Bohemia. He was now one of those who, in his own words, have no other
means of subsistence beyond that afforded by art itself; one of those
described by Balzac, “whose religion is hope, whose code is faith in
oneself, whose budget is charity.” Through nearly all the varied
experiences of which he was afterwards to write with such wonderfully
sustained graphic power, the young man himself now passed; through the
days of careless idleness or strenuous exertion; through the nights of
homeless wandering or furious dissipation; through all the grim poverty
and suffering, all the doubt and restlessness, all the fierce
fluctuations of assurance and despair, which presently went to the
making of his book. Even while he had still been in receipt of Count
Tolstoï’s allowance, things had sometimes gone hardly enough with him;
for, needless to state, he was not of the thrifty or frugal kind, “Your
friend,” he writes in a letter, as early as 1841, “has found the means
of swallowing forty francs in a fortnight; but happily for him there are
still forty sous left to carry him to the end of the month. His
existence, then, has been during the past fortnight diversified with
beefsteaks ... and Havana cigars”; while for the remaining two
ill-omened weeks, recourse must be had to that “table d’hôte of chance”
already referred to. With the discontinuance of this tiny but periodic
dropping from the great Cornucopia of Providence, the beefsteaks and
Havana cigars became less and less frequent apparitions in his life, and
the famous inn which bears the “Belle Etoile” as its sign and trading
token, found in him a pretty constant guest. To make his shoes last more
than six months, and his debts forever, now became an urgent problem for
him. Sometimes fortune would pay him a flying visit, and on such
occasions he describes himself as being temporarily in possession of
more money than he knows what to do with; but libraries, tailors,
restaurants, cafés, theatres, Turkish tobacco-pipes, and friends,
combined to help him over this perplexing difficulty with extraordinary
ease and rapidity. Once, in the intense excitement of a sudden windfall,
he went to bed and dreamed that he was the Emperor of Morocco and was
marrying the Bank of France. But such seasons of miraculous plenty were
few and far between, and visions of this extraordinary kind, when they
came at all, were less likely to arise from repletion than from an empty
stomach; for sometimes he was brought face to face with actual
starvation. Now, he reports borrowing right and left from any
acquaintance who had a franc to lend; now, again, “S—— is paying me the
thirty francs he owes me, fourteen sous at a time.” So from month to
month he struggled on, without seeming to get any nearer to the goal he
had in view, or, in point of fact, to any goal at all; often tortured
with physical pain and privation; often driven half-wild with despair;
but, after the fashion of the true Bohemian, keeping always a brave
heart, and a ready jest for the good friends who stuck close to him
through all, and who would have been only too willing to help him in his
need, but for the single unfortunate circumstance that they were as
badly off as himself.
Unhappily, Murger was, in one important respect, particularly
ill-adapted for the kind of life into which he was thus driven. A man
who trusts to his pen for daily bread should at least be a facile and
ready writer, able to turn off indefinite quantities of copy in a given
time, and willing to undertake the writing up of any subject upon which
public interest may be temporarily aroused, and an article required.
When literature becomes a business, the higher ambition to produce only
good work must almost inevitably be subordinated to the lower and more
practical aim of making the thing pay. Now, the difficulty with Murger
was, that although literature was his livelihood, his regular trade and
calling, he persistently refused to regard it mainly in that
light—refused to sacrifice artistic excellence to temporary advantage,
and to debase a sacred mission into mere routine work, the immediate, if
not indeed the sole, object of which was to turn so much intellectual
labor into so much food and clothing. He himself has remarked concerning
one of his characters that, after the fashion of genius—a generalization
which may or may not be partially true,—he had a tendency to be lazy.
Murger was not exactly lazy; but he was whimsical and uncertain; his
energies were not always under command; and he did not, with Anthony
Trollope, put firmer faith in a piece of beeswax on the seat of his
chair than in all the promptings of the divine afflatus. Like Goldsmith,
he recognized that the conditions of his life rendered it impossible for
him to pay court to the “draggle-tail Muses”; they would simply have
left him to starve outright. So he turned to prose; but with prose
things were nearly as bad. There were times when he could not and would
not write—when the spirit was not upon him; and when he could not work
as an artist, he would not work as a day-laborer or publisher’s drudge.
And even when he was in full swing, his delicate taste, his almost
morbid care in composition, his constant desire to do his best,
prevented him from ever producing with the rapidity necessary to make
the results really remunerative. Never, even under the greatest stress
of circumstances, would he consent to write hastily, or allow his
manuscript to leave his hands without what he conceived to be its proper
share of thought and revision. Money to him was always the secondary
consideration; even hunger had to wait, that the artistic sense might be
satisfied. Rather than prove traitor to his lofty ideals, he would live
for weeks on dry bread.
Thus he had more than the usual difficulty in making ends meet. But the
misfortune did not stop there. A slow and exceedingly painstaking
writer, he could produce but little in the normal hours of work; hence,
the limit had to be frequently extended; and, for this purpose, recourse
was had to the perilous aid of artificial stimulants. We now touch the
saddest part of Murger’s sad story. He wrote at night, and generally in
bed—a practice which he had probably adopted in days when fuel was a
luxury beyond his reach;[24] and his work was almost invariably done
with the assistance of strong and incessant potations of coffee. When
the house was perfectly quiet, when darkness and silence had fallen over
the city, then Murger, like Balzac, commenced the labors of the day.
With these desperate measures, there can be little doubt that he began
very early to undermine a constitution which had never been robust. The
story of the habits thus formed, and of the tyranny they acquired over
him, is a terribly tragic one, and might furnish a fearful warning to
many a jaded brain-worker, did we not know that it is the everlasting
law of human nature that no one shall profit by any one else’s
experiences. “I am literally killing myself,” he writes to a friend.
“You must break me of coffee. I count on you.” “There are nights,” he
declares at another time, “when I have consumed as much as six ounces of
coffee, and only end by convincing myself more than ever of my lack of
power—and this, yes, this has lasted three months. So that at present I
am broken down by the application of these Mochas.... And here I am
still passing my nights drinking coffee like Voltaire, and smoking like
Jean Bart.” As a direct consequence of these suicidal habits, he
gradually contracted a terrible disease—known to medicine as
“purpura”—which took him again and again to the hospital. Once, when the
hand of sickness had smitten him with more than usual severity, he made
a determined attempt to reform. He banished his coffee, and strove, by
closing the shutters and lighting the candles, to trick himself into
working, not of course by daylight, but simply during the day. But it
was too late to inaugurate so radical a change. Ere long his nocturnal
instincts reasserted themselves, and continued in full force to the end
of his career. Doubtless, it is in the pathological conditions thus
brought about, that we have to seek the explanation of the fearful
restlessness which presently came to characterize him, and which earned
for him the nickname of the Wandering Christian.
Footnote 24:
A story to the point is worth repeating here. When the playwright,
Barrière, went to him one afternoon to propose the dramatization of
the “Scenes of Bohemian Life,” he found Murger in his attic in the
Latin Quarter, in bed. It subsequently came out that a Bohemian
friend, having occasion to pay a business visit to some important
functionary, had borrowed his only pair of trousers, which had the
advantage of being a trifle better than his own; and Murger had to
remain in bed, with such patience as he could command, until they
should be restored.
-----
It was only after his constitution had been shattered, and he had grown
prematurely old, that Murger found his way out of Bohemia. The path into
that land of glamour and enchantments had been easy enough, like the
road to Avernus; the passage back again into the common world was in his
case, as in the case of so many others, a steep and difficult one. But
after months and years of toil and waiting, success came at last, and
little by little he was able to break with tenacious old associations,
and settle down to a more steady and regular routine of life. He
established a connection with the “Revue des Deux Mondes”; and with a
position now practically assured, took up his abode at Marlotte, near
Fontainebleau. Here he had every chance of restoring his enfeebled
health, and starting his career anew upon a different and a wiser plan.
But the hour had gone by. A brief period of work and quiet happiness was
brought to a close in January, 1861, when Henri Murger breathed his last
in the house where he had already spent so many weeks of suffering—in
the Hôpital St. Louis. He had not completed his thirty-ninth year.
* * * * *
Of the general work of Murger, this is not the place to speak. It is
considerable in quantity, and much of it has substantial claim to
critical attention; for his prose is finely wrought, and his
lyrics—instance the superb “Chanson de Musette,” so highly but justly
praised by Gautier,—are sometimes of rare purity and sweetness. But it
is by the “Scenes of Bohemian Life,” and by these alone, after all, that
Murger keeps his hold to-day upon the broader reading public. It has
been said that he only wrote at his best when he was writing straight
out of his own life. This is perhaps at bottom the reason why this one
singular book possesses vitality far in excess of all his other
productions. These may still be read with enjoyment, though in the
tremendous stress of modern affairs, and with the ceaseless activity of
the printing-press, they are more likely to be ignored by all but
special students. But the “Scenes of Bohemian Life,” as Mr. Saintsbury
has rightly insisted, take a permanent place in the literature of
humanity. Here we may notice one more illustration of the curiously
distorted judgments which authors often pass upon their own works. In
later years he was accustomed to speak slightingly and almost petulantly
of the volume which has carried his name over into a new generation;
even, it is said, going so far as to affirm that “that devil of a book
will hinder me from ever crossing the Pont des Arts”—that is, from
entering the Academy, which was one of the unfulfilled ambitions of his
life. But, in another and finer sense, it has placed his name among
those of the Immortals.
We may now pass from the author to his volume, on the title-page of
which he might well have written the famous _quorum pars magna fui_ of
Virgil’s hero. “Murger, c’est la Bohème, comme la Bohème fut Murger,”
was the declaration of one of his personal friends; and the stuff of his
wonderful scenes, with all their extravagance and rollicking absurdity,
with all their poignant pathos and whimsical humor, is, as we have said,
stuff furnished by close observation and intimate experience, though the
crude material is transmuted into gold by the secret alchemy of genius.
It has been said that many of Murger’s chapters were actually written—in
the French phrase, for which we have no satisfactory equivalent—_au jour
le jour_; that he made the scenes of his Bohemian life into literature,
so to speak, while they were still being enacted. To this effect
Théophile de Banville reported that “that which was done by
Rodolphe”—who, as we shall presently see, is generally to be identified
with Murger himself—“during the month when he was Mademoiselle Mimi’s
neighbor, has perhaps had no parallel since letters began. His days he
passed in composing verses, sketching plots of plays, and covering
Mimi’s hands with kisses as with a glove; but his daily bread was his
_feuilleton_ for the ‘Corsaire,’ and as Rodolphe had neither money nor
books to invent anything but his own life, each evening he wrote as a
_feuilleton_ for the ‘Corsaire’ the life of that day, and each day he
lived the _feuilleton_ for the next. It was thus that the morrow of I
know not what quarrel, after the fashion of the lovers of Horace, Mimi,
leaning on her lover’s arm, was bowed to in the Luxembourg by the poet
of the ‘Feuilles d’Automne,’ and returned home quite proud to the _Rue
des Canettes_; and that same evening Rodolphe wrote on this theme one of
his most delightful chapters.”[25] This account of the connection
between Murger’s book and his daily life, probably overstates the
matter, or is to be accepted as approximately true only in regard to
exceptional occurrences, like the one directly referred to. But that the
substance of the volume was throughout furnished by experience is
certain. The principal characters, and even some of the minor ones, have
long since been traced back to their archetypes; the spots rendered
famous by many a memorable scene—such as the Café Momus and the shop of
the old Jewish bric-a-brac dealer, Father Médicis—are known to have
actually existed in the old Latin Quarter, though in the evolution of
modern Paris the historic landmarks have been swept away; while there is
no question that in most of his stories Murger either drew immediately
upon actual circumstances, or at least built his superstructure of fancy
upon a very solid foundation of fact.
Footnote 25:
The passage in which reference is made to the meeting with Victor Hugo
will be found at the close of chapter xiv. of the “Scenes.” “After
lunching together, they started for the country. In crossing the
Luxembourg, Rodolphe met a great poet, who had always behaved to him
with charming kindness. For propriety’s sake, he was going to pretend
not to see him. But the poet did not allow him time; in passing, he
gave him a friendly recognition, and bowed to his young companion with
a gracious smile. ‘Who is that gentleman?’ asked Mimi. Rodolphe
replied by mentioning a name which made her blush with pleasure and
pride. ‘Oh,’ said Rodolphe, ‘this meeting with a poet who has sung so
well of love, is a good omen, and will bring luck to our
reconciliation.’” Banville’s statement of the way in which Murger fed
his fiction day by day upon the happenings of his own life, reminds us
somewhat of Mr. Robert S. Hichens’ grim and powerful story, “The
Collaborators.”
-----
* * * * *
The heroes of the “Scenes of Bohemian Life” are four in number. To each
member of the strange group—the “Quatuor Murger,” as it came to be
called—we will yield the honor of a separate paragraph or two of
characterization.
First we have Alexandre Schaunard, who, though he cultivates “the two
liberal arts of painting and music,” devotes the larger part of his
attention to the latter, and is indeed particularly engaged at the time
when we make his acquaintance, in the composition of an elaborate
symbolic symphony which might almost be said to anticipate some of the
crazy theories of more recent doctrinaires, representing as it does “the
influence of blue in the arts.” This strange production had a real
existence, and its originator in the book has been identified with
Alexandre Schaune, who also drove an artistic tandem with much
enthusiasm for a season, though he subsequently forsook Bohemia and
adopted a more profitable career in the toy-making business. He and
Murger became acquainted in 1841, lived together at one time in the
closest intimacy in the Rue de la Harpe, and remained friends till the
latter’s death. Schaune survived among “new faces, other minds,” till
1887, and only a short time before he died published some memoirs which
contain many matters of interest for the Murger student. He bore among
his companions the nickname of Schannard-sauvage, and in Murger’s
original manuscript the name was so written—Schannard. By a printer’s
error, however, the first _n_ was turned into a _u_, and the historian
thought well, in reading the proof, to let the blunder pass.
Schaunard in the book is specially distinguished among his acquaintances
for having raised borrowing to the level of a fine art. By dint of many
careful observations and delicate experiments he has discovered the days
when each one of his friends is accustomed to receive money, and thus,
following the periodic ebb and flow of the financial tide, spares
himself the trouble and annoyance of appealing to the generosity of
those who, at the given moment, are likely to be in as low water as
himself. Having, furthermore, “learned the way to borrow five francs in
all the languages of the globe,” the painter-musician is able, as a
rule, to keep pretty firmly on his feet. By a critical friend he was
once described as “passing one half of his time in looking for money to
pay his creditors, and the other half in eluding his creditors when the
money has been found.”[26] But it should be remembered that this calls
for some discount as a friend’s judgment, and likely, therefore, to be a
trifle over-colored; and it is but doing justice to Schaunard to say
that, towards the immediate companions who had come to his rescue from
time to time, he behaved upon a more honorable plan. To facilitate, and
at the same time to equalize so far as possible, the “taxes” which he
levied, he “had drawn up, in order of districts and streets, an
alphabetical list containing the names of all his friends and
acquaintances. Opposite each name was inscribed the maximum sum which,
having regard to their state of fortune, he might borrow from them, the
times when they were in funds, their dinner-hour, and the ordinary bill
of fare of the house. Beside this list, Schaunard kept in perfect order
a little ledger, in which he entered the amounts lent to him, down to
the minutest fractions; for he would never go beyond a certain figure,
which was within the fortune of a Norman uncle whose heir he was.[27] As
soon as he owed twenty francs to an individual, he closed the account,
and liquidated it at a single payment, even if for the purpose he had to
borrow from others to whom he owed less. In this way he always kept up a
certain credit, which he called his floating debt, and as people knew
that he was accustomed to pay when his personal resources permitted,
they willingly obliged him when they could.”
Footnote 26:
This passage, like sundry others already cited, is taken from the
dramatization of the “Scenes of Bohemian Life,” which was, as we have
seen, made by Murger in collaboration with Théodore Barrière, and was
extremely successful. It differs in many particulars from the book,
the scattered scenes of which are reduced to coherence and unity, but
the male characters preserve their general traits.
Footnote 27:
The “Norman uncle” very possibly stands for Schaune’s father, the
toy-manufacturer, to whose business he presently succeeded.
-----
Schaunard plays his part to the amusement, if not always to the
edification, of the reader in many delightful episodes in the “Scenes.”
It is through his misadventures with his landlord that the establishment
of the club is largely, though indirectly, brought about; it is he who
paints the provincial Blancheron’s portrait in fancy dressing-gown,
while Marcel goes off to dine with a deputy in his—the said
Blancheron’s—coat; it is he, again, who is hired by an Englishman to
play the piano from morning till night, as a means of getting even with
an actress living near by, whose parrot and shrill declamation combined,
have proved rather too much for even British nerves,—a transaction out
of which, we need scarcely add, the _virtuoso_ made a good deal more
money than he did from his famous symphony. On the whole, however, of
the four friends with whose doings our volume is mainly occupied,
Schaunard is by far the least attractive figure. He is coarse and
morose; has a harsh, rasping voice; is apt to be put out about trifles;
sometimes treats his male friends with scant courtesy; and has an
unpleasant habit of employing, with his more intimate associates of the
other sex, Captain Marryatt’s _argumentum ad feminam_—in other words, of
conversing with them occasionally through the medium of a stout cane.
Poor Phémie—the melancholy Phémie—had every right more than once or
twice to complain of the strength and efficacy of his logic; nor were
matters made very much better for her, we may opine, when, after one of
their quarrels, he gave her in grim joke, and as a keepsake, the stick
with which he had addressed to her so many telling remarks.
After Schaunard comes Marcel the painter, a character of more amiable
type, who appears to be a compound portrait of the two artists, Tabar
and Lazare. He is essentially a good fellow, bright, enthusiastic,
happy-go-lucky, and shiftless; and though, after the fashion of the
world in which he lives, he has an “insolent confidence in luck,” he is
manly enough, upon occasion, to “give fortune a helping hand.” He is the
hero of many amazing and some very ludicrous adventures, of which we can
find space here only for a single specimen. Like Schaunard, he is
devoting as much of his time and energy as he can save from the
manufacture of pot-boilers and the consideration of the “terrible daily
problem of how to get breakfast,” to the composition of one great work,
which is to be his _open sesame_ to fame—“The Passage of the Red
Sea.”[28] Was ever so much labor expended with such little practical
result, one may wonder, by any artist whatsoever—painter, musician, or
poet? For five or six years Marcel had worked away at his canvas with
unflagging diligence and courage, and “for five or six years this
masterpiece of color had been obstinately refused by the jury”; so that,
by dint of going and returning from the artist’s studio to the
exhibition, and from the exhibition back to the studio, the picture had
come to know the way so well, that, had it been set on wheels, it could
have gone to the Louvre by itself. Marcel, of course, attributed the
policy of the jury to the personal spite of its members, and persisted,
in the teeth of all discouragement, in regarding his production as the
pendant to “The Marriage in Cana.” Hence, nothing daunted, he returned
again and again to his vast design, after indulging in a sufficient
amount of abuse to relieve his ruffled temper. At length, under
conviction that the child of this world might possibly succeed where the
child of light had failed, he began to seek for means whereby, without
altering the general plan of his gigantic undertaking, he might deceive
the jury in supposing it to be an entirely fresh and hitherto unexamined
work. Thus, one year he turned Pharaoh into Cæsar, and the “Passage of
the Red Sea” became “The Passage of the Rubicon.” This ruse failing, he
covered, as by miracle, the Red Sea with snow, planted a fir-tree in one
corner thereof, dressed an Egyptian in the costume of the Imperial
Guard, and sent forth his canvas as “The Passage of the Beresina.” But,
unfortunately, the jury had wiped its glasses that day and was not to be
duped. It recognized the inexorable picture by dint of a multi-colored
horse—his “synoptic table of fine colors,” Marcel privately called this
astonishing steed—that went prancing about on the top of a wave of the
Red Sea; and again the masterpiece was churlishly blackballed. “Till my
dying day I will send my picture to the judges,” vowed Marcel, after
this new repulse; “it shall be engraved on their memories.”—“The surest
way of ever getting it engraved,” remarked Colline, who chanced to be
near by. And so the poor painter might have been left to try further and
still wilder experiments, but for the kindly intervention of Daddy
Médicis, an old Jew who had constant dealings with the Bohemians, and
often managed to do them a friendly turn without, as may be imagined,
sacrificing himself overmuch in the transaction. This singular
individual, coming one evening to Marcel’s room, offered to purchase the
famous picture “for the collection of a rich amateur,” and proposed one
hundred and fifty francs as a fair price. At first, the artist grumbled;
there was at least a hundred and fifty francs’ worth of cobalt in the
dress of Pharaoh alone, he protested. But the Jew stood firm, and at
last the painter yielded; whereupon Daddy Médicis gave the Bohemians a
dinner, at which “the lobster ceased to be a myth for Schaunard, who
contracted for this amphibious creature a passion bordering on madness.”
As for Marcel himself, his intoxication came near upon having deplorable
results. Passing his tailor’s shop, at two o’clock in the morning, he
actually wanted to wake up his creditor, and give him on account the
hundred and fifty francs he had just received. A ray of reason, which
still flitted in the mind of Colline, stopped the artist on the brink of
this precipice.
Footnote 28:
This incident of Marcel’s picture is said to have had its prototype in
a composition of Tabar’s, originally sketched as “The Passage of the
Red Sea,” and afterwards exhibited in the Salon as “Niobe and Her
Children Slain by the Arrows of Apollo and Diana.”
-----
And now for the sequel of the story.