Bohemian Days Part 1

Bohemian Days.

by Geo. Alfred Townsend.

PREFACE.

So far from the first tale in this book being of political motive, it was written among the subjects of it, and read to several of them in 1864. Perhaps the only _souvenir_ of refugee and "skedaddler" life abroad during the war ever published, its preservation may one day be useful in the socialistic archives of the South, to whose posterity slavery will seem almost a mythical thing. With as little bias in the second tale, I have etched the young Northern truant abroad during the secession. The closing tale, more recently written, in the midst of constant toil and travel, is an attempt to recall an old suburb, now nearly erased and illegible by the extension of a great city, and may be considered a home American picture about contemporary with the European tales.

BOHEMIA.

The farther I do grow from _La Boheme_, The more I do regret that foolish shame Which made me hold it something to conceal, And so I did myself expatriate; For in my pulses and my feet I feel That wayward realm was still my own estate; Wise wagged our tongues when the dear nights grew late, And quainter, clearer, rose our quick conceits, And pure and mutual were our social sweets.

Oh! ever thus convivial round the gate Of Letters have the masters and the young Loitered away their enterprises great, Since Spenser revelled in the halls of state, And at his tavern rarest Jonson sung.

THE REBEL COLONY IN PARIS.

I.

THE EXILES.

In the latter part of October, 1863, seven very anxious and dilapidated personages were a.s.sembled under the roof of an old, eight-storied tenement, near the church of St. Sulpice, in the city of Paris.

The seven under consideration had reached the catastrophe of their decline--and rise. They had met in solemn deliberation to pa.s.s resolutions to that effect, and take the only congenial means for replenishment and reform. This means lay in miniature before a caged window, revealed by a superfluity of light--a roulette-table, whereon the ball was spinning industriously from the practised fingers of Mr.

Auburn Risque, of Mississippi.

Mr. Auburn Risque had a spotted eye and a bluishly cold face; his fingers were the only movable part of him, for he performed respiration and articulation with the same organ--his nose; and the sole words vouchsafed by this at present were: "Black--black--black--white--black--white--white--black"--etc.

The five surrounding parties were carefully noting upon fragments of paper the results of the experiment, and likewise Master Lees, the lessee of the chamber--a pale, emaciated youth, sitting up in bed, and ciphering tremulously, with bony fingers; even he, upon whom disease had made auguries of death, looked forward to gold, as the remedy which science had not brought, for a wasted youth of dissipation and incontinence.

They were all representatives of the recently inst.i.tuted Confederacy.

Most of them had dwelt in Paris anterior to the war, and, habituated to its luxuries, scarcely recognized themselves, now that they were forlorn and needy. Note Mr. Pisgah, for example--a Georgian, tall, shapely and handsome, with the gray hairs of his thirtieth year shading his working temples; he had been the most envied man in Paris; no woman could resist the magnetism of his eye; he was almost a match for the great Berger at billiards; he rode like a centaur on the Boulevards, and counterfeited Apollo at the opera and the masque. His credit was good for fifty thousand francs any day in the year. He had travelled in far and contiguous regions, conducted intrigues at Athens and Damascus, and smoked his pipe upon the Nile and among the ruins of Sebastopol. Without principle, he was yet amiable, and with his dashing style and address, one forgot his worthlessness.

How keenly he is reminded of it now! He cannot work, he has no craft nor profession; he knew enough to pa.s.s for an educated gentleman; not enough to earn a franc a day. He is the _protege_ at present of his washerwoman, and can say, with some governments, that his debts are impartially distributed. He has only two fears--those of starvation in France, and a soldier's death in America.

The prospect of a debtor's prison at Clichy has long since ceased to be a terror. There, he would be secure of sustenance and shelter, and of these, at liberty, he is doubtful every day.

Still, with his threadbare coat, he haunts the Casino and the Valentino of evenings; for some mistresses of a former day send him billets.

He lies in bed till long after noon, that he may not have pangs of hunger; and has yet credit for a dinner at an obscure _cremery_. When this last confidence shall have been forfeited, what must result to Pisgah?

He is striving to antic.i.p.ate the answer with this experiment at roulette; for he has a "system" whereby it is possible to break any gambling bank--Spa, Baden, Wisbaden or Homburg. The others have systems also, from Auburn Risque to Simp, the only son of the richest widow in Louisiana, who disbursed of old in Paris ten thousand dollars annually.

His house at Pa.s.sy was a palace in miniature, and his favorite a tragedy queen. She played at the Folies Dramatiques, and drove three horses of afternoons upon the Champs Elysees. She had other engagements, of course, when Mr. Lincoln's "paper blockade" stopped Master Simp's remittances, and he pa.s.sed her yesterday upon the Rue Rivoli, with the Russian amba.s.sador's footman at her back, but she only touched him with her silks.

Simp studied a profession, and was a volunteer counsel in the memorable case of Jeems Pinckney against Jeems Rutledge. His speech, on that occasion, occupied in delivery just three minutes, and set the court-room in a roar. He paid the village editor ten dollars to compose it, and the same sum to publish it.

"If you could learn it for me," said Simp, anxiously, "I would give you twenty dollars."

This, his first and last public appearance, was conditional to the receipt from his mother, of six thousand acres of land and eighty negroes. It might have been a close calculation for a mathematician to know how many black sweat-drops, how many strokes of the rawhide, went into the celebrated dinner at the Maison Doree, wherein Master Simp and only his lady had thirty-four courses, and eleven qualities of wine, and a bill of eight hundred francs.

In that prosperous era, his inalienable comrade had been Mr. Andy Plade, who now stood beside him, intensely absorbed.

Of late Mr. Plade's affection had been transferred to Hugenot, the only possessor of an entire franc in the chamber. Hugenot was a short-set individual, in pumps and an eye-gla.s.s, who had been but a few days in the city. He was decidedly a man of sentiment. He called the Confederacy "ow-ah cause," and claimed to have signed the call for the first secession meeting in the South.

He a.s.serted frankly that he was of French extraction, but only hinted that he was of n.o.ble blood. He had been a hatter, but carefully ignored the fact; and, having run the blockade with profitable cargoes fourteen times, had settled down to be a respectable trader between Havre and Na.s.sau. Mr. Plade shared much of the sentiment and some of the money of this ill.u.s.trious personage.

There were rumors abroad that Plade himself had great, but embarra.s.sed, fortunes.

He was one of the hundred thousand chevaliers who hail the advent of war as something which will hide their nothingness.

"I knew it," said Auburn Risque, at length, pinching the ball between his hard palms as if it were the creature of his will. "My system is good; yours do not validate themselves. You are novices at gambling; I am an old blackleg." It was as he had said; the method of betting which he proposed had seemed to be successful. He staked upon colors; never upon numbers; and alternated from white to black after a fixed, undeviating routine.

Less by experiment than by faith, the others gave up their own theories to adopt his own. They resolved to collect every available sou, and, confiding it to the keeping of Mr. Risque, send him to Germany, that he might beggar the bankers, and so restore the Southern Colony to its wonted prosperity.

Hugenot delivered a short address, wishing "the cause" good luck, but declining to subscribe anything. He did not doubt the safety of "the system" of course, but had an hereditary antipathy to gaming. The precepts of all his ancestry were against it.

Poor Lees followed in a broken way, indicating sundry books, a guitar, two pairs of old boots, and a canary bird, as the relics of his fortune.

These, Andy Plade, who possessed nothing, but thought he might borrow a trifle, volunteered to dispose of, and Freckle, a Missourian, who was tolerated in the colony only because he could be plucked, a.s.serted enthusiastically, and amid great sensation, that he yet had three hundred francs at the banker's, his entire capital, all of which he meant to devote to the most reliable project in the world.

At this episode, Pisgah, whose misfortunes had quite shattered his nerves, proposed to drink at Freckle's expense to the success of the system, and Hugenot was prevailed upon to advance twenty-one sous, while Simp took the order to the adjacent _marchand du vin_.

When they had all filled, Hugenot, looking upon himself in the light of a benefactor, considered it necessary to do something.

"Boys," he said, wiping his eves with the lining of a kid glove, "will you esteem it unnatural, that a Suth Kurlinian, who sat--at an early age, it is true--at the feet of the great Kulhoon, should lift up his voice and weep in this day of ou-ah calamity?"

(Sensation, aggrieved by the sobs of Freckle, who, unused to spirits and greatly affected--chokes.)

"When I cast my eye about this lofty chambah" (here Lees, who hasn't been out of it for a year, hides himself beneath the bed-clothes); "when I see these n.o.ble spih-its dwelling obscu' and penniless; when I remembah that two short years ago, they waih of independent fohtunes--one with his sugah, anotha with his cotton, a third with his tobacco, in short, all the blessings of heaven bestowed upon a free people--n.i.g.g.ars, plantations, pleasures!--I can but lay my pooah hand upon the manes of my ancestry, and ask in the name of ou-ah cause, is there justice above or retribution upon the earth!"

A profound silence ensued, broken only by Mr. Plade, who called Hugenot a man of sentiment, and slapped his back; while Freckle fell upon Pisgah's bosom, and wished that his stomach was as full as his heart.

Mr. Simp, who had been endeavoring to recollect some pa.s.sages of his address, in the case of the Jeemses, for that address had an universal application, and might mean as much now as on the original occasion, brought down one of those decayed boots which the _marchand des habits_ had thrice refused to buy, and said, stoutly:

"'By Gad! think of it, hyuh am I, a beggah, by Gad, without shoes to my feet, suh! The wuth of one n.i.g.g.a would keep me now for a yeah. At home, by Gad, I could afford to spend the wuth of a staving field hand every twenty-fouah houahs. I'll sweah!" cried Simp in conclusion, "I call this hard."

"I suppose the Yankees have confiscated my stocks in the Havre steamers," muttered Andy Plade. "I consider they have done me out of twenty thousand dollars."

"Brotha writes to me, last lettah," continued Freckle, who had recovered, "every tree cut off the plantation--every n.i.g.g.a run off, down to old Sim, a hundred years old--every panel of fence toted away--no bacon in smoke-house--not an old rip in stable--no corn, c.o.o.n, possum, rabbit, fox, dog or hog within ten miles of the place--house stands in a mire--mire stands in desert--Yankee general going to conscrip brotha. I save myself, sp'ose, for stahvation."

"Wait till you come down to my condition," faltered the proprietor, making emphasis with his meagre finger--"I have been my own enemy; the Yankees will but finish what is almost consummated now. I tell you, boys, I expect to die in this room; I shall never quit this bed. I am offensive, wasted, withered, and would look gladly upon Pere la Chaise,[A] if with my bodily maladies my mind was not also diseased. I have no fort.i.tude; I am afraid of death!"