though Philothée O'Neddy in after years denied that he had more
influence than Gautier, Gérard, or Bouchardy, was Pétrus Borel, Le
Lycanthrope as he subsequently named himself. His full name was Pierre
Borel d'Hauterive, and he was born in Lyons in 1809. His father,
captured by the revolutionaries in 1792 and then liberated, fled to
Switzerland, whence he returned to Paris, a ruined man, to earn what he
could by keeping a shop. At the age of fifteen Pierre was apprenticed to
an architect, and in 1829 he set up on his own account without much
success. He and Jules Vabre became associated, and so poor were they
that they used to use the cellars of the houses on which they were
engaged as their dwelling-place. Gautier recalled visiting them once in
the cellar of a house in the Rue Fontaine-du-Roi, where they were
preparing their frugal meal of potatoes baked in the ashes. "Ah," said
Vabre with pride, "but we have salt on Sundays." Borel's ideas were too
Gothically fantastic for his _bourgeois_ clients, and, after a violent
dispute over his fourth commission, he ordered the half-finished
building to be demolished, and gave up for ever an ungrateful
profession,[18] betaking himself for a season to the study of painting,
and writing the while those poems animated by a haughty bitterness which
were published under the title of "Rhapsodies." They are dedicated and
addressed to the members of the second _cénacle_, among whom he enjoyed
an enormous reputation. He was for them the poet of the future, before
whom Hugo would crumble to dust. Alas! for youthful predictions; thirty
years later Gautier, the most loyal of Romantics, was forced to exclaim:
"Dire que j'ai cru à Pétrus!"[19] He exercised over the group, in fact,
a kind of unconscious hypnotism. His slightly superior age, his strange,
rough, paradoxical eloquence, and, above all, his picturesque appearance
imposed on them all. Their ideal was to have an _allure fatale_, a
sombre complexion and haughty, Byronic mien. Borel realized it. He
looked like a Castilian nobleman out of a Velasquez picture, says
Gautier, with his "young and serious face, of perfect regularity, an
olive skin gilded with light shades of amber, lit up by great, shining
eyes, sad as those of Abencerrages thinking of Granada," his bright red
lip which shone under his moustache, "one spark of life in that mask of
Oriental immobility," and his fine, full, silky beard perfumed and
tended like that of a sultan, at a time when to wear a beard in Paris
was an outrage to public decency. He was clothed in black, wearing a
high Robespierre waistcoat and draping a long black cloak around him
with an air of studied mystery. How could the younger men, whose beards
refused to grow, not believe in such a perfect symbol, so magnificently
scornful, so profoundly fatal? He was the most republican, too, of them
all, the typical _Bousingot_ of the _bourgeois_ Press, though fanatical
republicanism was not, as Philothée O'Neddy afterwards protested in a
letter to Charles Asselineau, their representative opinion. Gérard had
no political opinions at all, Gautier was obstinately _Jeune-France_,
and the others only dreamt of a social Utopia in which æstheticism
should replace religion, or of some humanitarian millennium after the
manner of Saint-Simon and Fourier. Borel, however, held society in
complete disgust, as he showed when he left the gathering at Jehan du
Seigneur's, and proceeded one summer to live with some followers on the
slopes of Montmartre, all naked as savages, till the landlord drove them
out at the price of his porter's lodge, which they burnt down in
revenge.
None of the others were quite so remarkably individual as Pétrus Borel,
whose character may be described as Jules Claretie describes his book of
extravagant stories, "Champavert": "doubt, negation, bitterness, anger,
something at the same time furious and comic." Vabre, his partner in
architecture, had fair hair and moustaches, without any extravagance in
his bearing, but his face twinkled all over with malice and his
conversation was madly Rabelaisian. He projected a famous book that was
never written, "Sur l'Incommodité des Commodes." An intense love for
Shakespeare was his chief Romantic asset. According to Gautier he gave
up his later life to studying our language in England that he might make
the perfect translation, a task which was never completed. Joseph
Bouchardy, who afterwards became a very successful writer of melodrama,
was then learning engraving. He, too, was dark, so dark that with the
soft, sparse beard that just fringed his face he looked an Indian, and
was nicknamed the Maharajah of Lahore. He was less poetry-mad than the
rest, but eternally occupied with dramatic scenarios in which all the
secret passages, trap-doors, and sliding panels of a novel by Mrs.
Radcliffe were brought into play. Jehan du Seigneur, who made medallions
of all his friends, was a gentle, modest youth with a very
pink-and-white complexion which was his everlasting despair. To atone
for this unavoidable defection from Romantic ideals, he wore a black
velvet _pourpoint_, a black jacket with broad velvet _revers_, and a
voluminous necktie, so that not a speck of white linen was shown, a
"suprème élégance romantique," as Gautier remarks. Augustus Mackeat was
chiefly conspicuous for the happy transformation of his name, though he
returned to the orthodox Maquet when he became a successful playwright.
His disguise, however, was nothing to the tremendous anagram which
turned Théophile Dondey into Philothée O'Neddy. He, says Gautier, was
dark as a mulatto with fair, curly hair. Though he was helping to
support a mother and sister by working in a government office, this
Philistine occupation did not prevent him from being one of the most
frenzied of the gang, a "paroxyst" _ruisselant d'inouïsme_. In 1833 he
published a collection of ultra-romantic poems called "Feu et Flamme,"
which reek with passion, despair, scorn, suicide, and contempt for
Christianity. Yet he lived till 1872, and though he published nothing
more, he left a collection of posthumous poems all of which breathe an
extreme melancholy. In the letter written to Asselineau ten years before
his death he admitted that in the days of the _cénacle_ he had "une
bonne grosse somme d'extravagance et de mauvais goût," but protested
warmly against the application to them of the epithet "ridiculous."
"Risible" they might have been, but only the _bourgeois_ were
"ridiculous." Célestin Nanteuil was big, fair, gentle, and so perfectly
medieval that Gautier caricatured him as Elie Wildman-stadius, the hero
of one of his _Jeune-France_ stories, who lived in a Gothic manor on
medieval fare, read nothing but medieval illuminated manuscripts, and
was killed when the Gothic cathedral, his sole external joy, was struck
by lightning. Gautier describes him personally as having the appearance
of "one of those long angels bearing censers or playing sambucs that
live in the gables of cathedrals, who has come down into the city in the
midst of the busy burgesses, keeping his nimbus all the while at the
back of his head like a hat, but without the least suspicion that it is
not natural to wear one's aureole in the street." He was a furious
Hernanist in 1830 (he was then only seventeen), and called "the
Captain," for leading the army to the fray. In 1843, when he was asked
to bring three hundred young men to support "Les Burgraves" in the same
manner, he sadly said: "Tell the master there are no more young men." He
might, says Maxime du Camp, have been a great painter, but he was
compelled to live by illustrating. Whenever he had made a little money
in this way he returned to his colours and his easel till it was
exhausted. He ended in the obscurity of Dijon, becoming the director of
its school of art.
[Illustration: Célestin Nanteuil]
Maxime du Camp compares Nanteuil's fate to that of Gautier, who was
forced by circumstances to waste so much of his talent in mere
journalism; but in 1830 Gautier, a young man of nineteen, who made long
hair serve instead of a beard, was still free as air. In that year he
brought out a little volume of poems, and a year or two later produced
the fantastic "Albertus," which he followed with "Les Jeune-France." His
art studies had soon ceased because he discovered that he suffered from
short sight, and we may regard him in the days of the _cénacle_ as a
poet pure and simple. One figure remains to be filled in, the most
pathetic of all the Romantic band, Gérard de Nerval. He was born in
1808, the son of a Doctor Labrunie--the family name of de Nerval was
only assumed by him when he began to write. His youth was spent in the
pleasant country of the Valois, and he received a very careful education
from his father, who taught him not only Latin and Greek, but German,
Italian, and the rudiments of Arabic and Persian. Even in his early days
he was an eager reader of mystics and utopists, which gave that first
fantastical turn to his brain which ended later in complete madness. His
development was normal at first. At the Collège Charlemagne he was the
snapper-up of every prize, and produced some quite worthless poetry in
praise of Napoleon that won high approval from his professors. He
followed this by a satire on the Academy, which appeared in 1826, and in
1828 he produced an ode to Béranger of a style to which his Romantic
friends could only have applied the new epithet _poncif_. The
translation of "Faust," which earned a very high compliment from the
great Goethe himself, turned him into his appropriate path and gave him
a serious literary reputation which he never lost. He translated other
fragments of German poetry, and wrote for the _Mercure de France_, of
which Pierre Lacroix, the "Bibliophile Jacob," was then the editor. His
adoption of a literary career was a grave disappointment to his father,
who had hoped to make a good official of him, and it is probable that
parental coldness first caused him to find a congenial asylum in the new
Bohemia, of which he was never a typical inhabitant. When he came of age
he inherited his mother's dowry, which made the actual earning of money
immaterial to him. His success with "Faust" had brought him into touch
with Hugo, so that after the days of "Hernani" he held in the _cénacle_
the most distinguished, if not the most influential, position as a
lieutenant of their demi-god, with notable achievements in the field of
letters already to his credit.
Gérard threw in his lot with the _cénacle_, but, though he even wrote
some revolutionary poems in 1830, for which he was imprisoned in Sainte
Pélagie, he was never quite at ease with Borel and the _Bousingot_
faction. The flamboyant side of Romanticism and its noisy gatherings had
little appeal for him. He was an eccentric and a solitary by nature, as
his writings, with their strong reminiscence of Heine, show. In the time
of the _cénacle_ he was, according to Gautier, a gentle and modest young
man, who blushed like a girl, with a pink-and-white complexion and
soft, grey eyes. Under his fine, light golden hair his forehead,
beautifully shaped, shone like polished ivory. He was usually dressed in
a black frock-coat with enormous pockets, in which, like Murger's
Colline, he buried a whole library of books picked up on the _quais_,
five or six notebooks, and a large collection of scraps of paper on
which he wrote down the ideas that occurred to him on his long walks. He
was the perfect peripatetic: as he once said, he would have liked to
walk through life unrolling an endless roll of paper on which he could
jot his reflections. He lived at this time with Camille Rogier, the
artist, in the Rue des Beaux Arts, but his friends could never be sure
where to find him. For him no hour was sacred to rest. He wandered about
Paris at all times of the day and night, dropping in on a friend for an
hour or two, ready to ride a hobby-horse with him in any direction, then
darting off again, his thoughts in the clouds, nobody knew whither, and
returning in the small hours, only to flit from his bed at the dawn. Of
all the gay companions of Bohemia he was the best loved, for his
childlike simplicity and his gentle manners won all hearts. He went
through life to his terrible death with complete unworldliness, almost
like a ghost, unconscious of the material side of existence, directing
his feet only by the light of his spirit. Gautier, writing after his
death, protested vehemently that his was no ordinary tragedy of
neglected genius; he had money enough, but money was nothing to him, so
he spent it without a thought; his work was always accepted by editors,
and his plays, though not successful, were all produced. But success was
the last of his preoccupations. He was a wanderer living in a world of
his own fantasies. As he will appear again in these pages, we may bid
him farewell for the moment, with the conviction that it would be
pleasant to be transported for a season back to that turbulent _vie de
Bohème_ if only to find the kindly Gérard's arm passed through one's own
and to hear his gentle murmur: "Tu as une fantaisie; je la promènerai
avec toi."
I ought, perhaps, to apologize for allowing the persons of the _cénacle_
to take up so much space before coming to their life, yet I imagine, on
the whole, that I have said too little rather than too much. To go back
to a past of which one has no experience is a matter of such extreme
difficulty that a historian must often despair at the impossibility of
reproducing the whole congeries of scattered detail from which alone his
own mental picture could have taken shape. The first Bohemia, that of
the second _cénacle_, was less a common life than a common recreation.
It was an incomplete _vie de Bohème_ in so far as its members were
united, not by a desire to share all the joys and difficulties of life,
but by a particular artistic enthusiasm. There is no record that any of
them worked or dwelt together, that they took part in joint expeditions
of amusement, or that the mutual acquaintance of those female
divinities for whom they plied so "fatally" their emotional bellows is
to be presumed--and these are marked characteristics of Murger's _vie de
Bohème_. When they ate together it was at the obscure _cabaret_ kept by
the Neapolitan Graziano for the needs of his compatriots who worked in
Paris. Here, in a plain whitewashed room with a sanded floor, a dresser
covered with violently coloured faience and plain wooden benches, they
were initiated by their host--a man of senatorial presence, with an
immense but perfectly correct nose and big black beard, who seemed to
dream all the while of his beloved Italy--into the delights of
_spaghetti_, _stufato_, _tagliarini_, and _gnocchi_. They were delicious
meals, seasoned with good spirits, and--to use the delightful French
phrase--"bedewed" with sound wine of Argenteuil or Suresnes christened
magnificently with the names of the most exclusive vineyards in Médoc or
Burgundy. Still, they were felt at times to be a trifle wanting in
Romantic glamour. It was all very well, the grumblers remarked, to be
enjoying incomparable macaroni, but when all was said and done there was
little that an impartial observer could descry in these banquets to
differentiate them from the prosaic meals of a Joseph Prudhomme.
Something was wanting, some tincture of the Newstead spirit, some
infernal joy in the food, some shudder in the drinking. The macaroni
remained obstinately matter-of-fact, but a brilliant idea was mooted
that would give a charnel flavour to the wine. Graziano's glasses were
only glasses of quite modern exiguousness; the true brotherhood should
drink out of a skull. A skull was accordingly procured by Gérard from
his father, the doctor, and ingeniously mounted by Gautier, who screwed
to its side an old brass handle from a chest of drawers. In truth it was
a noble bowl, and the pious company drank from it with bravado, each
concealing with more or less ill-success his natural repugnance.
Familiarity, however, bred contempt, till one uncompromising youth
surprised his companions by noisily commanding the waiter to fill with
sea-water.
"Why sea-water?" exclaimed a simple soul.
"Why sea-water! Because the master in 'Hans d'Islande' says 'he drank
the water of the sea from the skulls of the dead.' It is my desire to do
the same."
Yes, the _Petit Moulin Rouge_, for all its good cheer and its
death's-head mounted with a drawer-handle, was too workaday for these
eclectics. They reached their true glory only in the gatherings which
took place in Jehan du Seigneur's studio. It was a room over a little
fruiterer's shop that the _cénacle_ sanctified as their conventicle. "In
a little chamber," wrote an older Gautier, "which had not seats enough
for all its occupants, gathered the young men, really young and
different in that respect from the _young_ men of to-day, who are all
more or less quinquagenarians. The hammock in which the master of the
dwelling took his siesta, the narrow couchlet in which the dawn often
surprised him at the last page of a book of verses, eked out the
insufficiency of conveniences for conversation. One really talked better
standing up, and the gestures of the orator or declaimer only gained a
more ample scope. Still, it was extremely unwise to make too free with
your arms for fear of knocking your knuckles against the sloping
ceiling." It was a poor man's room, but not without ornament, for it
contained sketches by the two Dévérias, a head after Titian or Giorgione
by Boulanger, two earthenware vases full of flowers on the chimneypiece,
the inevitable death's-head instead of a clock, a looking-glass, and a
small shelf of books. On either side of the glass and in the embrasures
of the windows were hung the portrait medallions which Jehan made of his
friends. They had no money to get them cast in bronze, so the world has
lost in them a valuable appendix to the well-known busts of his
contemporaries executed by the more distinguished Romantic sculptor,
David d'Angers. Here they would all gather of an evening: Gérard if he
happened to be passing in his amiable wanderings, Bouchardy the
Maharajah, Gautier--not yet the burly critic of _La Presse_, but a thin
youth of nineteen--Nanteuil with his Gothic nimbus, Vabre bursting with
some new joke, Borel swinging off his long cloak with a scowl, O'Neddy
shedding Dondey in the street, Mackeat and the rest, each bursting with
eloquence or roaring the "Chasse du Burgrave" at the top of his voice.
When Maxime du Camp once asked Gautier what they talked about, he
answered: "About everything, but I haven't the least idea what they
said, because everybody talked at once." However, a very good idea of a
typical evening in the _cénacle_ is given in Philothée O'Neddy's "Feu et
Flamme," the first poem in which, called "Pandæmonium," is a gorgeous
description of their cave of harmony. It is freely decorated with "local
colour," which on a Romantic's lips meant the borrowing of all he could
carry away from the medieval stage-property room, but it was drawn from
life with all seriousness and sincerity. The poem opens by depicting
them all seated round the punch-bowl--punch, it must be stated, was the
only really respectable drink for a thorough-paced Romantic. He mixed it
in a large bowl and set light to the fumes, as the students are supposed
to do in the first act of the "Contes d'Hoffmann," and derived enormous
satisfaction from sitting in an obscurity only lit by this bluish flame.
Thus to recall the witches' cauldron and the fires of the Inferno had an
unfailing success as a stimulant to eloquence. The scene, then, opens
thus powerfully:
_Au centre de la salle, autour d'une urne en fer,_
_Digne émule en largeur des coupes d'enfer,_
_Dans laquelle un beau punch, aux prismatiques flammes,_
_Semble un lac sulfureux qui fait houler ses lames,_
_Vingt jeunes hommes, tous artistes dans le cœur,_
_La pipe ou le cigare aux lèvres, l'œil moqueur,_
_Le temporal orné du bonnet de Phrygie,_
_En barbe Jeune-France, en costume d'orgie,_
_Sont pachalesquement jetés sur un amas_
_De coussins dont maint siècle a troué le damas,_
_Et le sombre atelier n'a point d'éclairage_
_Que la gerbe du punch, spiritueux mirage._
Smoking, it would be well to add, was considered part of the whole duty
of a Romantic man. The cigar, being Byronic, was affected by the
"fatally" inclined; the pipe came, not from England, but from Germany;
it was Faust-like, Hoffmannesque; it was also Flemish, of course, and
the Flemish painters, like Steen and Teniers, were in high repute. A
pipe signified a more jolly potatory spirit than a cigar, but it was
always possible for the irreconcilable satanics to regard the breathing
out of smoke from either as symbolically demoniac. The cigarette was not
despised, but its popularity was due also to its picturesque
associations. Spain was the home of the cigarette, the _papelito_ as
Borel and his friends fondly called it. When they rolled their fragrant
Maryland lovingly in the _papel_ they assumed a Spanish _allure_,
Granada rose before their eyes, and invisible guitars played "Avez-vous
vu dans Barcelone?" However, cigarettes would have been out of place in
the prismatic flames of the punch-bowl. Their Spanish nonchalance suited
better the light of day: evening shadows were consecrated to gloom and
frenzy, Northern spirits. Hence it is not surprising to hear that all
the company had
_De haine virulente et de pitié morose_
_Contre la bourgeoisie et le Code et la prose;_
_Des cœurs ne dépensant leur exultation_
_Que pour deux vérités, l'art et la passion!_
The conversation is compared with some aptitude to a Spanish town
devastated by an earthquake, which confounds in one ruin palaces and
huts, churches and houses of ill-fame. So in their talk the ideal and
the grotesque, poetry and cynical jesting are confounded pell-mell.
Silence is made while a passage from Victor Hugo is declaimed, after
which four discourses are pronounced. Three are by Borel, Clopet, and
Bouchardy respectively, concealed in the names of Reblo, Noel, and Don
José, and the second discourse is delivered by the swarthy O'Neddy
himself, who,
_Faisant osciller son regard de maudit_
_Sur le conventicule,_
pours out a passionate complaint that poets have too long been under the
yoke of governments and codes of law. The evening closes with a violent
tumult. The punch has done its work, and the _cénacle_ is a-screaming
with the ecstasy of energumens.
_Ce fut un long chaos de jurons, de boutades,_
_De hurrahs, de tollés et de rhodomontades._
They danced and sang like the demon crew in the master's "Ronde du
Sabbat,"
_Et jusques au matin les damnés Jeune-Frances_
_Nagèrent dans un flux d'indicibles démences._
It is to be hoped that the worthy fruiterer was sleeping quietly in
another part of Paris, and only the potatoes were kept awake and sleep
banished from the pears.
If at this point our reader feels inclined to throw up his hands and
exclaim "How disgusting!" he will be well advised to put down the book.
One cannot approach Bohemia without a certain sympathy for youthful
excesses, howsoever opposed they may be to one's personal predilections.
If the _cénacle_ indulged in occasional orgies--which, even allowing a
good deal for "local colour" in O'Neddy's "Pandæmonium," they certainly
did--they had a great many compensating virtues, such as complete
disinterestedness and a consuming love of art, which were not
conspicuous in Paris at the time. Maxime du Camp in his memoir on
Gautier sets the extreme limit to which reasonable criticism of them
can go when, after remarking on the promise given by a violent youth for
a fruitful middle age, he says: