Vie De Boheme Part 7

The teller of stories, in their apprehension, is always on the look-out for a good effect, to which end he will minimize the essential and magnify the unessential, distorting sober fact at the call of his individual imagination. They are the people who read novels, as they say, for relaxation, while finding wisdom alone in biographies and memoirs bristling with dates and packed with quotations. The question, "What, after all, is sober fact?" is sufficient to put them into confusion, but to propound that ancient problem would be here beside the mark, for in a book that honestly professes to be as sober in fact as any it would be unbecoming unduly to press the point on behalf of fiction. The warrant, therefore, will be allowed to pa.s.s, and we return to those tales which men have told about themselves and their friends under the names which they bore at baptism, duly signed and dated. Such information as they give concerning the later years of Bohemia is, at best, fragmentary, but the fragments have some appearance of falling together in the light of Murger's picture. A more diligent research might have produced a more detailed record, but it may be questioned whether the total effect would have been any clearer. There were scores of obscure persons in Bohemia, but their daily uprising and lying-down were not so very widely different. At least this may be a.s.serted, that after a certain number of facts it is safer to use the imagination for the rest.

Murger and his friends were the legitimate successors of _la Boheme galante_, and in view of their fict.i.tious counterparts already introduced the main interest of this chapter lies with them. Yet before they appear there are some byways of Bohemia that call for inspection as an ill.u.s.tration and a contrast. Bohemia was, of course, always bordered on one side by the student life of the Quartier Latin, the freedom and licence of which were both different and older in origin, going back to the days of the schoolmen, when indigent scholars of all nations filled the great university cities of Europe, forming in each a picturesque but turbulent community. Even in most prosaic days the students of Paris have kept up the medieval tradition, but particular manifestations would naturally be influenced by the manners of the day. It is, therefore, not surprising that the student quarter was profoundly affected by the Romantic movement, and reflected its battles and its extravagances with a hilarious distortion. The motley world of the Quartier Latin and those who, though no longer students, remained attached to it had their "local colour," their Gothic enthusiasms, and their orgies. They had dining clubs with fantastic names, such as "Les 45 jolis cochons," which indulged in something very like b.u.mp-suppers, with loud singing in the streets, window-breaking, and practical joking to follow. The campaign of "Hernani" was imitated in the Salle Chanteraine--a theatre for amateurs--where there was nightly a _fracas_ with fisticuffs between the various factions. Elaborate farces were organized to mystify the good people of Paris, of which Maxime du Camp gives a good example in his "Souvenirs Litteraires." It was called "La grande chevauchee de la cotelette aux cornichons." Thirty young men, dressed in velvet waistcoats and nankeen jackets, with long hair and beards, headed by a certain young teacher of history waving a stick, marched solemnly in serried single file with a halting step, dangling their arms at the same time, from the Place Pigalle over the Pont Royal, crying in unison, "Une deux, une deux, le cholera, le cholera!" At the end of the Pont Royal they turned round in a body and shouted, "Connaissez-vous le thermometre de l'ingenieur Chevalier?" Solemnly facing about again, they proceeded as before to Sainte-Mande, where they lunched off pork cutlets.

The special home of the wildest jokers and most desperate caricatures of the new spirit was a certain tumble-down barrack, No. 9 Rue Childebert, a street on the south side of that beautiful old church Saint-Germain-des-Pres, and now merged in the Boulevard Saint-Germain.

This house, familiarly called "La Childebert," was five or six stories high and thoroughly decayed, for its owner, a Madame Legendre, refused to carry out any repairs. She was justified in this att.i.tude to some extent by the fact that few of her tenants paid any rent. Indeed, according to one witness, no man in his senses would have paid any rent for a room upon the top floor from 1837 onwards. One student, however, an ingenious fellow called Lepierre, who both lived on the top floor and paid his rent, succeeded in forcing the stingy lady to repair the roof.

Having been drenched one night during a hard storm, he took his revenge by removing a portion of his flooring, and hiring all the peripatetic water-carriers that could be found to pour water down the hole. The _concierge_ remonstrated, but in vain, and Madame Legendre was sent for in hot haste. When she arrived in a cab she was gaily serenaded by the inhabitants, and on proceeding to the flooded room she was horrified to find Lepierre in the costume of Adam before the Fall, who claimed a right, he said, to have a bath at his _own_ convenience. Madame Legendre fled, but the roof was repaired. The gay desperadoes of La Childebert were capable of carrying through any _charge_, howsoever lurid. One of the most successful was known as "le nez de Bouginier." Bouginier was an artist, the size of whose nose inspired his friend Fourreau with the idea of an exaggerated caricature in which this feature was made enormous. A stencil was cut and copied, and for many days Bouginier's nose appeared on all the walls in Paris. It is even alleged that two parties of students, about to travel in the East and wishing to meet on the voyage, hit on the simple plan of following Bouginier's nose. The party starting first took a stencil with them, so that the second party, leaving a fortnight later, were able to track them to Ma.r.s.eilles, Malta, Alexandria, and Suez. In a certain medallion in the Pa.s.sage du Caire, just south of the Boulevard Bonne Nouvelle, Bouginier's nose is still immortalized. La Childebert was always "up to"

something, but a certain fancy-dress _conversazione_ completely convulsed the neighbourhood. The schools of art and poetry dressed according to their views, and by universal consent the Romantics, for all they could do in pourpoints, doublets, and general local colour, were easily beaten by the Cla.s.sicists. Romulus and Remus with their wolf and Hercules with the Nemean lion created a _furore_; so great was the real consternation of the district at the apparition of these wild beasts that the commissary of police had to intervene. The wolf and the lion suffered themselves to be led with great docility to his office, where they turned out to be a great Dane and a mastiff respectively, painted and padded with diabolical cleverness.

La Childebert was strongly represented in a revellers' club called "Les Badouillards," that flourished between 1835 and 1838. In "Paris Anecdote" Privat d'Anglemont, who is the chief authority on the Childebertian doings, describes the qualifications of a perfect Badouillard. He had to pa.s.s a regular test before entering the bacchic brotherhood; he had to be strong and agile, a clever and ready boxer, fencer, and wrestler, he must have proved his courage in several encounters, shown a fine taste in ch.o.r.eographic fantasy at the Chaumiere and an ability to engage in a duel of slang with any chance person, and have sworn eternal feud against the sleep and peace of mind of all _bourgeois_. The initiation was a solemn and trying ceremony. It began with a copious dinner, followed by a ceaseless absorption of various liquors till the time came for going to the ball. Here the candidate stayed all night, behaving as outrageously as possible. He then adjourned without sleep to breakfast, and pa.s.sed the rest of the day in the _cafes_ of the Quartier Latin, drinking, playing billiards, and flirting. At night the programme was repeated, and if by the third night he had accepted every challenge, never fallen asleep, nor tumbled under any table, he was allowed to seek his bed a perfect Badouillard.

For all its light-hearted absurdities La Childebert was not Bohemia, for its existence belonged rather to that of irresponsible students than of artists. I only mention it by way of contrast, as I now mention again Privat d'Anglemont, the author of "Paris Inconnu" and "Paris Anecdote,"

legendary as a Bohemian, but of a very different type. These two curious and valuable books are a complete study of the seamy side of Paris during the latter part of Louis Philippe's reign. The life of the porters in the Halles, the _chiffonniers_, and all the pliers of obscure trades, with their customs, their dwellings, and their manners, is most faithfully reproduced in them in a manner which could only have been made possible by a complete identification of the author with the subjects of his observation. Such, in fact, was the lifework of Privat d'Anglemont, a Creole born in Guadeloupe. He became the legendary _noctambule_ of Paris, realizing, as Charles Monselet says in his preface to "Paris Anecdote," the popular idea of a Bohemian--that is, simply an eccentric vagabond. In the sense of the word as used in this book, he was not a Bohemian at all, for, though he wrote articles and books upon his experiences, he was in no sense an artist, nor was he striving to make his life conformable to artistic liberty. He was animated simply by a gipsy pa.s.sion for roaming, combined with a taste for mystery and romancing. Faithful as his books were, he hardly ever _spoke_ the truth: twenty times he told Theodore de Banville the history of his life, and each time it was different. Still, he merits a word here on account of his reputation as the complete Bohemian, a reputation increased by his being an easy peg on which to hang any fantastic story that came into a journalist's brain. Theodore de Banville, who first met him in 1841 and, according to Monselet, idealized him absurdly, gives some curious recollections of him in "Mes Souvenirs." He was a handsome man, dark, tall, and slender, rather resembling the elder Dumas. He pa.s.sed most of his life wandering about the low quarters of Paris in complete poverty, often begging a meal from one of the _cabaretiers_ of the Halles, who all loved him. Yet, de Banville avers, he was not really unprovided for, since at irregular intervals a relative used to send him about 200 from America in gold pieces. But Privat d'Anglemont preferred to live without money, so that he never hesitated in getting rid of this burden as soon as possible by standing a dinner to all the poor and hungry women he could find in the tiny inn called the "Buf Enrage," at the bottom of the Rue de la Harpe. Like Gerard de Nerval, he would set out on a voyage at a moment's notice and without a moment's preparation, and such was his charm that he had affectionate friends in the lower quarters of many a French town. Once during his nightly wanderings he was stopped by some robbers. "But I'm Privat," he said, roaring with laughter. At which the robbers joined in the laugh, and invited him to supper. By a ruined hut they sat down to drink the best champagne in the light of the stars, to smoke, and to tell stories.

Privat delighted his hosts, who invited him to meet them again; but he shook his head, saying, "N'engageons pas l'avenir."

Privat d'Anglemont, who eventually died of consumption, did little more than carry on the traditions of the "noctambules," less mischievously than their founder, Retif de la Bretonne, less modestly and artistically than Gerard de Nerval, but so much more seriously than either of his predecessors that he left little scope for a new departure to his own successor, Alfred Delvau. He was not, in the truest sense, a Bohemian, though he led an existence ever bordering on the confines of Bohemia.

The same may be said, in a more transitory sense, of Flaubert, the great renovator and refiner of Romanticism. Most of his life was spent in the country, but there was a short period when he came to study law in Paris, which, if it were not mentioned, might justify a challenge from readers familiar with "L'Education Sentimentale" or Maxime du Camp's "Souvenirs Litteraires." So far as the first of these books is concerned, little time need here be spent in finding relevant points of comparison. The last thing which Flaubert desired to portray in that depressing picture was an existence in any sense artistic. His hero is a provincial youth who, during his student days in Paris, drifts aimlessly and indolently through a variety of second-rate experiences in company with second-rate friends. Flaubert's own experiences are, no doubt, frequently worked into the material, but "L'Education Sentimentale" is nothing so cheap as autobiography served in a thin sauce of fiction. It is a novel in which the author has with the highest exercise of penetrative imagination treated what Mr. Henry James would call the "germ"--the dreary wastefulness, that is, of such a life in case of such a young man as Frederic Moreau, who with Madame Bovary is Flaubert's contribution to the pathology of _le mal romantique_. Flaubert himself, with all his excitability and extravagance, was of a much stronger stamp; the strength of his artistic conviction saved him from all such flabbiness. He came to Paris to study law, but, having failed to pa.s.s his examination, returned to his home in 1843. If he had stayed he might easily have become one of the leading figures, certainly a powerful influence, in that Bohemia which Murger knew. Maxime du Camp, who made his acquaintance early in 1843, shows him as a young man living always at a high pitch with the flamboyant vitality that would have done no dishonour to the Impa.s.se du Doyenne, so far was he from being the victim of Frederic's weak-kneed desolation. He pa.s.sed his days in an alternation of prodigality and poverty, spending fifty francs on his dinner one day and feeding on a crust and a slab of chocolate the next.

He lived in a kind of intellectual tornado, both frantic and noisy. He went into ecstasies over mediocre works in which he perceived beauties hidden from the rest of the world, but which he loved to point out stridently to his friends, intoning the prose, roaring the verse at the top of his voice, repeating incessantly any word which took his pa.s.sionate fancy, and filling all the neighbourhood with his din. He would wake up a friend without compunction at three in the morning to show him a moonlight effect on the Seine; one moment he would be inventing sauces to make brill appetizing, and the next he would be plotting to smack Gustave Planche's face for having spoken slightingly of Victor Hugo. The _cenacle_ composed of Louis de Cormenin, Le Poitevin, Du Camp, and himself often dined at Dagneaux's, one of the better restaurants of the Quartier Latin, and stayed talking ceaselessly till the doors were closed. Their ambitions were as wild as their conversation; Flaubert and Du Camp seriously determined to learn everything between the ages of twenty-one and thirty, to produce great works till forty, and then to retire into the country. Except for the fact that, according to his friend, Flaubert disdained the women whom his beauty attracted, this was a promising beginning for Bohemia. As the world knows, fate decreed otherwise, and he retired to develop in that close intellectual atmosphere with Louis Bouilhet and Du Camp, of which the latter says: "Living as we did, in solitude, we exchanged only the same set of ideas apart from all criticism, so that things in general lost their right proportion in our minds."

Flaubert's life in the Rue de l'Est was, at best, only a tentative pathway in Bohemia, like one of those tracks in a suburb that give hope of leading somewhere, but change their mind _en route_. It is too small a digression to be distracting, and I entered upon it, among other reasons, because its little adventure coincides in date with those movements in the central market-place yet to be touched on. One more alley, however, must be taken on the way, for it is, indeed, only just off the market-place. The name upon its wall is that of Charles Baudelaire, a well-known figure whose exact relation to Bohemia is, nevertheless, not so easy to determine. He began very much in the manner of Flaubert, coming as a student to the Quartier Latin and residing at a not very strictly kept _pension_ near the Pantheon between 1839 and 1841, his eighteenth and his twentieth years. I need not repeat the distinction made between student life--_das Burschenleben_--and out-and-out Bohemianism. Baudelaire filled his days to their fullest extent, mixing together indiscriminately the enjoyments of student, dandy, and _viveur_, so far as his means allowed. It was only at the end of this time that his determination to take up literature scandalized his stepfather and caused his enforced sea voyage. When he returned in 1842 he had come of age and possessed a capital of 75,000 francs. He set about spending this money with a gusto and in a manner not unworthy of the golden age of Bohemia. He had various lodgings till he settled for two years in a beautiful apartment in the old Hotel Pimodan on the ile St.-Louis, where his comrade was the painter Boissard, a good artist who, as Gautier said, exhausted himself in enthusiasms, and in whose wonderful Louis XIV salon the society of _hachischiens_ met. Had Baudelaire been a true Bohemian at heart he might have inst.i.tuted a second _Boheme galante_, but he was wanting in that simplicity and goodfellowship which are signal qualities in the Bohemian character. He wished to make his life, like his art, a study in exquisite intensity, so that in the days of his splendour his mode of living was rather that of a "dandy" than anything else. He dressed with immense care, but in a bygone fashion; he pursued every kind of sensation, frequented every kind of society, and became the leader of a set who carefully cultivated eccentricity for its own sake, an eccentricity too _pose_ to serve as a type of Bohemian manners. To make himself a subject of astonishment was his chief amus.e.m.e.nt, to which end his devices--such as entering a restaurant with a friend and feigning to begin a story with the loud exordium: "After I had murdered my poor father----"--were innumerable.

So much may be said with a certain pity or amus.e.m.e.nt, but it must also be admitted that a certain refinement, both social and intellectual, kept him from a.s.sociating himself entirely with the not over-discriminating Bohemia of his generation. It is all the more fair to say this because after 1844, when his stepfather got a guardian appointed to take charge of his remaining capital and he was reduced to eking out a reduced income by journalism, with all its attendant disappointments and hardships, he chose with some discrimination the extent to which he would throw in his lot with the Bohemian life for which he had by that time every qualification. He became a friend of Murger and many other complete Bohemians, and there is a story of his asking the original of Schaunard to dine and giving him a piece of Brie cheese and two bottles of claret, asking him to imagine that he was enjoying the dessert after a good dinner. Yet his real intimates were a band of young men, Theodore de Banville, Charles Monselet, Villiers de l'Isle Adam, and Leconte de l'Isle, who chose to maintain a certain amount of order in the midst of eccentricity and found boisterous joviality less to their taste than the more delicate affectations of wit. Here again I hold no brief for the complete Bohemians. They had their compensating virtues, but it is hardly doubtful that Baudelaire and his friends were the better educated and the more truly artistic set of the two. This, perhaps, was the greatest tragedy of Bohemia's decline, that its spiritual distinction faded with its material well-being. At any rate, for a combination of reasons, laudable and the reverse, Baudelaire's set was not Bohemia, and if, as I leave them, I may insist particularly on one of the less laudable reasons, it is that pose, which is another form of convention, must by the very conception of Bohemia be excluded from its characteristics. Nadar hits the difference when, in his curious little book on Baudelaire, which is written in an idiom describable as a French version of that elliptical quaintness a.s.sociated with our own _Pink 'Un_, he writes: "Avec ces epileptiques, combien loin du sans facon tout bonhomme, de la simplesse a la bonne franquette de mon autre bande de Boheme, 'la bande de Murger'

et de notre 'Societe des buveurs d'eau.' ..."

We return, then, to the author of "Scenes de la Vie de Boheme" at the end of a rather circuitous route. In speaking of the Bohemia which he immortalized I have called it, in distinction from certain modifications or superficial resemblances, the central market-place, but no more need be sought in that phrase than an effort to represent it by a handy image as exhibiting the main civic qualities and manners implied in the generic name. Compared with earlier days, a far less proud and bustling burgherdom trod its rather muddy paving-stones, for it had suffered as some agricultural centre when railways were beginning. Yet any pride of succession which they may have had was legitimately theirs, for, if they were less materially and intellectually endowed, if the peculiarly happy circ.u.mstances of their civic foundation had pa.s.sed to make their ultimate disruption certain under the changed conditions of all that is included in social development, they still preserved the Bohemian character, with its simplicity, gaiety, humour, and courage. To labour the point further is unnecessary, for if it is not already clear, the fault is too remote to be here corrected. In the "Scenes de la Vie de Boheme" all the daily comedy and tragedy of this Bohemia of common mortality finds expression: the life there described so intimately and humorously stands or falls by its artistic truth, to which no amount of possible doc.u.mentary corroboration adds an iota. Nevertheless, the professed concession to a desire for ascertainable "facts" with which this chapter opened must be made, at the risk of seeming to expose the vanity of the researcher as the real object of indulgence. Since, in the garrulous world of to-day, n.o.body can make the least incursion into the public eye, much less produce a successful book or picture, without the appearance of a crop of "personal notes," so Murger's picture may be taken for granted, and what follows may appear in the light of "personal notes," claiming no more connexion than a general relation to the picture.

Murger[28] was no son of a landed proprietor nor even sprung from a middle-cla.s.s family, as most Bohemians naturally were, for the whole life of Bohemia presupposes a more or less literary education seldom vouchsafed to the children of lower social order. His father was a German tailor in the Rue des Trois Freres, who wished, not without reason, that his son should succeed him in his trade. Murger's early education was therefore confined to the rudiments, and his deficiencies in that respect were a burden upon him all his life. The career of a tailor, for all that, aroused his utmost aversion; through his two friends, Emile and Pierre Bisson, who became clerks, he acquired a violent taste for poetry, with the composition of which he judged the shears incompatible. His father took the rebellion hardly, but got him a place, since he liked pens and paper so much, as errand-boy to an _avoue_, an occupation in which he continued to cultivate his poetic inclinations. When seventeen years old, in 1839, through the interest of M. de Jouy, a critic and member of the Academy, he was appointed secretary to a Russian diplomat, M. de Tolstoi. His salary was only 40 francs a month, out of which he had to pay a small _pension_ to his father for board and lodging; still, he was happy. His duties were very light, and his employer, who also had a literary turn, took a certain amount of interest in him and gave him occasional presents of money.

During the next two years he made the acquaintance of that group of friends on which he drew for his stories of Bohemia, and experienced two love affairs. The first object of his affections was "la cousine Angele," the heroine of a chapter in "Scenes de la Vie de Boheme," in which Rodolphe in his draughty garret, by dint of burning his great tragedy in the stove, warms himself sufficiently to write the commemorative poem for the tombstone of a defunct _bourgeois_, buying with the proceeds a bunch of white violets for his disdainful cousin.

The second was a certain Marie, who eventually ran away with one of his friends--a tragedy which he relates in "Scenes de la Vie de Jeunesse."

By this time he had become a thoroughly developed Bohemian, intolerant of all restraint. He left his father's home, and even for a time gave up his post with M. de Tolstoi.

It was then that Henry Murger's Bohemia was definitely formed, a society described by one of them as "ce demi-quarteron de poetes a l'outrance, mais absolument inedits, reunis dans un tas, sans vestes ni semelles, ne doutant de rien, ni de leur lendemain, ni de leur genie, ni du genie de leur voisin, ni de l'editeur a venir, ni du succes, ni des belles dames, ni de la fortune--de rien, si ce n'est de leur diner du soir, trop convaincus, d'ailleurs, quant a la question de leur dejeuner du matin."

Their names were the brothers Bisson, Lelioux, Noel, Nadar, Guilbert, Vastine, the brothers Desbrosses, Cabot, Villain, Tabar, Chintreuil, Pottier, Karol, Schann, and Vernet. They called themselves the "Societe des Buveurs d'Eau," but they were by no means so quixotic as Murger draws that society in "Scenes de la Vie de Boheme." It was simply a union for mutual help, the rules of which did not bar any commercial occupation. The members lived as they pleased or as they could, and water was only a compulsory beverage at the official monthly meetings, when they all submitted their work to the criticism of their brethren.

Their ordinary occupations were various enough. Noel gave drawing lessons; another was a judicial stenographer; Jacques Desbrosses, nicknamed Christ--the original of "Jacques D----" in "Scenes de la Vie de Boheme"--and Cabot drew designs for monumental masons; the other Desbrosses, called Gothique, earned a little money by painting door-signs for midwives; Schann, the original of Schaunard, was a musician, and Wallon, Murger's Colline, who joined the society later, eked out his barren philosophy by giving lessons; Chintreuil, afterwards to become a well-known artist, was then a bookseller's a.s.sistant, with Champfleury for his colleague; and Nadar, otherwise F. Tournachon, whom Alphonse Karr describes as "a kind of giant with immense legs, long arms, a long body with a s.h.a.ggy head of red hair above it, and staring, intelligent, flashing eyes," was the poet and journalist who became a celebrated balloonist and an immensely successful photographer. His caricature hangs in the section of the Musee Carnavalet devoted to early aeronautics in Paris.

We may take it from Murger that the shortcomings of fortune were borne with humorous fort.i.tude on the credit of her occasional smiles, but there was no illusion about the privations. Nadar, Champfleury, and Delvau all agree that a bitter wind blew upon them. It was not so bad, in Nadar's opinion, so long as they lived more or less together, and this they did for a short time in an old house by the Barriere d'Enfer, which looked like a farm with a farmyard inhabited by hens. Champfleury made their acquaintance at this time in a little dairy where they sometimes took their meals. It was a strange society. Some wore blouses, others Phrygian caps, while the brothers Desbrosses had large sky-blue overcoats, turned back with pink satin and fastened by huge mother-of-pearl b.u.t.tons. These two brothers were the originators of the colony at the Barriere d'Enfer, and its chiefs "surtout par leur misere." They harboured some of the others, who found a resting-place for the night in two hammocks slung in their small room. Murger was among them, the art of painting being for the moment his preoccupation.

Fine days were spent lounging on the roof and contemplating the then rural surroundings. Anybody arriving with five francs in his pocket would have been regarded as a millionaire; indeed, they were happy enough when they could afford a few fried potatoes for dinner. Yet they would not have exchanged their hovel for the Garden of Eden, and they fed upon their dreams with inexhaustible confidence. Privation was still worse when the society broke up. One Bohemian lived a whole week on raw potatoes brought by his poor mother from the country; another went three days without food; another pa.s.sed a winter shirtless in a calico blouse and a lasting waistcoat; another, as a device to keep himself warm, used to carry a log of wood up to his high garret, drop it over the banisters, and run down to fetch it again; an older Bohemian who heard of this manuvre exclaimed: "Spendthrift, why the log?"

Henry Murger himself, who had abandoned painting and definitely adopted the vocation of a sentimental poet, went to live with his friend Lelioux, first in the Rue Montholon and then in that garret at 4 a year in the Rue de la Tour d'Auvergne where Rodolphe's friends "drank badly filtered water out of eclectic earthenware" at his Wednesday receptions.

He had resumed his employment with M. de Tolstoi, but he was too improvident to keep out of misery for many days together. More than once he became so ill with purpura, an eruptive disease due in his case to the abuse of coffee, that he had to go to the hospital. Some extracts from his letters during these years will give an idea of his dest.i.tution. On December 14, 1841, he writes:

"Les Desbrosses pa.s.sent la moitie de la journee a ne pas manger et l'autre a crever de froid. Les chats se mefient d'eux, et, en fait de cheminee, ils ne possedent que leurs pipes--bien des fois sans tabac."

March 6, 1842:

"Sans le Christ, qui m'a donne a diner et a dejeuner quatre fois la semaine, je ne sais pas ce que je serais devenu. Ce garcon n'a pas vole son surnom."

April 25, 1843:

"Nous crevons de faim; nous sommes au bout du rouleau. Il faut decidement se faire un trou quelque part ou se faire sauter la cervelle."

March 17, 1844:

"De Charybde en Sylla, mon cher ami! La misere est plus horrible que jamais chez moi et autour de moi. Ma place au _Commerce_ n'a pas eu de suite; je suis de nouveau sur le pave. C'est horrible!

Aussi le decouragement m'a-t-il pris et tout a fait submerge.

Encore quelques jours de cette position et je me fais sauter la cervelle ou je m'engage dans la marine.--Pardonne-moi ces plaintes!

C'est le cri de la _fin_."

Like Colline, he punned even in his misery.

Letters of this doleful nature do not throw a very gay light upon the Bohemian market-place, where there was high compet.i.tion for a small custom and prices ruled low. They contain a truth which no consideration of Bohemia can omit, but it was not the whole truth, as Murger himself testifies in his stories. It was a life of good days as well as bad, even in the leanest years, or "Scenes de la Vie de Boheme" could never have been written. Murger himself had already begun to hand some small wares over his counter. Rodolphe, the poet, it will be remembered, did not disdain to edit a small fashion paper called _L'echarpe d'Iris_, in which, to Colline's extravagant delight, he inserted the philosopher's articles on metaphysics. This was a direct touch from life, for Bohemia in more than one instance lent its pen to trade. There was a certain Charles Vincent who edited two papers of the leather trade, _Le Moniteur de la Cordonnerie_ and the _Halle aux Cuirs_. In his editorial capacity he retained all the new pairs of boots and shoes sent in by advertisers, and with these he often paid his contributors. Murger in 1843 edited _Le Moniteur de la Chapellerie_, the industrial fruits of which were, no doubt, less profitable, but even a few hats and a few francs a month were of considerable value in Bohemia. They were, of course, nothing like the editorial profits of to-day. Receipts were extremely precarious, when, even on a well-written literary paper like _L'Artiste_, the application of a contributor for payment caused a considerable rummaging in tills and pockets before twenty-five francs could be found _dans la boutique_.[29] Yet small change was enough to stand a Bohemian holiday, and Murger's gloomy letters must be discounted by balancing them against Rodolphe's expedition to Versailles with Mademoiselle Laure after he had ransacked Paris for the five francs necessary to do that expedition in sufficient style. It would be absurd to suppose that Murger, with Nadar, Schann, and a _grisette_ or two, did not sometimes invade the Chaumiere in a joyous band or wake from sleep the serious inhabitants of the Rue de la Tour d'Auvergne.

At the same time, howsoever the balance of pleasure and pain be struck, it is clear that happy memories of this Bohemia could only remain to those for whom it was only a necessary stage in life and not a death-trap. This tendency to poetic melancholy and the painful slowness with which he worked might have caused Henry Murger to sink for ever like many of his friends. He was saved, in the first instance, by Champfleury, who, when he was finally sold up in the Rue de la Tour d'Auvergne, took him to live in the Rue de Vaugirard and induced him to abandon poetry for prose. Jules Husson-Fleury, who was born at Laon in 1821 and became a well-known writer under the name of Champfleury, a great collector of prints and porcelain, on which he wrote some valuable monographs, and finally the director of the Sevres manufactory, pa.s.sed through Bohemia during the same years as Murger, and in his "Souvenirs et Portraits de Jeunesse" records many lively experiences. He first came to Paris as shop-boy and a.s.sistant in a bookseller's shop where, as I have already said, the future painter Chintreuil was in the same service. Champfleury lost his place for reading the books on his errands instead of delivering them to the customers, but during this year 1839 he saw something of Murger and the colony of the brothers Desbrosses. He then left Paris for a year or two, and returned when Murger was living in the Rue de la Tour d'Auvergne, though the acquaintance was not at once renewed. It was approximately in 1845 that they went to live together in the Rue de Vaugirard, after Champfleury had met Murger again in the hospital. They did not by any means leave Bohemia; in fact, there is reason to suppose that to some extent the character of Marcel was drawn from Champfleury. They wrote a vaudeville together which was never accepted, and attacked the difficult art of writing stories.

Murger was able to place some of his work in _L'Artiste_, the editor of which was a.r.s.ene Houssaye, and in 1846 the "Scenes de la Vie de Boheme"

began to come out in _Le Corsaire_. They were poorly enough paid at the time, but their dramatisation by Barriere in 1849 proved a huge success, and from that time onwards Murger settled down to more serious work and a less disorderly life.

But I am antic.i.p.ating Champfleury's memories of the last days of Bohemia. In his view, at any rate so far as Murger and he were concerned, the indolence of Bohemia has been much exaggerated. "In reality," he says, "work was the basis of our life." They had a joint library, to which Murger supplied the poets and Champfleury the prose-writers. The latter read voraciously to educate himself, but Murger chiefly thumbed the pages of Victor Hugo and Alfred de Musset; he took regular doses of Shakespeare in a French translation, traces of which appear in "Scenes de la Vie de Boheme," but he had little knowledge of other cla.s.sic authors. He worked with extraordinary difficulty; a page of prose cost him a night's work and intense intellectual labour, for "Murger n'etait plein que de son cur."

Champfleury, for all his friendship, was a shrewd critic when he observed that his whole vision was introspective: "He swept the same chimney so often that in the end the plaster came off and the bricks fell down"; or again: "Besides his little library, his belongings consisted of worn white gloves, a velvet mask, and a withered bouquet hung on the walls. All Murger's work lies in his memories--some faded flowers, a meeting at the Bal de l'Opera, a heart-ache."

Certain disorders of Bohemia are not excused by Champfleury, particularly that of not paying debts. His friend Fauchery, an engraver who afterwards went to seek his fortune in Australia, induced him at first to accept the Bohemian code, which was:

1. Never to pay one's rent.

2. To conduct one's removals by the window.

3. To consider all bootmakers, tailors, hatters, and restaurant-keepers as members of Mr. Credit's family.

Some went so far as to maintain that after a clandestine removal through the window no piece of furniture which had pa.s.sed the gutter in the middle of the street could be reclaimed by the proprietor. This less creditable att.i.tude of Bohemia, which is sufficiently prominent in "Scenes de la Vie de Boheme," was repudiated with some shame in after years by many of Murger's friends. In the book Rodolphe pays his debts when he settles down, and we have it on the authority of Delvau that Schann (Schaunard), who eventually kept a respectable toy-shop, and the original of Musette, who married a chemist, took in their later days a more usual view of money matters. Champfleury confesses that he himself was saved by an amiable girl, who for a time became the divinity of his garret. Unlike Mimi and Musette, she had a horror of debt and vagabondage and inspired him with a pleasure in his own humble hearth, so that he gradually detached himself from his comrades, who were for the most part so ill provided for in the matter of lodging that their chief workroom was a _cafe_, where they arrived at nine in the morning, to leave at midnight. They read the newspapers, played at dominoes or _tric-trac_, and occasionally did a little work. Fauchery, in particular, caused considerable surprise among the regular customers by bringing his whole engraving apparatus and solemnly setting to work.

Some respect certainly is due to the proprietors of these little eating-houses who so gallantly put up with and gave credit to this noisy and not very profitable _clientele_, who were capable of perpetrating all the outrages committed by Rodolphe and the rest in their constant asylum, the Cafe Momus.

Champfleury says little of the amiable G.o.ddess who rescued him from vagabondage except that she left him, like Mimi, because she grew tired of cheap muslin, but in another chapter he gives some account of two other idols of Bohemia whom he calls Mademoiselle M. and Mademoiselle P.

Mademoiselle M. was dark and merry, a thorough coquette who laughed at wounded hearts; Mademoiselle P. was fair and melancholy, always in tears for the last lover who had left her. A generation of Bohemians were their lovers, poets and painters especially. As the generation grew up the divinities grew wiser, and Mademoiselle M. was the first to do a little mental arithmetic. For her own friends who had a future the days of idleness were over; there was no future for her either among the stranded remainder or in a new generation. Accordingly she departed to more profitable spheres. Mademoiselle P. stayed a little longer, still loving her poets, and weeping _toutes les larmes de son corps_ to find that she had a too formidable rival in the desire for fame which watched at the door of her lovers' hearts, till finally she found a worthy man who was no poet to love her and eventually to marry her. Mademoiselle M., meanwhile, had made by her conquests quite a respectable capital, with which one fine day she set sail for Algiers. Unhappily she left Ma.r.s.eilles in a steamer which sank with all hands, so that she and her gold came to rest at the bottom of the sea--a sad story from which Champfleury in an unworthy moment makes some show of drawing a moral.

Neither of these young women can be identified with Murger's heroines.

Musette, as I have said, married a chemist; Phemie Teinturiere, Schaunard's choice, was according to Delvau, a not over-respectable person resembling a heroine of Paul de k.o.c.k; as for Mimi, Delvau a.s.serts that Murger loved her while he wrote the "Scenes de la Vie de Boheme," and that her life and wretched death are matters of fact.

However, that we may not be too lugubrious let me add that I have read in the French equivalent of "Notes and Queries" a statement that she cheerfully lived to keep a stall in the market.

One more bead in this string of scattered "facts," and the hungerers for doc.u.mentary evidence must go away satisfied. The disorder of Bohemia requires no emphasis, but it is curious to note that the persons in whom its more orderly elements were incarnated were Champfleury himself and the original of that odd figure, Carolus Barbemuche, the solemn young tutor who in Murger's story glances so enviously at the _cenacle_ of Rodolphe, Schaunard, and Marcel in the Cafe Momus, who saves them from disaster by paying for their reckless Christmas Eve supper, who demands so humbly the privilege of being admitted to the clan, who serves so long and expensive an apprenticeship and gives such a splendid festival on his reception, even to the length of lending all his own presentable clothes to his guests for the occasion. Carolus Barbemuche was drawn, much to his disgust, from Charles Barbara, an obscure writer of fantastic stories, who joined Murger's Bohemia after acting as tutor to two boys. He had a face like a sphinx, rarely smiled, and seemed to be afraid of the wild jokes of his friends. Unlike the rest, he lived almost a hermit's life, receiving n.o.body in his garret, and retiring there every night neither to read nor to write, but to think, a queer occupation for a Bohemian. Of him Champfleury writes:

"He and I represented order in a group doomed to disorder; we were the _bourgeois_ of Bohemia, as much by our ambitions as our manner of living. The details of one day of our life, which continued in the same way for ten years, will show the succession of our studies and our labours. Rising very early, dashing from my bed to my table, I used to write till nine o'clock. An hour sufficed me for breakfast and a walk to the library, where I worked till twelve; there I used to meet Barbara, whom I took to the public lectures at the College de France, the Sorbonne, or the Jardin des Plantes. Two lectures, an hour each, exhausted our attention, and, resuming our walk, we arrived at Schann's temple of music, exclusively consecrated to quartets. Two hours of music every day, without counting piano trios three times a week at another house, made us able to read all the chamber music of the German masters....

Barbara was the finest instrumentalist in our band; son and brother of distinguished musicians, he had received in early youth excellent violin lessons, the fruit of which was not lost later, and he brought to the leading of a quartet a restrained emotion which is to be found in some pages of his writings."

It is an unexpectedly pretty glimpse into a part of Bohemia where Murger was not at home. When the quartets took place in a little square of the Quartier Latin, students and _grisettes_ came to listen before the open window, and workpeople on every story put out their heads to watch for the arrival of the musicians. Murger's disreputable Schaunard, with his symphony on _L'influence du bleu dans la musique_, was always, I must confess, my favourite; but to discover that he played the quartets of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and Mendelssohn for two hours a day with Barbemuche and Marcel--well, it was an intoxicating vision.

Schaunard, who had a pa.s.sion for lobsters, the composer (in his fleshly form of Schann) of a famous drinking song, as second violin in a Beethoven quartet--oh pleasant, pleasant fellow, who truly deserved to come into the comfortable harbour of a toy-shop!

Marcel, so far as he was Champfleury, found a haven too, and lived till 1889. Colline retired to found a new religion in Switzerland, and Rodolphe-Murger, though he lingered for some years in the band of artists and writers who haunted the _bra.s.serie_ where Courbet raised the temple of realism, finally turned his back on dissipation and settled at Marlotte, even now a charming village near Fontainebleau. His chief recreation there was hunting, an occupation quite innocuous to the game, if it be true that a certain hare survived his attentions for a whole season, and when an unwary keeper shot it one misty afternoon, he exclaimed with genuine compunction, "Tiens, c'est le lievre de M.

Murger!" In 1861 he came to die in Paris of arteritis, and all the literary world visited his bedside. He died two days after his admission to the hospital, exclaiming, "Pas de musique! Pas de bruit! Pas de Boheme!" Bohemia, indeed, had long been dead, and in his last moments he may have recognized that it was well. There was no longer room for it in a busier, a better-swept world. In its golden age Bohemia did no more than share the imperfections of all human inst.i.tutions. It had virtues, a liberty, a pride, and an ideal of its own. Murger had seen the beauty become a slattern, pretty no doubt beneath her s.m.u.ts, gay in the midst of her sorrows, but free by tolerance, not by protest, her pride almost in the dust and her ideals in the possession of others. In the words which Theodore Pelloquet spoke over his grave, Murger belonged to an evil generation:

"Il appartenait a une mauvaise generation, a une generation vieillie avant l'heure, et, malgre sa vieillesse prematuree, sans experience, sans enthousiasme et sans colere, ayant de la vanite et pas du tout d'orgueil, une vanite niaise, puerile, qui se manifeste surtout par l'affectation d'une ironie mesquine, en face de tous les enthousiasmes et de toutes les grandes causes; a une generation, en un mot, qui laissa perir dans ses mains le magnifique heritage que lui avaient legue les hommes de 1830."