Ballads of a Bohemian | Page 2

so as I toiled and toiled doggedly
enough, many were the looks I cast at the three faggots I had saved to
cook my evening meal. Now, however, my supper is over, my pipe
alight, and as I stretch my legs before the embers I have at last a glow
of comfort, a glimpse of peace.
My Garret
Here is my Garret up five flights of stairs;
Here's where I deal in

dreams and ply in fancies,
Here is the wonder-shop of all my wares,

My sounding sonnets and my red romances.
Here's where I
challenge Fate and ring my rhymes,
And grope at glory -- aye, and
starve at times.
Here is my Stronghold: stout of heart am I,
Greeting each dawn as
songful as a linnet;
And when at night on yon poor bed I lie

(Blessing the world and every soul that's in it),
Here's where I thank
the Lord no shadow bars
My skylight's vision of the valiant stars.
Here is my Palace tapestried with dreams.
Ah! though to-night ten
~sous~ are all my treasure,
While in my gaze immortal beauty gleams,

Am I not dowered with wealth beyond all measure?
Though in my
ragged coat my songs I sing,
King of my soul, I envy not the king.
Here is my Haven: it's so quiet here;
Only the scratch of pen, the
candle's flutter;
Shabby and bare and small, but O how dear!
Mark
you -- my table with my work a-clutter,
My shelf of tattered books
along the wall,
My bed, my broken chair -- that's nearly all.
Only four faded walls, yet mine, all mine.
Oh, you fine folks, a
pauper scorns your pity.
Look, where above me stars of rapture shine;

See, where below me gleams the siren city . . .
Am I not rich? -- a
millionaire no less,
If wealth be told in terms of Happiness.
Ten ~sous~. . . . I think one can sing best of poverty when one is
holding it at arm's length. I'm sure that when I wrote these lines,

fortune had for a moment tweaked me by the nose. To-night, however,
I am truly down to ten ~sous~. It is for that I have stayed in my room
all day, rolled in my blankets and clutching my pen with clammy
fingers. I must work, work, work. I must finish my book before poverty
crushes me. I am not only writing for my living but for my life. Even
to-day my Muse was mutinous. For hours and hours anxiously I stared
at a paper that was blank; nervously I paced up and down my garret;
bitterly I flung myself on my bed. Then suddenly it all came. Line after

line I wrote with hardly a halt. So I made another of my Ballads of the
Boulevards. Here it is:
Julot the ~Apache~
You've heard of Julot the ~apache~, and Gigolette, his ~mome~. . . .
Montmartre was their hunting-ground, but Belville was their home. A
little chap just like a boy, with smudgy black mustache, -- Yet there
was nothing juvenile in Julot the ~apache~.
From head to heel as
tough as steel, as nimble as a cat,
With every trick of twist and kick, a
master of ~savate~.
And Gigolette was tall and fair, as stupid as a
cow,
With three combs in the greasy hair she banged upon her brow.
You'd see her on the Place Pigalle on any afternoon,
A primitive and
strapping wench as brazen as the moon.
And yet there is a tale that's
told of Clichy after dark,
And two ~gendarmes~ who swung their
arms with Julot for a mark. And oh, but they'd have got him too; they
banged and blazed away, When like a flash a woman leapt between
them and their prey. She took the medicine meant for him; she came
down with a crash . . . "Quick now, and make your get-away, O Julot
the ~apache~!" . . . But no! He turned, ran swiftly back, his arms
around her met; They nabbed him sobbing like a kid, and kissing
Gigolette.
Now I'm a reckless painter chap who loves a jamboree,
And one night
in Cyrano's bar I got upon a spree;
And there were trollops all about,
and crooks of every kind, But though the place was reeling round I
didn't seem to mind. Till down I sank, and all was blank when in the
bleary dawn I woke up in my studio to find -- my money gone;
Three
hundred francs I'd scraped and squeezed to pay my quarter's rent.
"Some one has pinched my wad," I wailed; "it never has been spent."
And as I racked my brains to seek how I could raise some more, Before
my cruel landlord kicked me cowering from the door:
A knock . . .
"Come in," I gruffly groaned; I did not raise my head, Then lo! I heard
a husky voice, a swift and silky tread:
"You got so blind, last night,