Vie De Boheme Part 9

[Ill.u.s.tration: Rue de la Tixeranderie]

Another typical specimen of the Paris I am describing is to be seen in that curious confluence of three narrow streets, the Rues de la Lune, Beauregard, and de Clery, just off the Boulevard Bonne Nouvelle. The Rue de la Lune is dominated by the forbidding portals of a gloomy church, and its cobble-stones are quite deserted even when the activity of the neighbouring boulevard is at its height. No flight of imagination is needed to realize its appropriateness as the scene of that tragic close to "Illusions Perdues," where in a garret Lucien writes drinking songs over the corpse of his wretched Coralie to pay the expenses of her burial. This street and the two others, which meet at an extraordinarily acute angled building, diverge into the squalor of the Rue Montorgueil.

It is easier to see the conditions in which _la vie de Boheme_ was pa.s.sed in such spots as these than in the regions towards Montmartre.

The Rue de la Tour d'Auvergne still exists, but to search there for the garret of Murger and Champfleury is disappointing. One ascends the cheerful Rue des Martyrs from Notre Dame de Lorette, with its prospect of the Sacre Cur standing out against the open heavens, and on turning along the Rue de la Tour d'Auvergne one is confronted by a respectable, clean, sleepy street that might grace any neat provincial town in France. All suggestion of Bohemianism is remarkably absent, even on the top floors. In Murger's day this quarter was far less civilized, as may be seen from a water-colour sketch by Victor Hugo which hangs in the Carnavalet Museum. This represents the view southwards from the Rue de la Tour d'Auvergne--a wild foreground of uncultivated land with sombre trees and dilapidated fences, and in the distance all Paris spread out in panorama.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Rue Pirouette]

The left bank has changed no less than the right. The luxurious quarter of the Faubourg Saint-Germain has spread immeasurably, and even where old streets remain, as many do in the Quartier Latin, their houses have been rebuilt. Many a Bohemian could probably have told a parallel to Champfleury's touching story of how, long after his mistress had left him, he witnessed by chance the demolition of an old wall of a house in the quarter, and there on the topmost story was laid bare the room, with its very wallpaper unchanged, where they spent so many happy months of youth and love. In particular, this part of Paris was cleared and aired by the construction of those two very important thoroughfares, the Boulevard Saint-Germain, which broke through a host of little streets, including the rampageous Rue Childebert, and the Boulevard Saint-Michel, which replaced and widened the straggling old Rue de la Harpe. Before these were made, the Quartier Latin had not a single main street, though it was not quite so uncivilized as the Halles quarter, nor so large.

Southwards by the gardens of the Luxembourg it soon became comparatively _bourgeois_ and s.p.a.cious with pleasant houses and gardens, built originally for rich n.o.bles and prelates, but relinquished at the dictation of fashion to prosperous tradespeople and officials like the Ph.e.l.lions and Thuilliers of Balzac's "Les Pet.i.ts Bourgeois." Searches for vestiges of Bohemia in general on either side of the Boulevard Saint-Germain are fruitful enough; many an _hotel garni_ recalls that in which Lucien first hid his diminished head, or the early home of a.r.s.ene Houssaye, when Nini Yeux Noirs was his divinity and revolution his creed. Specific quests, however, are apt to be disappointing. The Rue des Quatre Vents, the headquarters of d'Arthez' _cenacle_, in Balzac's time "one of the most horrible streets in Paris," remains blamelessly near Saint-Sulpice as dull and decent as the Rue de la Tour d'Auvergne; and the Rue Vaugirard, where the second _cenacle_, headed by Petrus Borel, held its frantic orgies round the punch-bowl and where Murger wrote his "Scenes de la Vie de Boheme," is devoid of any spark of romance. On the other hand, a visit to the delightful Cour de Rohan, just off the Boulevard Saint-Germain, will land you _en pleine Boheme_, as will certain streets leading up towards the Church of Saint-Etienne du Mont, or the narrow pa.s.sages by the Church of Saint-Severin. It is just too late to see another unmistakable relic of Balzac's Paris, for the Maison Vauquer of "Pere Goriot" has just been pulled down. Yet to make a pilgrimage to its site gives a very good impression of the gloominess which Bohemian high spirits had usually to combat. The Maison Vauquer stood near the junction of the Rue des Postes and the Rue Neuve Sainte-Genevieve, now the Rue Lh.o.m.ond, and the Rue Tournefort, south of the Pantheon. I have walked down the Rue Lh.o.m.ond at three on a sunny autumn afternoon, yet I met no soul in this dingy street, which seemed to catch not a ray of the sun's illumination. It is crossed by two sinister little lanes, the Rue Amyot, at the corner of which Cerizet, in "Les Pet.i.ts Bourgeois," carried on the business of a small usurer in a loathsome, grimy house, and the Rue du Pot de Fer, before coming to which one pa.s.ses a high, dark barrack, heavy iron bars shielding its dirty lower windows, the "Inst.i.tution Lh.o.m.ond pour l'education des jeunes filles"--poor _jeunes filles_! When the Rue Tournefort meets the Rue Lh.o.m.ond there is a very steep descent, accurately described by Balzac, into the Rue de l'Arbalete. Almost any of the mournful dwellings with weedy gardens on this slope might have been the hideous _pension_ where Goriot died, while at the corner of the Rue de l'Arbalete there is a veritable dungeon, only two tiny windows in cracked frames piercing its high, blank wall. If you proceed into the narrow Rue Mouffetard, one long, smelly vegetable market, you will then realize the general state of all but the best of Louis Philippe's Paris.

It was part of the old world, unconscious of its impending reformation in the light of the new ideals of comfort and sanitation which were to become the accented notes of modernity. It was a provincial city of small compa.s.s with no industrial suburbs, no railways--let alone trams or river steamboats--and a population of considerably less than a million concentrated for the most part in its overcrowded quarters by the river banks, where the excitement of its spiritual life made up for the deficiencies of its material well-being. There were few public buildings of recent construction; the Louvre was still disfigured by the _debris_ of the Place du Carrousel; the Hotel de Ville, Notre Dame, and the Palais de Justice were hemmed in by crabbed streets and thickly cl.u.s.tering old houses. Private gardens were many, but public squares were few. Except for the boulevards the streets had medieval paving with central gutters, from which all and sundry were liberally splashed, so that for well-dressed persons to venture in them on foot was an impossibility. An American writing in 1835 says of them: "They are paved with cubical stones of eight or ten inches, convex on the upper surface like the sh.e.l.l of a terrapin; few have room for side-walks, and where not bounded by stores they are as dark as they were under King Pepin.

Some seem to be watertight."[37] They were seldom swept, never flushed, and primitively lit. The noise, too, except on the boulevards, was deafening and incessant. Not only did the eternal rumbling of wheels over cobblestones and the sharp clatter of stumbling hoofs a.s.sail the ear, but also the ringing of bells, the rattle of water-carriers'

buckets, the din of barrel-organs and itinerant singers, and all those street cries of fish-sellers, clothes-merchants, rag and bone men, glaziers, umbrella menders, and fruit-vendors so picturesque in isolated survival, but so unbearable in the _ensemble_ of their heyday. It would be a mistake, however, to imagine this Paris as sleepy, stagnant, or unp.r.i.c.ked by the progressive spirit; on the contrary, she was exceedingly wide-awake. But, whereas the Englishman at once translates his progressive idea into mechanism, the Frenchman prefers to let the first thorough ferment take place in his mind alone, allowing it, if need be, to inspire in him the primitive actions of attack and defence, but leaving more complicated handiwork to a later date, when the logic of change has been worked out, according to which he then acts rigorously. In this light the Paris of Bohemia must be regarded--picturesquely stagnant externally, seething inwardly--and of this condition Bohemia was the type. Its extravagant or tattered dress, its Rabelaisian speech and self-indulgence, the antiquated splendours of the Impa.s.se du Doyenne and the equally antiquated hovels and garrets of its poverty, its disregard of public convenience and its real antagonism to democracy, were externals voluntarily or of necessity adopted from an earlier age; they were the old bottles which served for a moment to hold and to flavour with a distinctive tang the new wine of the Romantic vintage. Other vintages of equal potency have quickened men's hearts since then, and every new age, whether its ideals be artistic or social, will have its particular ferment that will find its appropriate vessels, but the past can never return any more than the first delirious headiness can be restored to an old wine that now charms with its matured delicacy. Bohemia is a thing of the past with that irrevocable Paris with its tortuous, noisy streets, its high gables, its wide skirts and embroidered waistcoats, its

_Fashionables musques, gueux a mine incongrue,_ _Grisettes au pied leste, au sourire agacant,_ _Beaux tilburys dores comme l'eclair pa.s.sant--_

the Paris of Balzac, the Paris of Roger de Beauvoir and Alfred de Musset, the Paris of Theophile Gautier and Gerard de Nerval, the Paris of Rodolphe, Schaunard, and Marcel, the Paris, in fine, which was the only home of _les vrais Bohemiens de la vraie Boheme_.