Vie De Boheme Part 6

They were perched on ladders, the merry band, smoking cigarettes, singing Musset's songs or declaiming Victor Hugo, with roses behind their ears--a counsel of Gerard's, who, contenting himself with a general survey of operations, recommended a return to the cla.s.sic festal usage of garlanding the head with flowers. Camille Rogier, smiling through his beard, was painting Oriental or fantastically Hoffmannesque scenes; the burly Gautier executed a picnic in the style of Watteau, a tantalizing subject for thirsty dancers; Nanteuil, with his long golden hair, limned a Naiad; and Adolphe Leleux produced topers crowned with ivy in the manner of Velasquez. Other friends were pressed into service, Wattier, Chatillon, and Rousseau; Cha.s.seriau contributed a bathing Diana, Lorentz some revellers in Turkish costume, and Corot on two narrow panels placed two exquisite Italian landscapes. Any comrade might lend a hand, and it was on this occasion that Gautier first made the acquaintance of Marilhat, the Oriental painter, whom a friend brought in and who drew on a vacant s.p.a.ce some palm-trees over a minaret in white chalk. It is to this acquaintance that we owe Theo's recollections of this remarkable day. If that room, decorated thus because a few _louis d'or_ for refreshments were not forthcoming, were now existing, only a millionaire could buy, and only a great gallery worthily house, it. Yet regrets are misplaced, for it served its day, and it is well that the _salon_ of Doyenne, with its furniture and its painted panels, in which the happy, money-scorning Bohemians danced at their culminating festival, should vanish before mercenary dealings could soil its freshness.

The _fete_ was gorgeous. True, the landlord's wife had refused their invitation--a severe blow. But the hosts with some consideration, knowing that their revels would make sleep impossible in the quarter, invited all their bachelor neighbours on the condition that they brought with them _femmes du monde_ protected, if they pleased, by masks and dominoes. The wonderful evening began with the pantomime of "Le Diable Boiteux," in which many actresses from the boulevard took part. Then there were two little farces in which Ourliac covered himself with glory as the _buffo_. The first was "Le Courrier de Naples," and the second, written by Ourliac himself, "La Jeunesse du Temps et le Temps de la Jeunesse," was introduced by a prologue by Gautier, read from behind the curtain. Ourliac was buried in bouquets, and the noisy orchestra brought in from a _guingette_ struck up. The ruined quarter woke to life again, as in some ghost story; the desert streets resounded with songs and laughter; Turks and _debardeurs_ affronted the frown of the staid old Louvre, and only the landlords and _concierges_, tossing sleeplessly, consigned Bohemians to everlasting flames. The dance, sustained only by good spirits, never flagged, till in the final galop every mask with his partner rushed pell-mell from the room, leaped wildly down the rickety stairs, dashed up the Impa.s.se, and came to rest under the moonlit ruins of the old priory, where a little _cabaret_ had opened, and only the late dawn of winter drove Bohemia to its bed, to dream of the Pompadour salon, of Ourliac's satirical buffoonery, and of Roger de Beauvoir's magnificent Venetian costume of apple-green velvet with silver embroidery, and his inexhaustible wit, for once born of no champagne.

It is melancholy to go back to a deserted ballroom, and we may spare ourselves the pain. That joyous evening, little as it may have seemed to do so, marked the pa.s.sing of the golden age. Bohemia's sun henceforth descended the skies. The next year saw marked changes. The landlord of the old house in the Impa.s.se du Doyenne saw with relief--Gerard says he gave them notice to quit--the departure of his turbulent tenants. If Rogier had not gone to Constantinople it is possible that, even if the band had been compelled to change its quarters, some reconstruction of _la Boheme galante_ might have been possible. With him, the stable, the earner of money, absent, there was no hope. The heroes of Bohemia had to leave their enchanted garden for the ordinarily circ.u.mscribed dwelling of impecunious mortals, and, like the heroes of Valhalla when Freia is s.n.a.t.c.hed from them, a certain wanness came over the complexion of their lives. Joy and beauty and work and love were left, but the magic bloom had just faded. With smaller resources and in a colder light the resettlement of Bohemia was a work of compromise, not spontaneous achievement. Rogier was gone; Ourliac, who produced "Suzanne" with success, married before long, grew serious, and ended his days in the fullest odour of piety; Roger de Beauvoir found the boulevard more to his taste than any less brilliant Bohemia. Gautier, Gerard, and Houssaye were left, a trio of markedly divergent tastes. They made one attempt at a common life in the Rue Saint-Germain-des-Pres, which seems to have lasted a year or two. The details of it given by Gautier[26] and Houssaye[27] differ considerably. According to Gautier they did their own cooking: a.r.s.ene Houssaye was perfect in the _panade_, Gautier prepared the macaroni, no doubt remembering Graziano, while Gerard "went, with perfect self-possession, to buy galantines, sausages, or fresh pork cutlets with gherkins at the neighbouring cook-shop."

Houssaye, on the other hand, says that they had a rascally valet and a cook called Margot, and that they broke up because they were at variance on the degree of luxury to be maintained, Gerard, whom anything satisfied, departing to a bare _hotel garni_, Gautier to a sumptuous apartment in the Rue de Navarin, and Houssaye sharing rooms in the Rue du Bac, on the left bank, with Jules Sandeau. I do not trouble to reconcile these two accounts, for the memories of Bohemia are invariably picturesque. The fact remains that the old days could not come back. The first Bohemians were growing older, and the world was beginning to claim its once youthful defiers as servitors. Though Gerard's bed remained with Gautier as a memory of freer days, he knew too well that the gates of the prison were closing upon him. For a year or so he might pretend to mock destiny by producing another book of verses and a novel, or by making a voyage in Belgium accompanied by Gerard: but he was a doomed man. About 1838 he became the dramatic critic of _La Presse_, entering the mill in which he was to grind for over thirty years. Well might he say in 1867, in an autobiographical notice: "La finit ma vie heureuse, independante et prime-sautiere." Houssaye kept up the pretence a little longer. Life in the Rue du Bac was gay; there were suppers with Jules Janin and Sandeau at which Gautier and Ourliac sometimes appeared; there was dancing; there were the bright eyes of a certain Ninon, who inspired some pretty stanzas. But these were the last echoes of _la premiere Boheme_, as he had to admit. When they died away he completed the chapter of his youth, as Gautier had done, by travelling.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Gerard de Nerval]

Gerard alone escaped the inevitable superannuation of Bohemia, because he was too ethereal to become amenable to the ordinary dynamic laws of society. An attempt was made to catch him in the machinery by making him Gautier's a.s.sistant as dramatic critic of _La Presse_. The sprite within him would not submit to the drudgery, and in a little while he gave it up. He preferred, as ever, to wander at his will and at his own hours, or to sit reading at the dead of night by the light of a bra.s.s chandelier balanced on his head. It is not part of this book's plan to give complete biographies of those who appear in its pages, but an exception shall be made in the case of Gerard de Nerval. Between 1837 and 1839 he stayed in Paris, writing a comic opera, "Piquillo," with Dumas, in which Jenny Colon appeared, several plays, with a certain number of articles and reviews. His way of life was always eccentric, but he had his first definite attack of madness in 1839 or 1840, and was placed in the famous establishment of Doctor Blanche. He came out in 1841 and resumed a career of wider vagabondage than ever, now with money, now without, but caring little in any case and ready to go to the ends of the earth with a whim and without a coin. In 1841 he joined Camille Rogier in Constantinople, and wandered subsequently in other parts of the East--an experience which gave rise to some of his best descriptive work. He returned to Paris again, where his spirit dwelt in the clouds and his body anywhere, though he often allowed it to rest with one of his many friends, with whom he would leave a shirt to be washed against his next coming. He continued to write not very successful plays between 1846 and 1850, when he again went completely mad and retired to Dr. Blanche's house. His second stay here was longer, but as he soon became perfectly reasonable his friends were allowed to take him out for the day occasionally. Once more apparently cured he came out, but though he made one or two voyages his faculties remained permanently clouded. Of this he himself was perfectly conscious, but he bore his afflictions with perfect cheerfulness. His money was all gone, and the flashes of sanity too rare for him to earn much; he was homeless, but not friendless, for he never appealed to his friends in vain. He came for crumbs like a bird in winter, but like a bird he would not stay. He would have been an appropriate guest at some strange _Nachtasil_ such as Maxim Gorki describes so powerfully. Who knows, too, in what haunts he was not a familiar? His comrades of older days could do no more than greet him and tend him when they saw him, and his equanimity was too great to drive them to forcible detention. As Paul de Saint-Victor wrote after his death:

"In vain his friends tried to follow him with their hearts and eyes; he was lost to sight for weeks, months, years. Then, one fine day, one found him by chance in a foreign city, a provincial town, or more often still in the country, thinking aloud, dreaming with open eyes, his attention fixed on the fall of a leaf, the flight of an insect or a bird, the form of a cloud, the dart of a ray, on all those vague and ravishing beauties that pa.s.s in the air. Never man saw a gentler madness, a tenderer folly, a more inoffensive and more friendly eccentricity. If he woke from his slumber, it was to recognize his friends, to love them and serve them, to double the warmth of his devotion and welcome as if he wished to make up to them for his long absences by an extra amount of tenderness."

It was with a profound shock, therefore, that Paris heard, one morning in 1857, that Gerard had been found in the small hours, hanged to an iron railing by a woman's ap.r.o.n-string, in one of the lowest and most ill-famed streets in Paris, the Rue de la Vieille-Lanterne. The mystery of his death has never been cleared up. The inquest brought little light, save that the inmates of a filthy little drink-shop probably knew more than they would tell. What Gerard was doing in that foul haunt will never be known. It is possible that he may have been murdered, but, as he had no money and was the gentlest of men, it is more probable that with some dreadful cloud upon his brain he destroyed himself. Yet his very gentleness had made such an end unexpected, for he seemed to be under the protection of the children's guardian angel. Some sudden impulse brought him a death alien to the character of his whole life.

"II est mort," said Paul de Saint-Victor, "de la nostalgie du monde invisible. Paix a cette ame en peine de l'ideal!"

From Gerard's death, which Gustave Dore made more hideous in a ghoulish picture, it is a long cry back to the Impa.s.se du Doyenne and the Pompadour _salon_ of which he was the discoverer. Yet I will end this chapter, as it was begun, with this once festive haunt. Not long did it outlive its Bohemian colony. The landlord, explosively wrathful at the sight of the wall paintings, at once covered the mess, as he no doubt called it, with a coating of distemper. The treasures might, even then, have been saved in part, had anyone but Gerard de Nerval bought from the demolishers Corot's panels, the pictures by Wattier, Cha.s.seriau, and Chatillon, and Rogier's portraits of Cydalise and Theophile Gautier. His hand was one to baulk destiny only for a little. This moonstruck captain of a rickety craft let his cargo fall needlessly into the seas while he contemplated the stars and allowed the waves to swing the rudder. So pa.s.sed _la Boheme galante_, leaving only a gilded legend.

IX

SCHAUNARD AND COMPANY

_La Boheme carottiere et geignarde d'Henry Murger_ ...

LEPELLETIER: "Verlaine"

To follow the heroes into exile would be depressing as well as unprofitable. It is better to stand respectfully aside from the _Gotterdammerung_ and wait till Bohemia emerges again from the mists, when a lapse of years has wrought some patent changes, for it is easier to contemplate a result than to trace a process. By leaping forward some ten years from the dispersal of the brotherhood that sanctified by its presence the Impa.s.se du Doyenne it is possible to steal a march on Time and antic.i.p.ate with a rapid glance his changing hand. Yet to catch this later view it is necessary for the nonce to abandon the world of flesh and blood and to turn from the acts and reminiscences of actual mortals to the imaginary scenes and fict.i.tious characters of a book of stories.

The tide of life was too strong upon Theophile Gautier and a.r.s.ene Houssaye for them to pause and stamp out firmly the features of those precious days in _la Boheme galante_; they only caught fugitive impressions in retrospect. Henry Murger, less prodigal because less endowed, crystallized as it pa.s.sed a moment of Bohemia, the Bohemia of common mortality, in "Scenes de la Vie de Boheme." As a confectioner encloses a fresh grape in a transparent coat of candied sugar, so he, even while he tasted, sour and sweet, the fruit of his days, caught stray berries in a light film of art and presented them as dessert to the readers of the _Corsaire_, a small but amusing journal. Sharp and savoury as they were, Time would have destroyed them, as he destroyed the ambrosial lusciousness of the Doyenne feasts, but for that light film. n.o.body remembers reminiscences, but a well-told story preserves even the most trivial events.

Murger's "Scenes de la Vie de Boheme" is a book which has now lived for nearly seventy years and does not seem likely as yet to pa.s.s into the lumber-room. At the same time, it is to be wished that more people in England knew it, if only because the presupposition of such knowledge would make this chapter easier to write. It is not, of course, difficult to criticize the "Scenes de la Vie de Boheme"; many of Murger's countrymen, indeed, have done so. Its ethics, its humour, and its style have been attacked. M. Boucher, an estimable civil servant interested in literature, in his "Souvenirs d'un Parisien" calls it an effort to depict the life of low-cla.s.s students, accuses Murger of insipidity and repet.i.tion, and denies any wit to his "etudiants demi-escrocs, demi-canailles." M. Pelloquet, who was good enough to p.r.o.nounce a discourse over Murger's grave, said: "It is an unhealthy book, in which vice grimaces, youth paints its cheeks like a superannuated coquette, and a fict.i.tious _insouciance_ conceals, not a laziness that is sometimes poetic, but the cowardly indolence of men without courage and without talent." He was also rash enough to predict that it would not live. Jules Janin, the critic, in a wiser appreciation, a.s.serted that with a little more art and a little more poetry Murger might have created more pardonable heroes and no less charming heroines. Gautier's dictum about the invertebrate verses of "that feeble appendage to Alfred de Musset" has already been quoted, and the opinion of Verlaine's biographer appears at the head of this chapter. Murger's gravest fault, however, in the eyes of French people is that he wrote bad French. To them the mishandling of that difficult, elusive, and withal limited tongue is a crime of which we can hardly comprehend the enormity. It is perfectly true that Murger was culpable in this respect; he was deficient in scholarship and in rhythmic sense, so that his poems are weak and his prose, even where he tried to give it an air of respectability, betrays its imperfections no less manifestly than M.

Jourdain betrayed his birth. We in England, fastidious as our critics are in the matter of language, have not our ears tuned to this painful degree of precision. So long as a style effectively harmonizes with its environment we are content to let it stand: the Gothic grandeur of English can suffer without disfigurement the intrusion of the quaint. To sympathies so trained Murger's style in "Scenes de la Vie de Boheme"

should make a particular appeal, since in that book, for the most part, he makes no attempt to ape the academician, but writes in the extravagant jargon of the very Bohemians he is describing--a language full of comic inversions, extravagances, and lapses from grammar, which are an essential part of the book's gaiety and charm. Though his matter is unmistakably Parisian, his humour is, in some respects, remarkably English, delighting in broad and bustling effects rather than subtle strokes and sudden flashes. As for the life and the characters that he depicts, criticism of them will be implicit in the remainder of this chapter; of the book as a whole no more need be said than that it has survived when all the rest of Murger's work has been forgotten. It is not a book to be placed unwarily in the hands of the young and tender; parts of it are exaggerated, parts may be wished away, but, when all has been said, it remains, not the picture of _la vie de Boheme_ at its best and brightest, but the cla.s.sic expression of the Bohemian spirit--a frank confession, not the pseudo-pathetic souvenir of a prosperous greybeard. Its pages are among those rare ones in the world's library that have caught and held for a moment the intangible freshness, the poetry, and the gaiety of youth. For this alone it deserves never to grow old.

Murger's Bohemia is described in a series of scenes taken from the life of four young men, a quartet as fascinating to read of as Dumas'

Musketeers, though possibly less comfortable companions. They were Rodolphe, the sentimental poet; Marcel, the painter; Colline, the peripatetic philosopher and bookworm; and Schaunard, painter and musician, incomparable rogue whose masterpiece was a symphony "Sur l'influence du bleu dans la musique"--a sly hit at debased Romanticism.

Chance brought them together. Schaunard, unable to pay his arrears of rent, was forced to leave his lodging with his furniture in p.a.w.n. A day's peregrination in search of a loan brought him three francs in cash, which he spent in dinner, together with the less tangible benefit of Colline's and Rodolphe's acquaintance. He swore brotherhood with Colline over a dish of stewed rabbit in a little eating-house, and the pair collected Rodolphe in the Cafe Momus, where, at Colline's expense, they pa.s.sed the rest of a not too abstemious evening. Meanwhile Marcel, the painter, who had taken Schaunard's room unfurnished in advance, though having no furniture of his own but a second-hand scenic interior from the stock of a bankrupt theatre, had been persuaded to take the lodging furnished with Schaunard's furniture, and had duly moved in.

Late in the evening, when a sharp shower of rain was falling, Schaunard, in bacchic absence of mind, offered asylum to his two new comrades. Hastily buying the elements of a supper, they gaily invaded the apartment of Marcel. Explanations were difficult, but were accomplished during supper, and next day Marcel and Schaunard agreed to live together. A dinner and a magnificent supper inaugurated the foundation of the new clan, which was united, so long as their Bohemian days continued, by an unbroken bond of friendship. It is these young men whom Murger's readers follow through their straits and shifts, their love affairs, their extravagances, their boisterous jokes, and their nave pleasures--the poet, the artist, the savant, and the musician, characters drawn from Murger himself and his living friends, whose coats were ragged and whose pockets almost always empty, who were the bane of respectable _concierges_ and proprietors of _cafes_, who bore short commons with cheerful bravado and succ.u.mbed to innocent gluttony in times of unexpected prosperity, who were really funny even if they were sometimes vulgar, whose expedients for catching the elusive _piece de cent sous_ were as amazing as their puns, who made life, even in a garret, a sentimental poem and a rollicking ballad, and who had the sense to become prosaic before the sentiment grew threadbare or the ballad grew stale. It is a great temptation to follow some of their adventures in greater detail from the day when Marcel went out to dine in the sugar-merchant's coat while Schaunard painted the latter's portrait in his own colour-stained dressing-gown, to the day when Rodolphe by composing a didactic poem at fifteen sous a dozen lines for a celebrated dentist, Marcel by painting the portraits of eighteen grenadiers at six francs a head, and Schaunard by playing the same scale all day and every day for a month to revenge a rich Englishman on an actress's parrot, earned enough to give their mistresses new dresses and take them for a holiday in the fields of Fontenay-aux-Roses. Yet the impulse to discursive commentary must be checked, for plucking flowers is a distraction from comparative botany. Murger, after all, tells his own story infinitely better than any translator could do, and the purpose which is proper to the present book is to inquire what kind of a Bohemia appears in Murger's light-hearted pages.

So far as Bohemia was concerned, the generation of 1830 had entirely pa.s.sed away by 1846, when Murger's sketches actually appeared, and the young men of whom Bohemia was composed were formed under less violent influences. The last flashes of Napoleon's glory had not illuminated their early days, they knew little of the stifling reign of Charles X, and the Revolution of 1830 took place when they had only a little while outgrown the nursery. By the time they grew up the complexion of affairs in Paris wore a more even tone. a.s.sisted by Guizot, Louis Philippe had found the _juste-milieu_ to his people's satisfaction, revolutionary tendencies had been checked or diverted into harmless channels of humanitarian reform, the _bourgeois_ had firmly grasped his power and built up an already solid bulwark of commercial interest. In the artistic world, too, things were quieter. "Hernani," once a scandal, had become a cla.s.sic, and there was no further need of red waistcoats and furious _claques_. Romanticism, indeed, had become so workaday that a successful little excitement was aroused by a reaction against it in what was called "l'ecole de bon sens," whose chief poet, Ponsard, gained quite a celebrity for a short time with his cla.s.sic drama "Lucrece."

Beyond the gadfly of artistic impulse and the natural fermentation of the adolescent mind, there was little to rouse a young man's pa.s.sions or send his blood coursing faster through his veins; there was no particular idol to worship, no hobby-horse to ride, as a Gautier or a Borel had worshipped Hugo and mounted the gallant steed called Middle Ages. The creed of Romanticism was so thoroughly established that there was nothing left to make any fuss about, with the natural consequence that its early extravagances had fallen out of fashion and there was no further need to be satanic or profess excessive sensibility. Literature was feeling its way to the austerer Romanticism of Flaubert and the Goncourts, as painting towards the "realism" of Courbet, but the growth was still below ground and the surface as yet seemed undisturbed. The generation of Rodolphe and Schaunard found, therefore, in Paris no eager band to whom they could ally themselves and to whose educative influence they could submit. Driven by their impulses towards the arts, with souls naturally romantic, as most young men's souls are, they found no cause which they could immediately embrace in the manner of the second _cenacle_. They missed that valuable education which is the idolization of a great man, and were confined instead to fighting their own battle, a very much less distinguished affair, which allowed many little dishonourable compromises with indolence and in which victory meant no more than individual success. This explains, to some extent, the absence of intellectual fecundity in Murger's heroes, which even their most devoted admirers cannot deny. Rodolphe's poems are indeed only pale imitations of Alfred de Musset, who was an almost inevitable model for any lyric youngster of the day; his more serious effort, a drama called "Le Vengeur," good enough to burn for warmth in a draughty garret, is not vouchsafed to us in quotation by Rodolphe's creator. Marcel was obviously not a very gifted painter, in spite of his famous _Pa.s.sage de la Mer Rouge_, which was sent up in a different guise to each Salon and inevitably rejected, and when this great work was sold to become a shop-sign the artist's pride was not in the least revolted. Schaunard never gives any signs of musical inspiration till at the close he publishes a successful alb.u.m of songs, and Colline, polyglot philosopher as he is dubbed, abandoned his career before anything tangible had been achieved to make an advantageous marriage and give musical evenings. It would, of course, be pedantic to insist upon these considerations in the case of a book of short stories which aims chiefly at amusing, but it is impossible not to be struck in reading the "Scenes de la Vie de Boheme"

by the absence from the conversation of the characters of any indication of their artistic ideals. Save when Schaunard tells the sugar-merchant that he was a pupil of Horace Vernet, murmuring to himself, "Horreur, je renie mes dieux," and Marcel makes a scornful allusion to the "ecole de bon sens," the only proof that they are true artists lies in their creator's own a.s.sertion, of which he is not entirely mindful in the _denouement_. The worst sinner of all is Colline, for this mine of knowledge, throughout the book, is made chiefly remarkable for the composition of dreadful puns. This may be partly due to that want of "a little more art and a little more poetry" of which Janin accused Murger, but the fault was not only personal. The second _cenacle_ and the brotherhood of the Impa.s.se du Doyenne were, without doubt, just as commonplace in their ordinary conversation, but what lifted them off the ground was the enthusiasm of a hotly waged artistic struggle, which by Murger's day had died down. His four heroes are Romantics in general, but in no sense champions of any cause.

Another unmistakable fact about Rodolphe and his friends is that they were inconspicuous. True, they made the Cafe Momus unbearable to its more peaceful customers, and were not unknown at the Chaumiere, but the Cafe Momus was in a back street, and the Chaumiere was certainly not the Bal de l'Opera. They were miles away from the _viveurs_ upon the boulevard, and their connexion with the prominent writers and artists of the day was extremely remote. They made no public appearance, they were not a force to be reckoned with. They kept up the form of defying convention, but it was now no more than a convenient form for the impecunious. Art and the _bourgeoisie_ were beginning to play into one another's hands; the former had gained its liberty to a great degree, while the latter by the gilded pill of commercial success had purged artistic demonstration of its crudities. The time when eccentricity was a symbol had pa.s.sed; now it was only a skin to be sloughed, as Marcel saw when in a very sensible lecture delivered to Rodolphe he said:

"Poetry does not exist only in a disordered life, in improvised happiness, in love affairs that only last as long as a candle, in more or less eccentric rebellions against the prejudices which will for ever be the sovereigns of the world: a dynasty is more easily overturned than a custom, even a ridiculous one. To have talent it is not sufficient to put on a summer overcoat in May; one can be a true poet or artist and yet keep one's feet warm and have one's three meals a day."

Their Bohemia, in fact, was a kind of undergraduate existence, in which all sorts of disorder and youthful folly might be excused on the plea that youth must be served, but which could in no sense be regarded as a part of civic life, much less as the best part, the most truly disinterested and artistic. This is a significant change of att.i.tude from the days of _la Boheme galante_, which was one of the centres of Paris. That, indeed, was transitory and presupposed youth, but it was not obscure and its inhabitants had no misgivings. It was not they who gave it up as the writer of Ecclesiastes put away childish things, for they gloried in it all their days as the best part of their life; it was that the world claimed them for its business in spite of themselves. In their disinterested love of art they had made themselves valuable, and when the command went forth "Come and be paid" they were forced to go.

To guard against any accusation of misunderstanding Murger, it may be admitted that he calls his heroes only a small section of Bohemia--they moved, to use his phrase, in the _troisiemes dessous_ of literature and art--but there is no indication that Murger conceived a Bohemia which had its part in any higher sphere. When Rodolphe gets a lucky present of five hundred francs the determination he avows is not to suffuse his little corner of Bohemia with a more worthy splendour, but to become, like every other successful man, a _bourgeois_. "These are my projects,"

he cries to an astonished Marcel. "Sheltered from the material embarra.s.sments of life, I am going to work seriously; I shall finish my great work, and gain a settled place in public opinion. To begin with, I renounce Bohemia, I shall dress like everybody else, I shall have a black coat, and I shall frequent drawing-rooms." Such a speech would have fallen like a thunderbolt in Camille Rogier's Pompadour _salon_, and its author considered charitably to be in the first stages of lunacy. Marcel, however, falls in at once with the ambitious scheme, and they are only saved by their Bohemianism being stronger than their resolution. Both in the stories and the preface to the "Scenes de la Vie de Boheme"--where Murger speaks with a picturesque seriousness--there is no sign of that former joy in Bohemian life as the life which was alone worth living by poets and artists. Throughout he regards it as a necessity conditioned by the artistic impulse combined with poverty, to be borne with the courage and gaiety of youth, to be regretted "perhaps"

from the vantage-point of subsequent prosperity. The true Bohemia--as distinct from the Bohemia of mere idealists, incapables, and amateurs--he regards as a narrow, stony path leading up the sides of an arduous mountain, beset by the chasms of doubt and misery, but making for a possible goal, the goal of a sufficient income. Divested of all its _agrements_--resourcefulness, humour, courage, extravagance, which are properly attributes of youth, the real illuminant--Murger's Bohemia is laid bare as a merely economic state. The true Bohemians, he says, are known upon the literary and artistic market-place, where their wares are saleable, but at moderate prices; "their existence each day is a work of genius"--"preceded by a pack of ruses, poaching in all the industries connected with the arts, they hunt from morn till eve that ferocious animal which is called the five-franc piece." To Murger, who wrote of what he knew, the man who had the means to live a stable existence, howsoever retired, was a fool if he remained in Bohemia: to the inhabitants of _la Boheme galante_ it was the not being entirely dest.i.tute which made their life peculiarly worth living. If Colline ever speculated with any profundity he may have seen that his friends and he lived really in a prison of which poverty, prodigality, and idleness were warders. The Bohemia of Gautier, Gerard de Nerval, and Houssaye had all the glory of a voluntary protest, a pa.s.sionate a.s.sertion of liberty, a revivifying of life in accordance with new artistic ideas.

The difference is not simply one of degree. The brotherhood of the Impa.s.se du Doyenne were less dest.i.tute and more talented than Rodolphe and his friends, but that is not a point that at this moment requires stress. The important fact is that in a few years Bohemia had undergone a great change; that, whereas a few years after 1830 young men with a little money and some talent deliberately chose to make their life more picturesque than that of ordinary citizens and to escape from the suffocating atmosphere of commerce and officialdom, a few years after 1840 the ideal of struggling artists was to become as soon as possible successful merchants and to escape from the possibility of that picturesqueness which they welcomed as an alleviation of a state of transitory discomfort. It would be quite beside the mark to regard Bohemia as guilty in this of self-degradation; so far, indeed, as the change was conscious, the majority of mankind must logically find it praiseworthy, for all human effort is judged by its tendency to well-being. The change, however, was none of Bohemia's doing, but was due mainly to the fact that art was beginning, in the modern sense, to pay. The beginnings were small, but they were quite evident, especially in the increased profits from journalism and ill.u.s.tration. The old Bohemia of the golden age rested on the supposition that the artist worked primarily to please himself, and that money, source of enjoyment as it was, remained a secondary consideration. The supposition, in the first forward rush of commercial prosperity, was bound to become untenable. Writers and artists of obvious talent were too valuable commercial a.s.sets to be left to their careless selves; they had to be tempted into the cage--an easy task, for, if money be regarded as a means of more enjoyment, why should a Bohemian resist it? It was unimportant if individuals held out, or were too uncompromising to suit the market; the fact remained that there _was_ a market and a list of quotations, and this fact was the disruption of Bohemia. Whereas it had been a true fraternity in which art was all-important and individual celebrity a thing of so little moment that there was complete equality of intercourse, it now included the last two sections of a trisected world of artists--the well-paid, the ill-paid, and the not paid at all--and where money intervenes all equality ceases. The majority of the well-paid were kept too busy even to see they had lost the old freedom; they were tempted to live as other people in decent rooms and decent coats, and as their vanity kept them from complaining, the ill-paid and the not paid at all naturally envied their state, striving and jostling for an equally happy captivity, or at least intending to do so as soon as their irrepressible blood took a staider course through their veins.

The charm of Murger's merry crew is that their blood was too strong for their business instincts; the Bohemian spirit s.n.a.t.c.hed them along in spite of Mammon, for Mammon, incomplete as his hold has always been over youth, was in those days but just learning his strength. Where youth and art combine the Bohemian spirit is always there; only the possibilities of Bohemia have in the course of time been crowded out.

But in Murger's Paris Bohemia, shorn of earthly glory as it was, without lot in the brilliance of the boulevard, cut off from the more thriving traders in the artistic market-place, was still a possibility because the Bohemian tradition was still fairly strong, and because Paris was still a small city, its life little disturbed by a floating population of aliens and its interests completely self-centred.

The Bohemia described by Murger certainly corresponded in one respect with the general conception of Bohemianism to-day in that it was devoid of any material splendour. Neither Rodolphe nor Marcel indicates any desire for the old furniture, damasks, and other decorations which so glittered in the eyes of the early Romantics, but at any rate such things would have been beyond the capacity of their purses. They were unequivocally poor. When Rodolphe was in funds he could afford a hundred francs a year for a garret in the Rue de la Tour d'Auvergne; when Providence was less kind he lived "in the Avenue de Saint-Cloud, on the fifth branch of the third tree on the left as you leave the Bois de Boulogne." As for entertainments, they came a long way behind the costume ball of the Impa.s.se du Doyenne. At Rodolphe's Wednesdays in the Rue de la Tour d'Auvergne, it was said, one could only sit down morally and was forced to drink badly filtered water in eclectic earthenware.

Even the grand _soiree_ given by Rodolphe and Marcel, which began with a literary and musical entertainment and ended with a dance prolonged till sunrise, only cost the hosts fifteen francs--miraculously acquired at the last moment--in addition to a set of chairs which fed the stove from midnight onwards, though, as these belonged to a neighbour, they were probably not paid for. Their wardrobes were not conspicuous for any particularly Romantic or medieval effect, but simply, except in times of exceptional windfalls, for extreme dilapidation. Schaunard's chief garment was an overcoat worn to a state of utter baldness; Colline's ulster, crammed with books and papers, had the surface of a file; Marcel's coat was called "Mathusalem," but he must have acquired it subsequent to the sugar-merchant's momentous visit, for at that time, after an hour's search to discover a costume fit to dine out in, the net results were a pair of plaid trousers, a grey hat, a red tie, a (once) white glove and a black glove. To dine sufficiently at a small restaurant was for them no ordinary luxury, and as for entering the _Rocher de Caucale_, they might as well have aspired to membership of the Jockey Club. Why, Schaunard had never seen a lobster till the old Jew gave them all a feast after buying Marcel's _Pa.s.sage de la Mer Rouge_. Some days they dispensed with dining altogether, on others the staple dish was pickled herrings; so it is hardly surprising that on the proceeds of Marcel's picture they remained at table for five days, the room filled with a Pantagruelic atmosphere and a whole bed of oyster-sh.e.l.ls covering the floor. It was not that they took up any quixotic att.i.tude of art for art's sake, like the society called _Les Buveurs d'Eau_, whom Murger describes in one of his stories and whose principle was not to make the slightest concession to necessity. They were imperfect journeymen, indolent, careless, too easily distracted, but they were among those who were ill-paid rather than those who never tried to be paid. Rodolphe edited a small fashion paper, _L'echarpe d'Iris_; Marcel painted ruined manors for a Jew dealer and portraits of the lowliest possessor of a few spare francs; Colline gave lessons in the same range of subjects as Pico di Mirandola professed to discuss; and Schaunard, besides exhibiting a special ability as a borrower, put music to bad poetry for hard-hearted music-publishers.

In comparing this Bohemia with that of Gautier and Gerard de Nerval, it is easy to see the justification of Lepelletier's epithet "carottiere."

The graceful adjuncts and by no means contemptible achievements of a former day had vanished as completely as its enthusiasms. The presence of Roger de Beauvoir and Nestor Roqueplan in the Rue de la Tour d'Auvergne is as difficult to imagine as the composition of "Mademoiselle de Maupin." Yet Rodolphe and his friends were at least as well off in one respect, that is, in their affairs of the heart, if, indeed, they had not some advantage. The divinities of the Impa.s.se du Doyenne, Cydalise excepted, seem to have had their home in the _corps de ballet_, a body not notable for the tenderness or constancy of their attachments. Murger, who, like his Rodolphe, was an amorous sentimentalist, gave some poetic value, if not as much as he intended, to the figures of Mimi and Musette, the idols of Rodolphe and Marcel, who play such a prominent part in the "Scenes de la Vie de Boheme," that it would be an affectation not to speak of them, although an Englishman must always do so with some reserve. In spite of all that may be said against them--indeed, _is_ said by their very creator--there is a charm about Mimi and Musette which must always hold the reader of these stories, a charm which includes Francine, who died holding the m.u.f.f bought for her by her lover, and the vulgar Phemie Teinturiere, who shared the lot of a no more refined Schaunard. Without sympathizing, at least temporarily, with all the blend of mystery and frankness which a Frenchman breathes into the word "amour," it is useless to read French literature. To him love is the highest emotional value--emotion being in its turn the highest value in life--so that a union, whether it be celebrated in the Madeleine or in the _mairie_ of the notorious thirteenth _arrondiss.e.m.e.nt_, is equally sacred and equally interesting.

We in England look at love differently and, as we naturally think, better, but we are not hindered, nevertheless, from abandoning our view occasionally. We do so implicitly when we shed tears over "La Dame aux Camelias," over "Madame b.u.t.terfly," and over Mimi herself in Puccini's "La Boheme." To be honest, then, we must accept Murger's view, if we enjoy his book, as there is very little doubt that we do. We applaud Musette when she surrept.i.tiously waters the flowers whose duration is to measure that of her love for Marcel; we forgive her fickleness because she follows her fancy without calculation, even though on leaving the rich young n.o.bleman to visit Marcel she takes six days on the road; we warm to Mimi because Rodolphe really loved her and she him, though his jealousy and her love of luxury made their days a burden and their rupture certain; and if we join heartily in Marcel's ironical tirade against Mimi the fine lady, we cannot restrain our sadness at Mimi returning to her old love to die. The life of the Impa.s.se du Doyenne was so joyous, strong, and full that its _amours pa.s.sagers_ can be taken for granted, happy fantasies without regrets; but Murger's Bohemia, with its frequent moments of despondency and hardship, was forced to rely upon its heart to supply that relieving colour which its surroundings could not give. Mimi and Musette, Phemie and Francine, even the little _giletiere_ who corrected Colline's proofs and never appeared, meant so much more than Lorry or Victorine. So long as their attachment lasted they made a home out of the barest garret, doing for their men those thousand little things which men are too lazy or preoccupied to do for themselves. Besides, they opened a field for the exercise of unselfishness--a valuable service in itself. In this connexion I need only cite one delightful little story, to which I have already referred, ent.i.tled "La Toilette des Graces," an idyll which no afterthought can spoil. It tells how Rodolphe, Marcel, and Schaunard, having earned a little money by making their respective arts serve the humblest of commercial purposes, decided to surprise their mistresses by giving them new dresses. One fine morning Mimi, Musette, and Phemie were awakened by the entry of a procession headed by Schaunard, in a new coat of golden nankeen, playing a horn, and close behind him a shopman bringing samples. They nearly went mad with joy. Mimi jumped like a young kid, waving a pretty scarf; Musette, with each hand in a little green boot, threw her arms round Marcel's neck and clapped the boots like cymbals; as for Phemie, she could only sob "Ah, mon Alexandre, mon Alexandre!"

The choice was made, the bills discharged, and it was announced to the dames that they must have their new dresses ready for a day in the country on the morrow. That was a trifle; for sixteen hours they cut and st.i.tched, and when next day the Angelus sounded from the neighbouring church they were already taking their last look into the looking-gla.s.s.

Only Phemie had a little sorrow. "I like the green gra.s.s and the little birds," she said, "but one meets n.o.body in the country. Suppose we made our excursion on the boulevard." But they went to Fontenay-aux-Roses instead, and when they returned late at night there were only six francs left. "What shall we do with it?" asked Marcel. "Invest it in the funds," said Schaunard.

There are, doubtless, artistic _coteries_ to-day in whose existence parallels may be found to the "Scenes de la Vie de Boheme," but reproduction is impossible, for Murger's Bohemia, no less than _la Boheme galante_, was conditioned by its time. The conditions include a Paris of provincial narrowness, greater simplicity together with less conspicuous uniformity in ordinary life, less elaborate amus.e.m.e.nts, no Montmartre _cafes_, no swamping proletariat beside whose _murs d'Apaches_ the eccentricities of Bohemia seem mild and unimportant, a tiny fraction of the present opportunities for advertis.e.m.e.nt and publicity, and a lower standard, perhaps, of general education. To these one other condition may be added--the existence of Musette and Mimi, who were the last of the _grisettes_. Murger himself, in a pa.s.sage which I cannot do better than quote in the original, points out clearly their transitoriness:

"Ces jolies filles moitie abeilles, moitie cigales, qui travaillaient en chantant toute la semaine, ne demandaient a Dieu qu'un peu de soleil le dimanche, faisaient vulgairement l'amour avec le cur, et se jetaient quelquefois par la fenetre.

Race disparue maintenant, grace a la generation actuelle des jeunes gens: generation corrompue et corruptrice, mais par-dessus tout vaniteuse, sotte et brutale. Pour le plaisir de faire de mechants paradoxes, ils ont raille ces pauvres filles a propos de leurs mains mutilees par les saintes cicatrices du travail, et elles n'ont bientot plus gagne a.s.sez pour s'acheter de la pate d'amandes.

Peu a peu ils sont parvenus a leur inoculer leur vanite et leur sottise, et c'est alors que la grisette a disparu. C'est alors que naquit la lorette."

[Ill.u.s.tration: A Grisette]

The _grisette_ made love for love: like a wild rose, she had to be plucked, and when men came to prefer buying bouquets in shops, she naturally died away. Money already tainted Bohemia, even here, in its heart. The opportunity of luxury tempted both Mimi and Musette to be unfaithful, but since caprice was ever stronger with them than self-interest they were not undeserving to be called the last of the _grisettes_. They were necessary adjuncts to Bohemia, and satisfactory adjuncts, in spite of their caprices, for the last thing which Bohemian man required was the Bohemian or--to use an obsolete phrase--the "emanc.i.p.ated" woman. Too ignorant to meet their lovers, even had they wished, upon their own ground, they held their place by keeping to their natural advantage, the woman's desire to please. So they pa.s.sed through life, making the feast more festive and the fast less desolate, filling a void and mending a sorrow as light-heartedly as they darned a sock or patched a ragged coat. Mimi and Musette were the true counterparts of Rodolphe and Marcel, and it is with regret that we see them disappear into an epilogue of prosperity and propriety. Yet it was all they could do, for what I have called the Bohemia of common mortality became dangerous long before the age of thirty years. Rodolphe could not have written in middle age to Marcel as Bouchardy did to Theophile Gautier; only hypocritically could he have said "nous etions ivres du beau."

Murger escapes any false effect of that kind in his conclusion:

"'We are done for, old fellow,' says Marcel, 'we are dead and buried. Youth only comes once! Where are you dining to-night?'

"'If you like,' answered Rodolphe, 'we will go and dine for twelve sous at our old restaurant in the Rue du Four, where the plates are of village earthenware, and where we were always so hungry when we had finished eating.'

"'Good heavens, no. I don't mind looking back at the past, but it shall be across a bottle of decent wine and seated in a good arm-chair. It is no use, I'm corrupted. I only care now for what is good!'"

X

MURGER AND HIS FRIENDS

_Si on excepte quelques natures fortement trempees qui se tirerent des impa.s.ses de la Boheme, le reste fut cond.a.m.ne a vivre difficilement en face d'un ideal borne et sans avenir. Ni etudes, ni loisirs, ni aisances ne permettaient a ces aspirants a l'art de s'elever et de conquerir un nom._

CHAMPFLEURY:

"Souvenirs et Portraits de Jeunesse"

In order to catch at a glance the result of a lapse of years I lingered in the last chapter over Rodolphe, Mimi, and their friends, figures drawn from the moving scene of contemporary life, yet s.n.a.t.c.hed from the changes of time as permanently as those on Keats's Grecian urn. The "Scenes de la Vie de Boheme" show, as it seems to me, more clearly than any other kind of record, the decadence of Bohemia, regarding the degree of its approach to an ideal of complete artistic existence, since the great days that followed 1830. This might, indeed, be a warrant for not returning to more doc.u.mentary facts at all, but there are always those to be considered who view Fiction as a sprite so far divorced from actuality that they are unable to place any trust in her indications.