Vie De Boheme Part 4

_Il est depuis longtemps avere que nous sommes,_ _Dans le siecle, six milles jeunes hommes_ _Qui du demon de l'Art nous croyant tourmentes,_ _Depensons notre vie en excentricites;_ _Qui, du fatal Byron copiant des allures,_ _De solennels manteaux drapons nos encolures._

These six thousand copies of the "Fatal Byron," if they ever existed, have, for the most part, died without leaving their names to posterity.

The historian can deal only with a few individuals, who embodied the salient qualities of Bohemia.

VII

THE SECOND "CeNACLE"

"People always forget," said Theophile Gautier in his old age, "that we were the first Schaunards and Collines, a quarter of a century before Murger. Only," he added with a smile, "we had talent and did not write invertebrate verses like those of that feeble appendage to Alfred de Musset." This saying, reported by his son-in-law, was made on a festive occasion, so that it is unnecessary to regard with concern the discrepancy between this view of Murger and the one which Gautier has expressed in print. That kindest-hearted of writers would never wittingly have hurt the reputation or memory of the humblest among his fellows, and I only quote the pa.s.sage because, when the malice is discounted as largely as the "quarter of a century," it remains a true reference to the origins of Bohemia by one who was, so to speak, one of its pilgrim fathers. The first Schaunards and Collines, Rodolphes and Marcels, the unknown poets and artists who first raised the standard of common enthusiasm against a common enemy, the _bourgeois_, were the young and l.u.s.ty friends of a young and l.u.s.ty Gautier. They were members of a _cenacle_, albeit a less beatific _cenacle_ than the brotherhood drawn in Balzac's "Illusions Perdues." In the _cenacle_ of the Rue des Quatre Vents he evolved by sheer imagination a compensating mirage of virtue to be contrasted with all the real depravity of society which his eye so unerringly saw, just as Eugenie Grandet shines out impossibly beside her miserly father, and Madame Firmiani in the corrupt circle of his _femmes du monde_. Nevertheless there is a certain sublimity in the _cenacle_ to which attention cannot be denied. It was Balzac's picture of an ideal Bohemia in which alone such a nature as his could have found a home. It is of little moment that he dates the action of "Illusions Perdues" a few years before 1830, for the _cenacle_ itself is a timeless creation, only limited by the fact that one of its members died in the insurrection of 1832. The young men who composed the _cenacle_ bore upon their brow the "seal of special genius." Daniel d'Arthez, upon whom since the death of their leader, the great mystic, Louis Lambert, the mantle had fallen, was a monarchist of n.o.ble family, destined to become the greatest writer of the future; Horace Bianchon, the flower of doctors, a materialist of perfect charity and profound science; Leon Giraud, a humanitarian philosopher; Joseph Bridau, a great painter with "the line of Rome and the colour of Venice"; Fulgence Ridal, a sceptic, a cynic, and the wittiest playwright of his time; Meyraux, a scientist; and Michel Chrestien, a red republican who was killed in the Cloitre Saint-Merri. They were not ascetics by profession: d'Arthez, for instance, was the last lover of the Diane, the Princesse de Cadignan, in the days of his later glory; Bridau's art was affected by his love affairs; Chrestien was "plein d'illusions et d'amour." They were like the "saints" of the early Christian Church, each going his own way, but true helpers one of another, true champions and honest critics. They were without vanity or envy, having a profound esteem for one another, with a consciousness of their own worth. "Their great external misery and the splendour of their intellectual wealth produced a singular contrast. In their society n.o.body thought of the realities of life except as subjects for friendly pleasantries.... The sufferings of poverty, when they made themselves felt, were so gaily borne, accepted with such ardour by all, that they did nothing to alter the particular serenity which marks the faces of young men free from grave faults, who have not lost part of themselves in any of those low traffickings which are forced upon men by poverty ill supported, by the desire to get on without any choice of means, and by the facile complacency with which men of letters welcome or pardon betrayals.... These young men were sure of themselves: the enemy of one became the enemy of all, and they would have abandoned their most urgent interests to obey the sacred solidarity of their hearts. All incapable of a mean action, they could oppose a formidable 'no' to every accusation, and defend one another with security. Equally high-minded and equally matched in matters of sensibility, they could think and speak all their mind in the domain of science and intelligence; thence came the innocence of their intercourse, the gaiety of their talk. Sure of mutual understanding, their minds digressed at their ease; and they stood on no ceremony among themselves, confided in each other their sorrows and their joys, pondered and suffered with open hearts." I need speak no further of this imaginary _cenacle_, for "Illusions Perdues" is widely known. It is one of those wonderful fantasies that one feels were lovingly cherished by Balzac, at once his darling dreams and his disappointments. He had a pa.s.sionate desire to express the beautiful, and he was denied that gift.

The lights dance before his eyes, and his very language becomes confused and turgid when he deserts reality. It may safely be said that in the real _Boheme_ there was no such goodly company of industrious, gifted, morally austere, intellectually gay, unselfish young men, and that there never will be in any society till the coming of the Coquecigrues.

The Bohemia of artistic tradition began in what Theophile Gautier named the "second _cenacle_." The first _cenacle_, as all the world knows, was that of Victor Hugo, Sainte-Beuve, and the brothers Deschamps, who met regularly at the _cabaret_ of Mere Saguet on Montparna.s.se in the days when Hugo was still hatching the plot of the literary revolution. To trace to them the origins of Bohemia would be an error, for they never had any part or lot in Bohemianism. They were young, it is true, and depended upon their art for a living, but the fact that they were nothing but a small _coterie_ of earnest poets, more akin to the band of d'Arthez than the friends of Rodolphe, depends upon two things, their time and their outlook. The first _cenacle_ came into existence about 1822, when the throne of the Bourbons seemed solid and royalism went hand in hand with cla.s.sicism. No standard of insurrection, civic or literary, had yet been raised; the victory was yet to come, and it would have been madness, before the campaign was fully planned or the army gathered, for the chiefs to have aped the style of victors. The merciless ridicule of Paris would have killed them in a week, without support as they were. Defiance of the _bourgeois_, an absolute essential of the true Bohemian creed, was, therefore, not appropriate to the first _cenacle_, who lived openly the life of ordinary, decent citizens, while secretly preparing the proclamations, the standards, and the weapons by which the cataclysmic victory of 1830 was to be won. In such a tense moment Bohemia could not be born. Their outlook, in the second place, was too lofty to comprehend the lower planes in which Bohemia made itself conspicuous. To strike a more human note in poetry was their chief aim: they were concerned with art rather than with life itself; and though Hugo, in the privacy of his room, doffed with relief that _bourgeois_ symbol, the high linen collar, he was like a general in his tent drawing up that transcendental plan of operations, the preface to "Cromwell," which was to inspire his troops in their pioneering and shooting, in their whole bodily attack on the cla.s.sic tradition. As the cla.s.sic tradition was embodied not only in literature, in contemporary journalism, in professional lectures, but in the social life of all staid citizens as well, the Romantic troops, pa.s.sionate and fundamental as their literary enthusiasm was, were forced to make social life the field of their a.s.sault, all the more because, being poor, young, and unknown, they were unable to inflict such palpable wounds with pen or brush as they could by making a violent protest in every detail of the ordinary way of living. By outraging the accepted standards of decency in dress, in speech, and in demeanour, they made their presence daily felt, and where their presence was felt their ideals were made ostensible. Their tactics, after the event, may be blamed, the effect they produced was, no doubt, smaller than they imagined, but the fact remains that la _vie de Boheme_ began neither as a retreat for higher souls nor as a means for reckless self-indulgence, but as a definite method of drawing attention to a new and important artistic creed. For the greater exponents of this creed, a Hugo or a Delacroix, such a material protest would have been out of place; it would have detracted even from the effect produced by their great works of art. Only the rank and file, to whom supreme personal achievement was impossible, collected and commonly inspired, as I have already pointed out, under special historical and social conditions, were justified in adopting the measures that were best suited to their purpose. Their purpose was as temporary as their conditions; their device, _epater le bourgeois_, has now become a hollow phrase, but it meant then the rousing of every shopkeeper, every _garcon de cafe_, as well as the cultured reader of current literature, to the sense that art was alive again. This was the aim of the second _cenacle_, the first Bohemians. They were successful, and they were necessary.

The second _cenacle_ was not a formal organization, so that no definite date can be fixed for its inst.i.tution. Its members probably came together in the same haphazard way as the small bands of friends at a public school or university, crystallizing so imperceptibly that the moment of incorporation baffles memory, and often so firmly that death alone is their solvent. Theophile Gautier, in his fragmentary "Histoire du Romantisme," has given the fullest details of the _cenacle's_ existence, yet neither he nor his biographer, Maxime du Camp, make it clear whether it was formed prior or posterior to the famous first night of "Hernani" in February of 1830. Gautier, no doubt, had forgotten, but it seems fairly safe to a.s.sume that if preliminary acquaintance was already made between some of its members before that time, the stormy nights of February strengthened the bond and made the a.s.sociation compact. The story of "Hernani," with the red waistcoat, _vieil as de pique_, and other tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs, has so often been told, even in English, that it may seem unnecessary to traverse such well-trodden ground; but a historian has no business to take anything for granted, so that "Hernani" can be no more justly omitted here than Waterloo from any work upon Napoleon. It was part of Victor Hugo's agreement with the Theatre Francais that a number of seats should be at his disposal each night, and that the holders of the tickets should be admitted some time before the ordinary public. These were the trenches into which his army of young men were thrown. Minor officers were entrusted with the task of bringing the men to the rendezvous, Jules Vabre, an architect, being responsible for a hundred and fifty men, and Celestin Nanteuil for almost as large a number. Gerard de Nerval, whose translation of Goethe's "Faust," published in 1828 (when he was only nineteen), had brought him considerable fame in Romantic circles, had known Gautier, who was two years his junior, at the College Charlemagne. This amiable essayist, whom Gautier likened more than once to a swallow, flitting always in and out among his friends, was not forgetful of his young friend in the days of recruiting. Gautier was at that time studying painting in the studio of Rioult, whither Gerard de Nerval made one day a swallow-like dart and produced six tickets marked with the single but thrilling word _Hierro_, the Spanish for "iron." According to Maxime du Camp he gave these to Gautier with the words:

"Tu reponds de tes hommes?"

To him replied Gautier: "Par le crane dans lequel Byron buvait a l'Abbaye de Newstead, j'en reponds. N'est-ce pas, vous autres?"

"Mort aux perruques!" resounded in answer through the studio, and Gerard flitted away content.

Gautier, who was a little better provided with worldly goods than some of the Romantic army, then set about devising a costume that should strike death into the heart of the _perruques_. With extreme care he cut out a pattern of a medieval _pourpoint_--a b.u.t.tonless waistcoat coming right up to the collar-bone, and fastening with laces behind like the uniform of Saint-Simon's disciples, which symbolized mutual a.s.sistance, because no Saint-Simonian could truss his own points. His Gascon tailor's professional objections were overruled, even though the material chosen was a gorgeous silk coloured a Chinese vermilion, and the garment was made as desired: to it were added a pair of light greenish-grey trousers with a broad stripe of black down each seam, a black coat with ample _revers_ of velvet, and a flowing cravat. It was indeed a devastating sight, and one that deservedly became famous. In this fervent spirit was the battle waged over "Hernani"; for thirty consecutive performances the trenches were manfully filled and a fusillade of cheers poured forth at every touch of romantic colour, every bold _enjambement_, every defiance of cla.s.sic circ.u.mlocution, and, above all, every sign of disapprobation on the part of those they rudely styled "wigs" and "bald pates." The battlefield was often a pandemonium, but the result was victory. The Theatre Francais, the very home of Moliere, was successfully carried by the Romantic a.s.sault. Gautier had magnificently won his spurs, and shortly afterwards he was introduced by Gerard de Nerval and Petrus Borel to the great hero himself, an ordeal which caused him so much trepidation that he sat for over an hour on the stairs with his two sponsors before he could pluck up courage to proceed. His fears, however, soon vanished after a cordial reception, and as his parents were then living next door to Hugo in the splendid old Place Royale, he soon became the most constant page and attendant of the poet, for whom he preserved a lifelong devotion.

These were the days of the second _cenacle_, for "Hernani" was the Hegira of _la vie de Boheme_. During the long waits in the empty theatre, the pa.s.sionate mornings of preparation, the fiery reunions after the curtain had fallen, a set of the most ardent Hugo-worshippers had found their affinities. They did not indeed live together--some were dutifully under the parental roof, some had hardly a roof to their heads, one at least was supporting a mother and sister by daily work in a government office--but they formed the habit of meeting and spending many hours of the day and night together and the meeting-place was either the studio of a young sculptor, Jehan du Seigneur, or the sanded parlour of the _Pet.i.t Moulin Rouge_, in the _rond-point_ of the Arc de Triomphe. Their names were Petrus Borel, Joseph Bouchardy, Philothee O'Neddy, Alphonse Brot, Augustus Mackeat, Jules Vabre, Napoleon Thom, Jehan du Seigneur, Leon Clopet, Celestin Nanteuil, Theophile Gautier, and Gerard de Nerval. It is almost needless to say that some of the names are Gothic transformations in the Romantic fashion. Petrus Borel was, of course, christened Pierre, as du Seigneur was christened Jean by his parents; while Philothee O'Neddy and Augustus Mackeat conceal the persons of Theophile Dondey and Auguste Maquet. But names in _-us_ or Celtic patronymics were all the rage, and even Gautier was called Albertus after his poem of that name published in 1832. A curious feature about the group was that, though it existed to champion the cause of Romantic poetry, the only pure man of letters was Gerard de Nerval. Of the rest, Borel, formerly an architect, was learning to draw in Deveria's studio, Thom and Nanteuil were artists, Gautier and Bouchardy studying art, du Seigneur a sculptor, Clopet and Vabre architects; O'Neddy and Brot, indeed, were professed poets, but in no less an embryonic stage than some of the others who afterwards found in the pen their most successful tool. "This mixture of art in poetry,"

says Gautier, "was and has remained one of the characteristic signs of the new school, and makes it clear why the first adepts were recruited rather among the artists than among the men of letters. A mult.i.tude of objects, images, and comparisons which were thought to be irreducible to the written word were introduced into the language and have stayed there."[17]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Petrus Borel]

The one whom Gautier called the _individualite pivotale_ of the group, though Philothee O'Neddy in after years denied that he had more influence than Gautier, Gerard, or Bouchardy, was Petrus Borel, Le Lycanthrope as he subsequently named himself. His full name was Pierre Borel d'Hauterive, and he was born in Lyons in 1809. His father, captured by the revolutionaries in 1792 and then liberated, fled to Switzerland, whence he returned to Paris, a ruined man, to earn what he could by keeping a shop. At the age of fifteen Pierre was apprenticed to an architect, and in 1829 he set up on his own account without much success. He and Jules Vabre became a.s.sociated, and so poor were they that they used to use the cellars of the houses on which they were engaged as their dwelling-place. Gautier recalled visiting them once in the cellar of a house in the Rue Fontaine-du-Roi, where they were preparing their frugal meal of potatoes baked in the ashes. "Ah," said Vabre with pride, "but we have salt on Sundays." Borel's ideas were too Gothically fantastic for his _bourgeois_ clients, and, after a violent dispute over his fourth commission, he ordered the half-finished building to be demolished, and gave up for ever an ungrateful profession,[18] betaking himself for a season to the study of painting, and writing the while those poems animated by a haughty bitterness which were published under the t.i.tle of "Rhapsodies." They are dedicated and addressed to the members of the second _cenacle_, among whom he enjoyed an enormous reputation. He was for them the poet of the future, before whom Hugo would crumble to dust. Alas! for youthful predictions; thirty years later Gautier, the most loyal of Romantics, was forced to exclaim: "Dire que j'ai cru a Petrus!"[19] He exercised over the group, in fact, a kind of unconscious hypnotism. His slightly superior age, his strange, rough, paradoxical eloquence, and, above all, his picturesque appearance imposed on them all. Their ideal was to have an _allure fatale_, a sombre complexion and haughty, Byronic mien. Borel realized it. He looked like a Castilian n.o.bleman out of a Velasquez picture, says Gautier, with his "young and serious face, of perfect regularity, an olive skin gilded with light shades of amber, lit up by great, shining eyes, sad as those of Abencerrages thinking of Granada," his bright red lip which shone under his moustache, "one spark of life in that mask of Oriental immobility," and his fine, full, silky beard perfumed and tended like that of a sultan, at a time when to wear a beard in Paris was an outrage to public decency. He was clothed in black, wearing a high Robespierre waistcoat and draping a long black cloak around him with an air of studied mystery. How could the younger men, whose beards refused to grow, not believe in such a perfect symbol, so magnificently scornful, so profoundly fatal? He was the most republican, too, of them all, the typical _Bousingot_ of the _bourgeois_ Press, though fanatical republicanism was not, as Philothee O'Neddy afterwards protested in a letter to Charles a.s.selineau, their representative opinion. Gerard had no political opinions at all, Gautier was obstinately _Jeune-France_, and the others only dreamt of a social Utopia in which aestheticism should replace religion, or of some humanitarian millennium after the manner of Saint-Simon and Fourier. Borel, however, held society in complete disgust, as he showed when he left the gathering at Jehan du Seigneur's, and proceeded one summer to live with some followers on the slopes of Montmartre, all naked as savages, till the landlord drove them out at the price of his porter's lodge, which they burnt down in revenge.

None of the others were quite so remarkably individual as Petrus Borel, whose character may be described as Jules Claretie describes his book of extravagant stories, "Champavert": "doubt, negation, bitterness, anger, something at the same time furious and comic." Vabre, his partner in architecture, had fair hair and moustaches, without any extravagance in his bearing, but his face twinkled all over with malice and his conversation was madly Rabelaisian. He projected a famous book that was never written, "Sur l'Incommodite des Commodes." An intense love for Shakespeare was his chief Romantic a.s.set. According to Gautier he gave up his later life to studying our language in England that he might make the perfect translation, a task which was never completed. Joseph Bouchardy, who afterwards became a very successful writer of melodrama, was then learning engraving. He, too, was dark, so dark that with the soft, spa.r.s.e beard that just fringed his face he looked an Indian, and was nicknamed the Maharajah of Lah.o.r.e. He was less poetry-mad than the rest, but eternally occupied with dramatic scenarios in which all the secret pa.s.sages, trap-doors, and sliding panels of a novel by Mrs.

Radcliffe were brought into play. Jehan du Seigneur, who made medallions of all his friends, was a gentle, modest youth with a very pink-and-white complexion which was his everlasting despair. To atone for this unavoidable defection from Romantic ideals, he wore a black velvet _pourpoint_, a black jacket with broad velvet _revers_, and a voluminous necktie, so that not a speck of white linen was shown, a "supreme elegance romantique," as Gautier remarks. Augustus Mackeat was chiefly conspicuous for the happy transformation of his name, though he returned to the orthodox Maquet when he became a successful playwright.

His disguise, however, was nothing to the tremendous anagram which turned Theophile Dondey into Philothee O'Neddy. He, says Gautier, was dark as a mulatto with fair, curly hair. Though he was helping to support a mother and sister by working in a government office, this Philistine occupation did not prevent him from being one of the most frenzied of the gang, a "paroxyst" _ruisselant d'inousme_. In 1833 he published a collection of ultra-romantic poems called "Feu et Flamme,"

which reek with pa.s.sion, despair, scorn, suicide, and contempt for Christianity. Yet he lived till 1872, and though he published nothing more, he left a collection of posthumous poems all of which breathe an extreme melancholy. In the letter written to a.s.selineau ten years before his death he admitted that in the days of the _cenacle_ he had "une bonne grosse somme d'extravagance et de mauvais got," but protested warmly against the application to them of the epithet "ridiculous."

"Risible" they might have been, but only the _bourgeois_ were "ridiculous." Celestin Nanteuil was big, fair, gentle, and so perfectly medieval that Gautier caricatured him as Elie Wildman-stadius, the hero of one of his _Jeune-France_ stories, who lived in a Gothic manor on medieval fare, read nothing but medieval illuminated ma.n.u.scripts, and was killed when the Gothic cathedral, his sole external joy, was struck by lightning. Gautier describes him personally as having the appearance of "one of those long angels bearing censers or playing sambucs that live in the gables of cathedrals, who has come down into the city in the midst of the busy burgesses, keeping his nimbus all the while at the back of his head like a hat, but without the least suspicion that it is not natural to wear one's aureole in the street." He was a furious Hernanist in 1830 (he was then only seventeen), and called "the Captain," for leading the army to the fray. In 1843, when he was asked to bring three hundred young men to support "Les Burgraves" in the same manner, he sadly said: "Tell the master there are no more young men." He might, says Maxime du Camp, have been a great painter, but he was compelled to live by ill.u.s.trating. Whenever he had made a little money in this way he returned to his colours and his easel till it was exhausted. He ended in the obscurity of Dijon, becoming the director of its school of art.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Celestin Nanteuil]

Maxime du Camp compares Nanteuil's fate to that of Gautier, who was forced by circ.u.mstances to waste so much of his talent in mere journalism; but in 1830 Gautier, a young man of nineteen, who made long hair serve instead of a beard, was still free as air. In that year he brought out a little volume of poems, and a year or two later produced the fantastic "Albertus," which he followed with "Les Jeune-France." His art studies had soon ceased because he discovered that he suffered from short sight, and we may regard him in the days of the _cenacle_ as a poet pure and simple. One figure remains to be filled in, the most pathetic of all the Romantic band, Gerard de Nerval. He was born in 1808, the son of a Doctor Labrunie--the family name of de Nerval was only a.s.sumed by him when he began to write. His youth was spent in the pleasant country of the Valois, and he received a very careful education from his father, who taught him not only Latin and Greek, but German, Italian, and the rudiments of Arabic and Persian. Even in his early days he was an eager reader of mystics and utopists, which gave that first fantastical turn to his brain which ended later in complete madness. His development was normal at first. At the College Charlemagne he was the snapper-up of every prize, and produced some quite worthless poetry in praise of Napoleon that won high approval from his professors. He followed this by a satire on the Academy, which appeared in 1826, and in 1828 he produced an ode to Beranger of a style to which his Romantic friends could only have applied the new epithet _poncif_. The translation of "Faust," which earned a very high compliment from the great Goethe himself, turned him into his appropriate path and gave him a serious literary reputation which he never lost. He translated other fragments of German poetry, and wrote for the _Mercure de France_, of which Pierre Lacroix, the "Bibliophile Jacob," was then the editor. His adoption of a literary career was a grave disappointment to his father, who had hoped to make a good official of him, and it is probable that parental coldness first caused him to find a congenial asylum in the new Bohemia, of which he was never a typical inhabitant. When he came of age he inherited his mother's dowry, which made the actual earning of money immaterial to him. His success with "Faust" had brought him into touch with Hugo, so that after the days of "Hernani" he held in the _cenacle_ the most distinguished, if not the most influential, position as a lieutenant of their demi-G.o.d, with notable achievements in the field of letters already to his credit.

Gerard threw in his lot with the _cenacle_, but, though he even wrote some revolutionary poems in 1830, for which he was imprisoned in Sainte Pelagie, he was never quite at ease with Borel and the _Bousingot_ faction. The flamboyant side of Romanticism and its noisy gatherings had little appeal for him. He was an eccentric and a solitary by nature, as his writings, with their strong reminiscence of Heine, show. In the time of the _cenacle_ he was, according to Gautier, a gentle and modest young man, who blushed like a girl, with a pink-and-white complexion and soft, grey eyes. Under his fine, light golden hair his forehead, beautifully shaped, shone like polished ivory. He was usually dressed in a black frock-coat with enormous pockets, in which, like Murger's Colline, he buried a whole library of books picked up on the _quais_, five or six notebooks, and a large collection of sc.r.a.ps of paper on which he wrote down the ideas that occurred to him on his long walks. He was the perfect peripatetic: as he once said, he would have liked to walk through life unrolling an endless roll of paper on which he could jot his reflections. He lived at this time with Camille Rogier, the artist, in the Rue des Beaux Arts, but his friends could never be sure where to find him. For him no hour was sacred to rest. He wandered about Paris at all times of the day and night, dropping in on a friend for an hour or two, ready to ride a hobby-horse with him in any direction, then darting off again, his thoughts in the clouds, n.o.body knew whither, and returning in the small hours, only to flit from his bed at the dawn. Of all the gay companions of Bohemia he was the best loved, for his childlike simplicity and his gentle manners won all hearts. He went through life to his terrible death with complete unworldliness, almost like a ghost, unconscious of the material side of existence, directing his feet only by the light of his spirit. Gautier, writing after his death, protested vehemently that his was no ordinary tragedy of neglected genius; he had money enough, but money was nothing to him, so he spent it without a thought; his work was always accepted by editors, and his plays, though not successful, were all produced. But success was the last of his preoccupations. He was a wanderer living in a world of his own fantasies. As he will appear again in these pages, we may bid him farewell for the moment, with the conviction that it would be pleasant to be transported for a season back to that turbulent _vie de Boheme_ if only to find the kindly Gerard's arm pa.s.sed through one's own and to hear his gentle murmur: "Tu as une fantaisie; je la promenerai avec toi."

I ought, perhaps, to apologize for allowing the persons of the _cenacle_ to take up so much s.p.a.ce before coming to their life, yet I imagine, on the whole, that I have said too little rather than too much. To go back to a past of which one has no experience is a matter of such extreme difficulty that a historian must often despair at the impossibility of reproducing the whole congeries of scattered detail from which alone his own mental picture could have taken shape. The first Bohemia, that of the second _cenacle_, was less a common life than a common recreation.

It was an incomplete _vie de Boheme_ in so far as its members were united, not by a desire to share all the joys and difficulties of life, but by a particular artistic enthusiasm. There is no record that any of them worked or dwelt together, that they took part in joint expeditions of amus.e.m.e.nt, or that the mutual acquaintance of those female divinities for whom they plied so "fatally" their emotional bellows is to be presumed--and these are marked characteristics of Murger's _vie de Boheme_. When they ate together it was at the obscure _cabaret_ kept by the Neapolitan Graziano for the needs of his compatriots who worked in Paris. Here, in a plain whitewashed room with a sanded floor, a dresser covered with violently coloured faience and plain wooden benches, they were initiated by their host--a man of senatorial presence, with an immense but perfectly correct nose and big black beard, who seemed to dream all the while of his beloved Italy--into the delights of _spaghetti_, _stufato_, _tagliarini_, and _gnocchi_. They were delicious meals, seasoned with good spirits, and--to use the delightful French phrase--"bedewed" with sound wine of Argenteuil or Suresnes christened magnificently with the names of the most exclusive vineyards in Medoc or Burgundy. Still, they were felt at times to be a trifle wanting in Romantic glamour. It was all very well, the grumblers remarked, to be enjoying incomparable macaroni, but when all was said and done there was little that an impartial observer could descry in these banquets to differentiate them from the prosaic meals of a Joseph Prudhomme.

Something was wanting, some tincture of the Newstead spirit, some infernal joy in the food, some shudder in the drinking. The macaroni remained obstinately matter-of-fact, but a brilliant idea was mooted that would give a charnel flavour to the wine. Graziano's gla.s.ses were only gla.s.ses of quite modern exiguousness; the true brotherhood should drink out of a skull. A skull was accordingly procured by Gerard from his father, the doctor, and ingeniously mounted by Gautier, who screwed to its side an old bra.s.s handle from a chest of drawers. In truth it was a n.o.ble bowl, and the pious company drank from it with bravado, each concealing with more or less ill-success his natural repugnance.

Familiarity, however, bred contempt, till one uncompromising youth surprised his companions by noisily commanding the waiter to fill with sea-water.

"Why sea-water?" exclaimed a simple soul.

"Why sea-water! Because the master in 'Hans d'Islande' says 'he drank the water of the sea from the skulls of the dead.' It is my desire to do the same."

Yes, the _Pet.i.t Moulin Rouge_, for all its good cheer and its death's-head mounted with a drawer-handle, was too workaday for these eclectics. They reached their true glory only in the gatherings which took place in Jehan du Seigneur's studio. It was a room over a little fruiterer's shop that the _cenacle_ sanctified as their conventicle. "In a little chamber," wrote an older Gautier, "which had not seats enough for all its occupants, gathered the young men, really young and different in that respect from the _young_ men of to-day, who are all more or less quinquagenarians. The hammock in which the master of the dwelling took his siesta, the narrow couchlet in which the dawn often surprised him at the last page of a book of verses, eked out the insufficiency of conveniences for conversation. One really talked better standing up, and the gestures of the orator or declaimer only gained a more ample scope. Still, it was extremely unwise to make too free with your arms for fear of knocking your knuckles against the sloping ceiling." It was a poor man's room, but not without ornament, for it contained sketches by the two Deverias, a head after t.i.tian or Giorgione by Boulanger, two earthenware vases full of flowers on the chimneypiece, the inevitable death's-head instead of a clock, a looking-gla.s.s, and a small shelf of books. On either side of the gla.s.s and in the embrasures of the windows were hung the portrait medallions which Jehan made of his friends. They had no money to get them cast in bronze, so the world has lost in them a valuable appendix to the well-known busts of his contemporaries executed by the more distinguished Romantic sculptor, David d'Angers. Here they would all gather of an evening: Gerard if he happened to be pa.s.sing in his amiable wanderings, Bouchardy the Maharajah, Gautier--not yet the burly critic of _La Presse_, but a thin youth of nineteen--Nanteuil with his Gothic nimbus, Vabre bursting with some new joke, Borel swinging off his long cloak with a scowl, O'Neddy shedding Dondey in the street, Mackeat and the rest, each bursting with eloquence or roaring the "Cha.s.se du Burgrave" at the top of his voice.

When Maxime du Camp once asked Gautier what they talked about, he answered: "About everything, but I haven't the least idea what they said, because everybody talked at once." However, a very good idea of a typical evening in the _cenacle_ is given in Philothee O'Neddy's "Feu et Flamme," the first poem in which, called "Pandaemonium," is a gorgeous description of their cave of harmony. It is freely decorated with "local colour," which on a Romantic's lips meant the borrowing of all he could carry away from the medieval stage-property room, but it was drawn from life with all seriousness and sincerity. The poem opens by depicting them all seated round the punch-bowl--punch, it must be stated, was the only really respectable drink for a thorough-paced Romantic. He mixed it in a large bowl and set light to the fumes, as the students are supposed to do in the first act of the "Contes d'Hoffmann," and derived enormous satisfaction from sitting in an obscurity only lit by this bluish flame.

Thus to recall the witches' cauldron and the fires of the Inferno had an unfailing success as a stimulant to eloquence. The scene, then, opens thus powerfully:

_Au centre de la salle, autour d'une urne en fer,_ _Digne emule en largeur des coupes d'enfer,_ _Dans laquelle un beau punch, aux prismatiques flammes,_ _Semble un lac sulfureux qui fait houler ses lames,_ _Vingt jeunes hommes, tous artistes dans le cur,_ _La pipe ou le cigare aux levres, l'il moqueur,_ _Le temporal orne du bonnet de Phrygie,_ _En barbe Jeune-France, en costume d'orgie,_ _Sont pachalesquement jetes sur un amas_ _De coussins dont maint siecle a troue le damas,_ _Et le sombre atelier n'a point d'eclairage_ _Que la gerbe du punch, spiritueux mirage._

Smoking, it would be well to add, was considered part of the whole duty of a Romantic man. The cigar, being Byronic, was affected by the "fatally" inclined; the pipe came, not from England, but from Germany; it was Faust-like, Hoffmannesque; it was also Flemish, of course, and the Flemish painters, like Steen and Teniers, were in high repute. A pipe signified a more jolly potatory spirit than a cigar, but it was always possible for the irreconcilable satanics to regard the breathing out of smoke from either as symbolically demoniac. The cigarette was not despised, but its popularity was due also to its picturesque a.s.sociations. Spain was the home of the cigarette, the _papelito_ as Borel and his friends fondly called it. When they rolled their fragrant Maryland lovingly in the _papel_ they a.s.sumed a Spanish _allure_, Granada rose before their eyes, and invisible guitars played "Avez-vous vu dans Barcelone?" However, cigarettes would have been out of place in the prismatic flames of the punch-bowl. Their Spanish nonchalance suited better the light of day: evening shadows were consecrated to gloom and frenzy, Northern spirits. Hence it is not surprising to hear that all the company had

_De haine virulente et de pitie morose_ _Contre la bourgeoisie et le Code et la prose;_ _Des curs ne depensant leur exultation_ _Que pour deux verites, l'art et la pa.s.sion!_

The conversation is compared with some apt.i.tude to a Spanish town devastated by an earthquake, which confounds in one ruin palaces and huts, churches and houses of ill-fame. So in their talk the ideal and the grotesque, poetry and cynical jesting are confounded pell-mell.

Silence is made while a pa.s.sage from Victor Hugo is declaimed, after which four discourses are p.r.o.nounced. Three are by Borel, Clopet, and Bouchardy respectively, concealed in the names of Reblo, Noel, and Don Jose, and the second discourse is delivered by the swarthy O'Neddy himself, who,

_Faisant osciller son regard de maudit_ _Sur le conventicule,_

pours out a pa.s.sionate complaint that poets have too long been under the yoke of governments and codes of law. The evening closes with a violent tumult. The punch has done its work, and the _cenacle_ is a-screaming with the ecstasy of energumens.

_Ce fut un long chaos de jurons, de boutades,_ _De hurrahs, de tolles et de rhodomontades._

They danced and sang like the demon crew in the master's "Ronde du Sabbat,"

_Et jusques au matin les d.a.m.nes Jeune-Frances_ _Nagerent dans un flux d'indicibles demences._

It is to be hoped that the worthy fruiterer was sleeping quietly in another part of Paris, and only the potatoes were kept awake and sleep banished from the pears.

If at this point our reader feels inclined to throw up his hands and exclaim "How disgusting!" he will be well advised to put down the book.

One cannot approach Bohemia without a certain sympathy for youthful excesses, howsoever opposed they may be to one's personal predilections.

If the _cenacle_ indulged in occasional orgies--which, even allowing a good deal for "local colour" in O'Neddy's "Pandaemonium," they certainly did--they had a great many compensating virtues, such as complete disinterestedness and a consuming love of art, which were not conspicuous in Paris at the time. Maxime du Camp in his memoir on Gautier sets the extreme limit to which reasonable criticism of them can go when, after remarking on the promise given by a violent youth for a fruitful middle age, he says:

"From that should we conclude that the young men who composed the _cenacle_ were all destined to become great men? Certainly not; there were among them dreamers with illusions about themselves, sterile dupes of the comedy that they played, failures in whose case the brilliant future which they promised themselves fell naturally into obscurity. To more than one of them the saying of Rivarol could have been applied: 'It is a terrible advantage never to have done anything, but it should not be abused.' In short, only one of them has made a name that will not perish: Theophile Gautier. Gerard de Nerval, by whom he had been distanced at the beginning of his life, never pa.s.sed a very moderate level, did not push his way in the crowd, and came early to grief. On the other hand, most of them were celebrated in the group, I might say in the _coterie_, to which they belonged, but their reputation never went beyond the circle in which they lived."

Maxime du Camp takes a very superior point of view which is less than just. The members of the _cenacle_, it may be admitted, overrated one another's talents and were ready, in some instances, to take posturing for performance; but Bohemia is not to be blamed because all her children were not great men any more than Eton because all her _alumni_ are not scholars. As a matter of fact, in this first Bohemia of the _cenacle_ there were very few of whom it could be said that their lives were ruined. Gerard died a violent death, but he was afflicted with mental disease. Apart from his eccentricity he was a scholar and a gentleman whose attainments equalled those of Gautier himself, though he could not bring himself to exploit them. Petrus Borel was the one real failure, the _poseur_ who inevitably came to grief. His Bohemian career reached its apogee at his masked ball in 1832--a caricature of Dumas'

own famous ball--held at his lodgings in the Rue d'Enfer, an appropriate address. He left Paris shortly afterwards, and, after earning for some years a precarious livelihood and publishing "Madame Putiphar," he became an inspector of Mostaganem, in Algeria, in which country he died wretchedly. The rest, though they did not quite achieve their proud dreams, continued, most of them, in the paths of art with rect.i.tude and some success, Bouchardy and Maquet as dramatists, du Seigneur as a sculptor, Nanteuil as an artist. O'Neddy, once the _cenacle_ dissolved, as it did towards 1833, found poetry a resource in solitude, and poor Vabre, if he made no figure in the world, at least set himself the highest of ideals in devoting his life to the study of Shakespeare.

The first Bohemia, for what that is worth, was singularly respectable in its results. Even had they been far worse, sufficient praise to stifle carping would be found in the indelibly beautiful memory which it left on the minds of its members. In 1857 Bouchardy wrote of it to Gautier in these words:

"It was a holy and beautiful comradeship, my dear Theo, in which each was the loving brother, the devoted friend, the fellow-traveller who makes his friend forget the length and the fatigue of the road. It was a more beautiful comradeship than one can say, in which all wished the success of all without insensate exaggeration and without collective vanity, in which each of us offered to lend his shoulder to the foot of him who wished to climb and to reach his goal.... It was a happy time, dear Theophile, of which we ought to be proud, for when one has traversed this life so often saddened by so much bitterness, we ought to be proud of having found in it some hours of joy, we ought to boast of having been happy!"

Even Maxime du Camp admits that the effect of the _cenacle_ on Gautier was incalculable: its disinterested friendship and its enthusiasm made his individuality. All his life he remained "the mystic companion of Victor Hugo's first disciples." Weighed down in after years by the irksome tasks of journalism, the slave who remembered his years of freedom with regret, he responded to Bouchardy with tender melancholy from beside the rivers of Babylon:

"No doubt such joy could not last. To be young and intelligent, to love one another, to understand and commune in every realm of art--a more beautiful manner of life could not be conceived, and from the eyes of all those who followed it its dazzling splendour has never been obliterated."

At another time he wrote to Sainte-Beuve: "Nous etions ivres du beau, nous avons eu la sublime folie de l'art."