of the scale to Lord Seymour and his friends. They had a position
without activity: his activity made his position. No great artist
remains long in Bohemia. Some work their way out on foot: he rose from
it, one might say, in a balloon, by which, after disporting himself for
some years above the mists, he was landed for his later days in the
obscurity of a province. Such a man, at home in all society, is
restricted by none. As he was not the perfect Bohemian, so he was not
the whole-hearted _viveur_, for whose complete picture I must return to
Roger de Beauvoir and his set, some of whom are described in Roger's own
little book, "Soupeurs de mon Temps." It is a melancholy epitaph of a
brilliant company. The sparkling wit of their gatherings has vanished
with the bubbles of the champagne they drank, and little is left on
record but the capacity of their stomachs. They took an immense pride in
their consumption of champagne. Briffaut, a clever journalist and a
particular friend of Roger's, was the king of topers. To him was due the
invention of "ingurgitation," which consisted in pouring a bottle of
champagne into a bell-shaped glass cover, such as was used to protect
cheese, and swallowing it at a draught. He once challenged a noted
English toper and gave him a glass a bottle; the victory was easily his,
for he disposed of a dozen. Among other champions who helped to make
Veuve Clicquot's fortune were Armand Malitourne, a singularly gifted
man, a journalist, and at one time secretary to the minister Montalivet;
Béquet, whose good taste Roger himself extolled; and Bouffé, the
director of the Vaudeville. Then there was Emile Cabanon, who lives in
Romantic annals as the author of the extravagant "Roman pour les
Cuisinières." Champfleury,[15] on the authority of Camille Rogier, the
artist, says that he appeared one day upon the boulevard and won himself
forthwith a place by his gifts as a story-teller, becoming a favourite
with all from Prince Belgiojoso downwards. He is one of the reputed
originals--there are two or three--of Balzac's Comte de la Palférine (in
"Un Prince de la Bohème"), who, being struck with the appearance of a
lady passing along the street, at once attached himself to her: in vain
she tried to get rid of the importunate by saying she was going to visit
a friend, for her cavalier came too and mixed with all urbanity in the
conversation, rising to take his leave at the same time as the object of
his sudden passion. This assiduity so captivated the besieged one's
heart that she struck her colours. It is _à propos_ of Cabanon that
Champfleury refers with some contempt to "les gentilshommes de lettres
du boulevard de Gand, qui nageaient comme des poissons dans le fleuve de
la dette, se fiaient plus sur leurs relations que sur leur plume,
dépensaient de l'esprit comptant en veux-tu en voilà." Alfred
Tattet,[16] the rich son of an _agent de change_, who was introduced to
the _viveurs_ by Félix Arvers, the poet of one sonnet, was another of
the crew. Alfred de Musset, Roger de Beauvoir, Romieu, and others made
merry at his sumptuous entertainments till he varied the monotony by
running over the frontier with a married woman, leaving Arvers to look
after his affairs. In 1843 he returned to settle down at Fontainebleau
with the wife of a German in Frankfort. Another young man, with the
promising name of Chaudesaigues--a corruption of the Latin for "hot
water"--came to Paris in 1835 with a fortune of 30,000 francs, which he
squandered in a few years, and then struggled on as a journalist till he
died of apoplexy.
I should wrong the _viveurs_ if I allowed it to be implied that they
were all purely pleasure-seekers. Some of them were successful business
men besides. Lautour-Mézéray, for instance, who was distinguished by the
white camellia in his buttonhole, laid the foundations of his fortune by
starting a paper called _Le Voleur_, which was entirely composed of
cuttings from other papers. Like Andoche Finot, he went on from small to
great, founding _La Mode_ and _Le Journal des Enfants_, the first
children's paper. He helped to start _La Presse_ with Emile de Girardin,
who was another of the more solid among the _viveurs_. Doctor Véron,
stout and self-important, his face half hidden in a huge cravat, held an
important place among them. He began life as a medical practitioner, but
made a fortune by exploiting a certain Pâte Regnault and took to
political journalism. Between 1831 and 1835 he was an extremely
successful director of the Opéra, and in 1838 bought _Le
Constitutionnel_, which he sold fourteen years later for two million
francs. To him, it is said, is due the invention of the _tournedos_.
Certainly, he was a prominent gastronome, and the terror of head
waiters, for he was no mere swiller of champagne, but one who insisted
on perfect vintages combined with perfect cooking. In the thirties, when
"Robert le Diable" was filling the Opéra and his own pocket, he was a
constant diner at the restaurants, but in later years he never dined
except at his own house, where Sophie, his cook and majordomo, alone
preserved the proper traditions of gastronomy. Mæcenas-like, he made a
certain literary set free of his table. Their places were always laid,
they helped themselves, and they remained as long as they pleased,
whether their host left them or no. Théodore de Banville and many others
have celebrated the excellent "cuisine" and its accompaniment of wit,
but a reader of Véron's "Souvenirs d'un bourgeois de Paris" will be
inclined to suspect that the doctor himself was rather a prosy humbug,
who only supplied the appropriate stimulus for the wit of his guests.
The chief of these, another celebrated _viveur_, was Nestor Roqueplan,
whose toilette was unsurpassed and whose wit inexhaustible. He was a
Parisian to the marrow; a day from Paris was to him a day out of
Paradise. Like most of his generation, he began as a journalist, but
diverged to become a director of theatres. The Panthéon, Nouveautés,
Saint-Antoine, Variétés, Opéra, Opéra Comique, and Châtelet passed
successively under his sway, and he lost money at them all except at
the Variétés, during his management of which he wrote those sparkling
"Nouvelles à la main" which are perhaps the freshest examples of purely
ephemeral contemporary wit.
The Revolution of 1848 dispersed the _viveurs_ for ever. It was not that
Paris diminished in gaiety during the Second Empire nor that the _cafés_
ceased to be invaded by merry bands of _fêtards_, but simply that Paris
became too gay, too large, and too cosmopolitan. The boulevard was no
longer to be kept sacred for a chosen few, and a new generation was
rising, which found other channels for its energies than ingurgitatory
wit-combats. Under the new _régime_ there was a court and a more
exciting foreign policy. The aristocracy threw off its sulks, the
prosperous industrial conquered his diffidence, the pleasure-loving
stranger found that all railways led to Paris. The old guard was
overwhelmed, or rather would have been overwhelmed if not already
well-nigh crumbled away. Men with clear heads and practical aims, who
had only devoted their leisure to enjoyment, like Véron, Roqueplan, de
Girardin, survived to retire with all the honours of war, forming small
_coteries_ for the cultivation of wit and good cheer, but shunning,
instead of affronting, the public eye. But the rest, the _viveurs_ of
every hour, where were they? Dead, worn-out, shattered in health, paying
the dismal reckoning for the dissipation of their heyday, poor,
neglected, forgotten. Misfortune overtook the gay Roger from the moment
he married Mademoiselle Doze, the actress. For six years he was pestered
with lawsuits for separation, till a divorce was finally procured. He
had drunk, as he said, 150,000 francs worth of champagne and written 300
songs. The francs were gone, the songs lost, and nothing was left but
the gout.
_Jadis j'étais des plus ingambes,_
_Mais hélas! destins inhumains,_
_Le papier que j'avais aux mains,_
_A présent je le porte aux jambes._
He could jest to the last, but in his last days he was a pathetic sight,
fat, prematurely old, infirm, confined to a wretched chamber, and denied
even the champagne which could charm away his regrets. The dapper figure
that had once filled a frock-coat so jauntily was now a shapeless
corpulence hidden in the loose folds of a greasy dressing-gown. He died
of gout, as Alfred de Musset died of drink. Malitourne, after sinking
lower and lower in drunkenness, died mad; apoplexy carried off
Chaudesaigues and Charles Froment; Arvers died of spinal paralysis;
Béquet ended in a hospital; gout killed Cabanon and Tattet; while
Briffaut expired in a mad-house. The mental pronouncement of their
funeral orations I leave to any moralist who chooses, bidding him
remember that if they failed as individuals to fulfil the highest
destinies of mankind they were victims of a strange fever in common with
all the generation of 1830.
Of that generation they were a part, perhaps the most conspicuous part
at the time. I might almost liken them to the set of "swells" in some
public school, privileged themselves yet censorious of others, always in
the eye of their small world, influential in their smallest acts,
embodying conspicuously the current fashion and expressing the
prevailing tone, shining inevitably as a pattern, envied by most,
respected, outwardly, by all. In Louis Philippe's time Parisian society
was as limited a corporation as a school. Its "swells" attained their
position, as all "swells" do, by excelling in a pursuit in which
excellence is universally admired. They excelled in tinging their life
with a medieval splendour of colouring, they had some prowess in poetry
and letters, they performed miracles of wit in the new spirit of busy,
ever-bubbling, _bruyant_ fun. As the "swells" of Romanticism they
justified their position so long as the conditions allowed. Bohemia, in
some respects, was like a "house" in the same school, with a smaller
corporate life of its own, yet influenced by the powers outside it, the
more so because some of its members had risen themselves to the company
of "swells." In this not very exalted, but true, simile is my reason for
devoting space to the _viveurs_. They were not Bohemians for the most
part, but many Bohemians hoped to be _viveurs_ as Etonians hope to be in
"Pop." On them rested the high lights of the picture, but we can now
peer into the background and discern the true Bohemia of 1830.
VI
LA BOHÈME ROMANTIQUE
MIL HUIT CENT TRENTE! _Aurore_
_Qui m'éblouis encore,_
_Promesse du destin,_
_Riant matin!_
_Aube où le soleil plonge!_
_Quelquefois un beau songe_
_Me rend l'éclat vermeil_
_De ton réveil._
_Jetant ta pourpre rose_
_En notre ciel morose,_
_Tu parais, et la nuit_
_Soudain s'enfuit._
THÉODORE DE BANVILLE
The Romantic Bohemia has been the theme of so many French writers, from
the time when the first reminiscences appeared to the present day, when
a Léon Séché and a Philibert Audebrand, following the lead of Charles
Asselineau, the pious _chiffonnier_ of Romanticism, industriously
collect the very last scraps of authentic information, that a foreigner
with all a foreigner's limitations may well hesitate to mar the pretty
edifice erected to the memory of 1830 by some clumsy addition of his
own. Yet I take heart from the consideration that even in France there
is, at least to my knowledge, no complete account of this Bohemia. Those
who would follow its annals in their original tongue must do so in a
multitude of books, published at different times, some of which are
rarities only to be found in museums and the largest libraries.
Moreover, the French chronicler writes from a point of view which a
foreigner cannot adopt, and makes assumptions which a foreigner cannot
grant. All the historical and literary associations on which I have
touched in a former chapter make it a subject which even to-day excites
passionate enthusiasm and equally passionate reprobation across the
Channel. The foreigner can approach in a cooler temper, though I
postulate in my readers a general sympathy for Gautier's scarlet
_pourpoint_ and all that it symbolized. In this cooler temper, then, not
seeing red, but with a tendency, at least, to see rosy, a foreigner may
glance at a life, so essentially limited by its period and its
nationality, without challenging unfavourable comparisons.
The Romantic Bohemia was part of Parisian society, a fact of which I
have already tried to point out the implications. It might add to the
general picture to know how society judged Bohemia. Contemporary record
is scarce, not only because Bohemia itself so largely supplied the
personal element in the journalism of its time, but also because the
conception--indeed, the name--was so new. There is, however, something
to be picked up from allusions here and there which is of some service
in the definition of boundaries. Nestor Roqueplan, for instance, in his
little book, "La Vie Parisienne," defines Bohemia as comprehending "all
those in Paris who dine rarely and never go to bed." He distinguishes
sloth and debt as the salient faults in the general disorder of its
life, and he is not too appreciative of its abilities, though he admits
that there is an inner Bohemia, "intelligente et spirituelle," composed
of a certain number of young men with the makings of excellent
ministers, irreproachable officials, and daring men of business. In
conclusion he asserts the great truth that "Bohemia must be young; it
must be continually renewed. If the Bohemian were more than thirty, he
might be confused with the rogue." This is excellent testimony from a
man who, himself no real Bohemian, had extensive relations with Bohemia
as one on whom its young playwrights inflicted the reading of their
plays. Balzac is the next witness, though it is remarkable that his only
specific reference to Bohemia is in the short story, "Un Prince de la
Bohème," which tells how the young Comte de la Palfèrine, a penniless
son of a general who died after Wagram, satisfied his vanity in the
person of his mistress, Madame du Bruel. He was debarred by his
position from having a wife worthy of his aristocratic pride, but that
at least his mistress might be worthy, Madame du Bruel, an actress
married to a writer of _vaudevilles_, worries her husband into the
acquisition of riches, political power, and a peerage. At the beginning
of this story--one of Balzac's most curious--he gives a general
definition of Bohemia:
"Bohemia, which ought to be called the wisdom of the Boulevard des
Italiens, is composed of young men all over twenty, and under
thirty, years of age, all men of genius in their manner, still
little known, but destined to make themselves known and then to be
very distinguished; they are already distinguished in the days of
the carnival, during which they discharge the plethora of their
wit, which is confined during the rest of the year, in more or less
comic inventions. In what an age do we live! What absurd authority
allows immense forces thus to be dissipated! In Bohemia there are
diplomats capable of upsetting the plans of Russia, if they felt
themselves supported by the power of France. One meets in it
writers, administrators, soldiers, journalists, artists! In a word,
all kinds of capacity and intellect are represented in it. It is a
microcosm. If the Emperor of Russia were to buy Bohemia for some
twenty millions, supposing it willing to quit the asphalt of the
boulevards, and were to deport it to Odessa, in a year Odessa would
be Paris. There it is, the useless, withering flower of that
admirable youth of France which Napoleon and Louis XIV cherished,
and which has been neglected for thirty years by that gerontocracy
under which all things in France are drooping.... Bohemia has
nothing and lives on that which it has. Hope is its religion,
self-confidence is its code, charity passes for its budget. All
these young men are greater than their misfortunes--below fortune,
but above destiny."
The narrator of the story, the witty Nathan, goes on to give some
particular _traits_ of La Palférine, who would be King of Bohemia, if
Bohemia could suffer a king. Some of these are rather vulgar
pleasantries which display the bluntness of Balzac's sense of humour
rather than La Palférine's wit, as when the Bohemian, angrily accosted
by a _bourgeois_ in whose face he had thrown the end of his cigar,
calmly replied: "You have sustained your adversary's fire; the seconds
declare that honour is satisfied." La Palférine was never solvent: once,
when he owed his tailor a thousand francs, the latter's head clerk, sent
to collect the debt, found the debtor in a wretched sixth-floor attic on
the outskirts of Paris, furnished with a miserable bed and a rickety
table; to the request for payment the count replied with a gesture
worthy of Mirabeau: "Go tell your master of the state in which you have
found me!" In affairs of love, though he was impetuous as a besieger, he
was proud as a conqueror. After having passed a fortnight of unmixed
happiness with a certain Antonia, he found that, as Balzac puts it, she
was treating him with a want of frankness. He therefore wrote to her
the following letter, which made her famous:
"MADAME,--Your conduct astonishes as much as it afflicts me. Not
content with rending my heart by your disdain, you have the
indelicacy to keep my tooth-brush, which my means do not allow me
to replace, my estates being mortgaged beyond their value.
Farewell, too lovely and too ungrateful friend!
May we meet again in a better world!"
Balzac's account is obviously tinged with literary exaggeration, though
the stories of La Palférine were no doubt gleaned among the gossips of
the boulevard. He shall be balanced by an adverse witness, one M.
Challamel, who, after a severe attack of _le mal romantique_ which
caused him to run away from his father's shop, settled down to be a
staid librarian. In his "Souvenirs d'un Hugolâtre" he says:
"In the wake of the freelances of the pen the _Bohemians_ abounded,
affecting the profoundest disdain for all that the bourgeois call
'rules of conduct,' posing as successors to François Villon,
playing the part of literary art-students, frequenters of
_cabarets_, often of disreputable houses, breaking with the usages
of polite society, and believing, in fine, that everything is
permitted to people of intelligence.... By the side of these sham
romantic Byrons there existed some good fellows who fell into the
excess of the literary revolution, and who paraded the active
immorality of debauch. Sceptics, materialists, loaded with debt,
they raised poverty to a system and laughed at their voluntary
insolvency. Some shook off early their Diogenes' cloak ... others
succumbed prematurely ... all had imitators who ended by forming
numerous groups and by founding a school. The spirit of Bohemia
became infectious, and engendered the spirit of mockery (_la
blague_)."
I conclude this general testimony with some lines from Alfred de
Musset's "Dupont et Durand," which is an imaginary conversation between
two old school-fellows, one of whom has become a prosperous citizen, the
other has failed as a Bohemian. The Bohemian says:
_J'ai flâné dans les rues,_
_J'ai marché devant moi, bayant aux grues;_
_Mal nourri, peu vêtu, couchant dans un grenier,_
_Dont je déménageais dès qu'il fallait payer;_
_De taudis en taudis colportant ma misère,_
_Ruminant de Fourier le rêve humanitaire,_
_Empruntant çà et là le plus que je pouvais,_
_Dépensant un écu sitôt que je l'avais,_
_Délayant de grands mots en phrases insipides,_
_Sans chemise et sans bas, et les poches si vides,_
_Qu'il n'est que mon esprit au monde d'aussi creux,_
_Tel je vécus, râpé, sycophante, envieux._
With the aid of these lights we may descry some general features of the
Romantic Bohemian. He must be young; on this both Roqueplan and Balzac
are agreed, placing his proper age between twenty and thirty. The
Bohemians of 1830 were, as a matter of fact, nearer to the earlier than
the later limit. Most of them were born at the end of the first decade
of the nineteenth century, so that 1830 found them in, or not long past,
their twentieth year, a happy state of things which Arsène Houssaye
celebrated in his poem "Vingt Ans." We Englishmen can hardly understand
the magic of this joyous phrase, _vingt ans_; through French prose and
poetry it sounds again and again like a tinkling silver bell calling
those who have lived and loved in youth to hark back for a moment in
passionate regret, in an ecstasy of remembrance. To think of Bohemia
without that silver tinkle in one's ears is to do it a grave injustice,
for Bohemia throbbed with it then as with a tocsin, as with a summoning
bell to a joyous refectory in some transcendant Abbaye de Thélème. It
may be well for us that at twenty we are still hobbledehoys whom serious
persons are only too glad to get rid of for half the year in
universities as peacefully unmoved by our turmoil as their Gothic
buildings by the storms of winter; but these frenzied medievalists had
no Gothic university to be engulfed in save their own dear Paris, at a
time when the university of their own dear Paris was trying its hardest
to withstand the new ideas with which they were aflame. If juvenile
excesses and absurdities can be tolerated with easy smiles at Oxford and
Cambridge, how much more can those of the Romantic Bohemia be excused
when its denizens were Frenchmen, hardly more than schoolboys, yet
already victorious as champions of a revolution, with their livelihood
to gain, with no kind parents to pay their bills and no kind Dean to
regulate their mischief! As the college porter says, "Young gentlemen
will be young gentlemen," a proverb which condones the excesses of
tender, as it reprobates those of riper, years. Bohemia, in Roqueplan's
words, must be continually renewed, for the old Bohemian is nothing but
a legitimate object for ardent social reformers. So the Bohemians of
1830, some of whom made their names, while others remained obscure, were
all youthful nobodies in the eyes of the world, perching in their attics
like a colony of singing birds upon the topmost branches.
This youth of theirs, once it is properly grasped, explains a good many
of their qualities, amiable and otherwise. Poverty, for instance, was a
tradition of Bohemia. "They dine rarely," "the Bohemian has nothing and
lives on what he has," "they raised their poverty into a system and
laughed at their voluntary insolvency": so say Roqueplan, Balzac, and
Challamel. Most young men in this world are poor, in the sense they have
nothing of their own. So long as they follow the careers laid down for
them, or earn the prescribed salaries in the prescribed professions,
they are not without means indeed, but if they take a contradictory
line of their own which is not lucrative, especially if they dare to set
up as poets, it is considered better for them to knock their heads
against the hard corners of life without much extraneous assistance. On
the whole this is a wise point of view, and one can hardly follow some
of the less talented Romantics in making it an indictment against
society that superior soup-kitchens are not provided for the sustenance
of all who choose to embrace the arts. There were, of course, degrees of
poverty in Bohemia, just as there were degrees of economic adaptability.
Some were really, others only comparatively, destitute: some girded
their loins daily in search of pence, others waited for pence to drop
from heaven. Still, in spite of all degrees and differences, poverty was
very real. The market for art and letters was still extremely
restricted, processes were costly, the science of distribution still in
its infancy; a few celebrities took all the cream of the demand, leaving
only the thinnest trickle to satisfy the rest.