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, h