since although the specific vocabularies are in constant change. 17 Perhaps coincidentally, in Murger’s Scenes de la vie de boheme, more than a decade later, Schaunard is working on a symphony titled “The Influence of Blue on the Arts.”

Pyat 11 contrary symptoms -- for example, we have seen afflicted individuals with very short hair. It normally infects individuals between eighteen and thirty. Old people are affected less than the middle-aged and the middle-aged less than younger adults. There are children who die of it before they finish teething. But most often it attacks those who go to college. They go to study law or medicine and then bang! The air affects you like Paris water does and you suddenly become an artist. Instead of law books, you buy a violin; instead of a scalpel, an artist’s palette. You are sick. To avoid contagion, preventative medical recommendations include complete abstinence from all poetry, great restraint in intimate relations, a healthy diet that is anti-inflammatory and solid like Bareme for example,18 a little gaiety, no trips to the Vaudeville Theatre, no daydreaming, no sunsets, no contact with literary men, and a shave every day. Once infection is detected, the most effective cures include leaving Paris and giving up the consumption of medievalism, a bit of mathematics is helpful in these cases, and the purchase of furniture in the style fashionable in provincial society, and putting a white tie back on. In certain acute cases, there have been miraculous cures obtained from the wearing of shirt collars. But the most desperate are treated with the application of scissors to the head and a daily regimen of shaving. The disease attacks men and women equally. Recently, it has had a particularly severe spread among women. Paris is infected with artists. A black flag should be flying from the towers of Notre Dame.

Translated by Rob Holton

18 A reference to an arithmetic text, perhaps to counter the mental inflammation caused by poetry.

Pyat 12