Ballads of a Bohemian | Page 2

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, ~mon vieux~, I collared all your cash -- Three hundred francs. . . . There! ~Nom de Dieu~," said Julot the ~apache~.
And that was how I came to know Julot and Gigolette,?And we would talk and drink a ~bock~, and smoke a cigarette. And I would meditate upon the artistry of crime,?And he would tell of cracking cribs and cops and doing time; Or else when he was flush of funds he'd carelessly explain?He'd biffed some