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Real Latin Quarter

<h2> CHAPTER V</h2> <div class="figcenter"> <ANTIMG src="images/image007.jpg" width-obs="30" height-obs="22" alt="" title="" /></div> <h3>“A DÉJEUNER AT LAVENUE’S”</h3> <div class="figcenter"> <ANTIMG src="images/image007.jpg" width-obs="30" height-obs="22" alt="" title="" /></div> If you should chance to breakfast at “Lavenue’s,” or, as it is called, the “Hôtel de France et Bretagne,” for years famous as a rendezvous of men celebrated in art and letters, you will be impressed first with the simplicity of the three little rooms forming the popular side of this restaurant, and secondly with the distinguished appearance of its clientèle. <div class="figright"> <ANTIMG src="images/image046.jpg" width-obs="333" height-obs="450" alt="" title="" /> MADEMOISELLE FANNY AND HER STAFF</div> As you enter the front room, you pass good Mademoiselle Fanny at the desk, a cheery, white-capped, genial old lady, who has sat behind that desk for forty years, and has seen many a “bon garçon” struggle up the ladder of fame—from the days when he was a student at the Beaux-Arts, until his name became known the world over. It has long been a favorite restaurant with men like Rodin, the sculptor—and Colin, the painter—and the late Falguière—and  - 95 -Jean Paul Laurens and Bonnat, and dozens of others equally celebrated—and with our own men, like Whistler and Sargent and Harrison, and St. Gaudens and Macmonnies. These three plain little rooms are totally different from the “other side,” as it is called, of the Maison Lavenue. Here one finds quite a gorgeous café, with a pretty garden in the rear, and another room—opening into the garden—done in delicate green lattice and mirrors. This side is far more expensive to dine in than the side with the three plain little rooms, and the gentlemen with little red ribbons in their buttonholes; but as the same good cook dispenses from the single big kitchen, which serves for the dear and the cheap side the same good things to eat at just half the price, the reason for the popularity of the “cheap side” among the crowd who come here daily is evident. <div class="figcenter"> <ANTIMG src="images/image047.jpg" width-obs="360" height-obs="450" alt="" title="" /> RODIN</div> It is a quiet, restful place, this Maison Lavenue, and the best place I know in which to dine or breakfast from day to day. There is an air of intime and cosiness about  - 97 -Lavenue’s that makes one always wish to return. <div class="figcenter"> <ANTIMG src="images/image048.jpg" width-obs="550" height-obs="450" alt="(group of men dining)" title="" /></div> You will see a family of rich bourgeois enter, just in from the country, for the Montparnasse station is opposite. The fat, sunburned mama, and the equally rotund and genial farmer-papa, and the pretty daughter, and the newly married son and his demure wife, and the two younger children—and all talking and laughing over a good dinner with champagne, and many toasts to the young couple—and to mama and papa, and little Josephine—with ices, and fruit, and coffee, and liqueur to follow. All these you will see at Lavenue’s on the “cheap side”—and the beautiful model,- 98 - too, who poses for Courbel, who is breakfasting with one of the jeunesse of Paris. The waiters after 2 P.M. dine in the front room with the rest, and jump up now and then to wait on madame and monsieur. It is a very democratic little place, this popular side of the house of M. Lavenue, founded in 1854. And there is a jolly old painter who dines there, who is also an excellent musician, with an ear for rhythm so sensitive that he could never go to sleep unless the clock in his studio ticked in regular time, and at last was obliged to give up his favorite atelier, with its picturesque garden—— “For two reasons, monsieur,” he explained to me excitedly; “a little girl on the floor below me played a polka—the same polka half the day—always forgetting to put in the top note; and the fellow over me whistled it the rest of the day and put in the top note false; and so I moved to the rue St. Pères, where one only hears, within the cool court-yard, the distant hum of the busy city. The roar of Paris, so full of chords and melody! Listen to it sometimes,  - 100 -monsieur, and you will hear a symphony!” <div class="figcenter"> <ANTIMG src="images/image049.jpg" width-obs="311" height-obs="450" alt="" title="" /> “LA FILLE DE LA BLANCHISSEUSE” By Bellanger.—Estampe Moderne</div> And Mademoiselle Fanny will tell you of the famous men she has known for years, and how she has found the most celebrated of them simple in their tastes, and free from ostentation—“in fact it is always so, is it not, with les hommes célèbres? C’est toujours comme ça, monsieur, toujours!” and mentions one who has grown gray in the service of art and can count his decorations from half a dozen governments. Madame will wax enthusiastic—her face wreathed in smiles. “Ah! he is a bon garçon; he always eats with the rest, for three or four francs, never more! He is so amiable, and, you know, he is very celebrated and very rich”; and madame will not only tell you his entire history, but about his work—the beauty of his wife and how “aimables” his children are. Mademoiselle Fanny knows them all. But the men who come here to lunch are not idlers; they come in, many of them, fresh from a hard morning’s work in the studio. The tall sculptor opposite you has- 101 - been at work, since his morning coffee, on a group for the government; another, bare-armed and in his flannel shirt, has been building up masses of clay, punching and modeling, and scraping away, all the morning, until he produces, in the rough, the body of a giantess, a huge caryatide that is destined, for the rest of her existence, to hold upon her broad shoulders part of the façade of an American building. The “giantess” in the flesh is lunching with him—a Juno-like woman of perhaps twenty-five, with a superb head well poised, her figure firm and erect. You will find her exceedingly interesting, quiet, and refined, and with a knowledge of things in general that will surprise you, until you discover she has, in her life as a model, been thrown daily in conversation with men of genius, and has acquired a smattering of the knowledge of many things—of art and literature—of the theater and its playwrights—plunging now and then into medicine and law and poetry—all these things she has picked up in the studios, in the cafés, in the course of her Bohemian life. This “vernis,” - 102 - as the French call it, one finds constantly among the women here, for their days are passed among men of intelligence and ability, whose lives and energy are surrounded and encouraged by an atmosphere of art. In an hour, the sculptor and his Juno-like model will stroll back to the studio, where work will be resumed as long as the light lasts. <div class="figright"> <ANTIMG src="images/image050.jpg" width-obs="317" height-obs="400" alt="" title="" /> A TRUE TYPE</div> The painter breakfasting at the next table is hard at work on a decorative panel for a ceiling. It is already laid out and squared up, from careful pencil drawings. Two young architects are working for him, laying out the architectural balustrade, through which one, a month later, looks up at the allegorical figures painted against the dome of the blue heavens, as a background. And so the painter swallows his eggs, mayonnaise, and demi of beer, at a gulp, for he has a model coming at two, and he must finish this ceiling on time, and ship it, by a fast liner, to a millionaire, who has built a vault-like structure on the Hudson, with iron dogs on the lawn. Here this  - 104 -beautiful panel will be unrolled and installed in the dome of the hard-wood billiard-room, where its rich, mellow scheme of color will count as naught; and the cupids and the flesh-tones of the chic little model, who came at two, will appear jaundiced; and Aunt Maria and Uncle John, and the twins from Ithaca, will come in after the family Sunday dinner of roast beef and potatoes and rice pudding and ice-water, and look up into the dome and agree “it’s grand.” But the painter does not care, for he has locked up his studio, and taken his twenty thousand francs and the model—who came at two—with him to Trouville. At night you will find a typical crowd of Bohemians at the Closerie des Lilas, where they sit under a little clump of trees on the sloping dirt terrace in front. Here you will see the true type of the Quarter. It is the farthest up the Boulevard St. Michel of any of the cafés, and just opposite the “Bal Bullier,” on the Place de l’Observatoire. The terrace is crowded with its habitués, for it is out of the way of the stream of people along the “Boul’ Miche.” The terrace is- 105 - quite dark, its only light coming from the café, back of a green hedge, and it is cool there, too, in summer, with the fresh night air coming from the Luxembourg Gardens. Below it is the café and restaurant de la Rotonde, a very well-built looking place, with its rounding façade on the corner. <div class="figleft"> <ANTIMG src="images/image051.jpg" width-obs="316" height-obs="400" alt="(studio)" title="" /></div> At the entrance of every studio court and apartment, there lives the concierge in a box of a room generally, containing a huge feather-bed and furnished with a variety of things left by departing tenants to this faithful guardian of the gate. Many of these small rooms resemble the den of an antiquary with their odds and ends from the studios—old swords, plaster casts, sketches and discarded furniture—until the place is quite full. Yet it is kept neat and clean by madame, who sews all day and talks to her cat and to every one who passes into the court-yard. Here your letters are kept, too,  - 107 -in one of a row of boxes, with the number of your atelier marked thereon. At night, after ten, your concierge opens the heavy iron gate of your court by pulling a cord within reach of the family bed. He or she is waked up at intervals through the night to let into and out of a court full of studios those to whom the night is ever young. Or perhaps your concierge will be like old Père Valois, who has three pretty daughters who do the housework of the studios, as well as assist in the guardianship of the gate. They are very busy, these three daughters of Père Valois—all the morning you will see these little “femmes de ménage” as busy as bees; the artists and poets must be waked up, and beds made and studios cleaned. There are many that are never cleaned at all, but then there are many, too, who are not so fortunate as to be taken care of by the three daughters of Père Valois. <div class="figcenter"> <ANTIMG src="images/image052.jpg" width-obs="620" height-obs="362" alt="" title="" /> VOILÀ LA BELLE ROSE, MADAME!</div> There is no gossip within the quarter that your “femme de ménage” does not know, and over your morning coffee, which she brings you, she will regale you with the- 108 - latest news about most of your best friends, including your favorite model, and madame from whom you buy your wine, always concluding with: “That is what I heard, monsieur,—I think it is quite true, because the little Marie, who is the femme de ménage of Monsieur Valentin, got it from Céleste Dauphine yesterday in the café in the rue du Cherche Midi.” In the morning, this demure maid-of-all-work will be in her calico dress with her sleeves rolled up over her strong white arms, but in the evening you may see her in a chic little dress, at the “Bal Bullier,” or dining at the Panthéon, with the fellow whose studio is opposite yours. <div class="figcenter"> <ANTIMG src="images/image053.jpg" width-obs="620" height-obs="419" alt="" title="" /> A BUSY MORNING</div> Alice Lemaître, however, was a far different type of femme de ménage than any of the gossiping daughters of old Père Valois, and her lot was harder, for one night she left her home in one of the provincial towns, when barely sixteen, and found herself in Paris with three francs to her name and not a friend in this big pleasure-loving city to turn to. After many days of privation, she became bonne to a woman known as  - 110 -Yvette de Marcie, a lady with a bad temper and many jewels, to whom little Alice, with her rosy cheeks and bright eyes and willing disposition to work in order to live, became a person upon whom this fashionable virago of a demi-mondaine vented the worst that was in her—and there was much of this—until Alice went out into the world again. She next found employment at a baker’s, where she was obliged to get up at four in the morning, winter and summer, and deliver the long loaves of bread at the different houses; but the work was too hard and she left. The baker paid her a trifle a week for her labor, while the attractive Yvette de Marcie turned her into the street without her wages. It was while delivering bread one morning to an atelier in the rue des Dames, that she chanced to meet a young painter who was looking for a good femme de ménage to relieve his artistic mind from the worries of housekeeping. Little Alice fairly cried when the good painter told her she might come at twenty francs a month, which was more money than this  - 112 -very grateful and brave little Brittany girl had ever known before. <div class="figcenter"> <ANTIMG src="images/image054.jpg" width-obs="620" height-obs="426" alt="(brocanteur shop front)" title="" /></div> “You see, monsieur, one must do one’s best whatever one undertakes,” said Alice to me; “I have tried every profession, and now I am a good femme de ménage, and I am ‘bien contente.’ No,” she continued, “I shall never marry, for one’s independence is worth more than anything else. When one marries,” she said earnestly, her little brow in a frown, “one’s life is lost; I am young and strong, and I have courage, and so I can work hard. One should be content when one is not cold and hungry, and I have been many times that, monsieur. Once I worked in a fabrique, where, all day, we painted the combs of china roosters a bright red for bon-bon boxes—hundreds and hundreds of them until I used to see them in my dreams; but the fabrique failed, for the patron ran away with the wife of a Russian. He was a very stupid man to have done that, monsieur, for he had a very nice wife of his own—a pretty brunette, with a charming figure; but you see, monsieur, in Paris it is always that way. C’est toujours comme ça.” - 113 - <div class="figleft"> <ANTIMG src="images/image055.jpg" width-obs="213" height-obs="350" alt="J" title="" /></div> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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