_cénacle_ were all destined to become great men? Certainly not;
there were among them dreamers with illusions about themselves,
sterile dupes of the comedy that they played, failures in whose
case the brilliant future which they promised themselves fell
naturally into obscurity. To more than one of them the saying of
Rivarol could have been applied: 'It is a terrible advantage never
to have done anything, but it should not be abused.' In short, only
one of them has made a name that will not perish: Théophile
Gautier. Gérard de Nerval, by whom he had been distanced at the
beginning of his life, never passed a very moderate level, did not
push his way in the crowd, and came early to grief. On the other
hand, most of them were celebrated in the group, I might say in the
_coterie_, to which they belonged, but their reputation never went
beyond the circle in which they lived."
Maxime du Camp takes a very superior point of view which is less than
just. The members of the _cénacle_, it may be admitted, overrated one
another's talents and were ready, in some instances, to take posturing
for performance; but Bohemia is not to be blamed because all her
children were not great men any more than Eton because all her _alumni_
are not scholars. As a matter of fact, in this first Bohemia of the
_cénacle_ there were very few of whom it could be said that their lives
were ruined. Gérard died a violent death, but he was afflicted with
mental disease. Apart from his eccentricity he was a scholar and a
gentleman whose attainments equalled those of Gautier himself, though he
could not bring himself to exploit them. Pétrus Borel was the one real
failure, the _poseur_ who inevitably came to grief. His Bohemian career
reached its apogee at his masked ball in 1832--a caricature of Dumas'
own famous ball--held at his lodgings in the Rue d'Enfer, an appropriate
address. He left Paris shortly afterwards, and, after earning for some
years a precarious livelihood and publishing "Madame Putiphar," he
became an inspector of Mostaganem, in Algeria, in which country he died
wretchedly. The rest, though they did not quite achieve their proud
dreams, continued, most of them, in the paths of art with rectitude and
some success, Bouchardy and Maquet as dramatists, du Seigneur as a
sculptor, Nanteuil as an artist. O'Neddy, once the _cénacle_ dissolved,
as it did towards 1833, found poetry a resource in solitude, and poor
Vabre, if he made no figure in the world, at least set himself the
highest of ideals in devoting his life to the study of Shakespeare.
The first Bohemia, for what that is worth, was singularly respectable in
its results. Even had they been far worse, sufficient praise to stifle
carping would be found in the indelibly beautiful memory which it left
on the minds of its members. In 1857 Bouchardy wrote of it to Gautier in
these words:
"It was a holy and beautiful comradeship, my dear Théo, in which
each was the loving brother, the devoted friend, the
fellow-traveller who makes his friend forget the length and the
fatigue of the road. It was a more beautiful comradeship than one
can say, in which all wished the success of all without insensate
exaggeration and without collective vanity, in which each of us
offered to lend his shoulder to the foot of him who wished to climb
and to reach his goal.... It was a happy time, dear Théophile, of
which we ought to be proud, for when one has traversed this life so
often saddened by so much bitterness, we ought to be proud of
having found in it some hours of joy, we ought to boast of having
been happy!"
Even Maxime du Camp admits that the effect of the _cénacle_ on Gautier
was incalculable: its disinterested friendship and its enthusiasm made
his individuality. All his life he remained "the mystic companion of
Victor Hugo's first disciples." Weighed down in after years by the
irksome tasks of journalism, the slave who remembered his years of
freedom with regret, he responded to Bouchardy with tender melancholy
from beside the rivers of Babylon:
"No doubt such joy could not last. To be young and intelligent, to
love one another, to understand and commune in every realm of
art--a more beautiful manner of life could not be conceived, and
from the eyes of all those who followed it its dazzling splendour
has never been obliterated."
At another time he wrote to Sainte-Beuve: "Nous étions ivres du beau,
nous avons eu la sublime folie de l'art."
These words, issuing from a soul ever animated during its days on earth
by a Bohemian spirit, cast a protecting spell round the memory of the
first Bohemian brotherhood through which no Philistine anathemas can
break.
VIII
LA BOHÈME GALANTE
_O le beau temps passé! Nous avions la science,_
_La science de vivre avec insouciance;_
_La gaieté rayonnait en nos esprits moqueurs,_
_Et l'Amour écrivait des livres dans nos cœurs!_
ARSÈNE HOUSSAYE
The _cénacle_ broke up towards 1833 and its members scattered. All
Bohemian _coteries_ must be short-lived, but this one was specially
doomed to a quick dissolution. It was, I will not say too romantic, but
too romantically ritualistic, too much concerned with the vestments and
incense and celebrations incident to the profession of "Hugolâtry." It
is not hard to imagine how the too mystic significance given to its
gatherings, its feasts, and even its individual actions became to some
of the brethren, now that Romanticism was firmly established, either
unreal or merely tiresome: divergences of taste and opinion began to
creep in till, in the end, this attempted Bohemia became a deserted
shrine. But the Bohemian spirit could not thus be quenched; indeed, it
was only then fully kindled. The deacons and acolytes, whom the mere
symbolism had mainly attracted, were gone; paid off the Swiss Guard
whom the return of peace called back to civil life. Those who remained,
the most advanced of the initiated, saw that the time had come for the
casting away of symbols and the cessation of noisy worship. Bohemia had
originated in a literary creed, but in its consummation it was to pass
beyond the letter and take hold of human life. This consummation came
with extraordinary rapidity; there were no feeble tentatives, no
half-successes. A new community arose in Paris, almost out of the ashes
of the _cénacle_, vastly different though it was from the obscure group
in Jehan du Seigneur's humble studio. It was animated by all that was
best in Romanticism--its disregard for academic convention, its colour,
its joyousness, its warmth of feeling, and its sympathy with all human
passions; but, unlike the _cénacle_, it did not trammel itself with
Romantic convention, it set creation above imitation, and--greatest of
all differences--it was no society meeting at intervals for spiritual
and corporeal refreshment, but a genuine life in common lived just for
the sake of living by a set of high-spirited, joyous young men, most of
them true artists, neither maniacs, nor ne'er-do-wells, nor idlers. The
_cénacle_ was dead, but _la vie de Bohème_ was born, and its golden age
came first. The brotherhood of the Impasse du Doyenné was, in A.
Delvau's words, "une Bohème dorée, avec laquelle celle de Schaunard n'a
que des rapports très éloignés."[20] Delvau, who was of Murger's
generation, knew well how quickly the glory departed. Yet at least
Murger's Bohemians had this connexion with what Gérard de Nerval named
_la Bohème galante_ that they could look back to it as the Romans to the
reign of Saturn. It was constituted informally, even fortuitously; it
existed without self-advertisement, but it remained, in the phrase of
another French writer, "la patrie de toutes les Bohèmes littéraires."
In 1832 another Bohemian of the golden age had come to Paris, a brave
and merry soul called Arsène Houssaye, who had only breathed this
terrestrial atmosphere for seventeen years. It was not to champion a
cause that he came, but he was called thither by the poet within him to
take his part in infusing a new vitality into life and letters. Like
Gautier, he was a natural _enfant de Bohème_, yet did not at first find
the brotherhood which he was to hymn in prose and verse; it was still
only a potentiality. For a few months he lived in an odd little Bohemia
of his own with a friend called Van dell Hell in a _hôtel garni_. They
wrote songs for a living, wore the red hats by which the more violent
students of the Quartier Latin proclaimed their republicanism, and
consoled themselves for the rebuffs of editors with the smiles of a
certain "Nini yeux noirs." Houssaye in those amusing volumes which he
called "Les Confessions" bears witness to the deplorable state of the
literary market at the time. Novels and plays could not be sold, poetry
was not wanted as a gift, and the newspapers regarded mere men of
letters as too frivolous for employment. Poverty among the struggling
writers was acute, but nobody cared a fig about money when all cared so
much about art--a merciful dispensation of Providence. Yet, if
commercialism did not affect art, the same can hardly be said of
politics. Far too many of the young poets and artists, who would have
scorned to drive a mercenary bargain at the expense of their art,
exulted in defiling their artistic convictions with the reddest and most
insensate republicanism, not seeing that if art does not need to regard
gold pieces, neither does it need to trouble itself whether a king's
head or a cap of liberty is their stamp. Arsène Houssaye, careless
wretch, nearly missed the glory of Bohemia entirely by mixing himself up
in the insurrection of the Cloître Saint-Merri. He was arrested, but a
friendly commissary of police saved him from trial and imprisonment by
sending him home to his wealthy, loyal, and scandalized family. The
ungrateful lad, instead of settling down to some solid profession,
simply bided his time till the disturbance was over, and returned to
Paris, only so far profiting by his warning that he left politics
henceforth to look after themselves. Houssaye's father, worthy man, felt
that money would be thrown away on such a ruffian, so Arsène was left to
his own resources, which, if they were meagre in early days, kept him
alive for another sixty-three years.
Bohemia was not to be baulked a second time. The elements were present,
and all that remained to do was for somebody to give them a slight push,
such as Lucretius gave to his atoms. The push occurred at the Salon of
1833, if Houssaye is to be believed--a condition not inevitably
fulfilled. There, one fine day, he met Théophile Gautier and Nestor
Roqueplan, the former of whom was certainly a stranger to him. A genial
conversation on the merits of the pictures ensued, in which Arsène
Houssaye made, as he was destined to do, a very good impression upon his
senior. Gautier was not a man to leave hazard any further part after
such a promising beginning, and he accordingly proffered an invitation
to _déjeuner_ next day in the words: "Je te surinvite à venir déjeuner
invraisemblablement demain chez les auteurs de mes jours." Houssaye
turned up next day at No. 8 Place Royale, where the irrepressible Théo
introduced his father as "le respectable bonhomme qui me donna l'être."
The other guest at this _déjeuner_ was Gérard de Nerval, whom with true
instinct Gautier had brought to test and to embrace the newly found
brother. The wit and gaiety, the range and the emphasis of their
postprandial conversation can be imagined. At last Théo blurted out
frankly: "Tu sais que je ne te connais pas: dis-moi huit vers de toi, je
le dirai qui tu es." It was not a test which the future author of
"Vingt Ans" feared. Gautier found himself able to give an enthusiastic
account of the new brother; the two truest Bohemians in Paris were at
once bosom friends, and the most wayward of geniuses was a friend of
both.
So far the credit had been with Gautier, but Bohemia was still without a
dwelling-place, and in this matter Gérard de Nerval deserved pious
mention in the Bohemian bidding prayer, for it was owing to him that _la
Bohème galante_ found a home suitable to the golden age, a unique
setting which posterity could remember but never reproduce. It was a
rare opportunity, and it might almost be supposed that fortune,
approving of Théo's first amiable push, advanced willingly another step,
making peripatetic Gérard her tool. In the course of his wanderings he
had become acquainted with one of the most singular regions in all
Paris, no sign of which remains to-day. Hardly a visitor to Paris omits
a look into the Louvre, but very few know that as they walk from the
statue of Gambetta to the entrance of the galleries they are crossing
the site that Bohemia in its florescence made memorable. On that spot
there stood in 1833 part of an older Paris, which in intention had long
been cleared away, but in fact remained another twenty years. Those who
have read Balzac's "Cousine Bette" have made its acquaintance, though I
should wager that the majority of them have taken it for granted with
other of Balzac's topographical details. Let me recall to them the
sinister quarter where Cousine Bette, at the opening of the story,
cherishes the young sculptor Steinbock and makes the acquaintance of the
infamous Monsieur and Madame Marneffe. With his practised touch for
tragic effect Balzac describes it thus:
"The existence of the block of houses which runs alongside of the
old Louvre is one of those protests which the French people like to
make against good sense, so that Europe may be reassured as to the
grain of intelligence accorded them and may fear them no more....
Anybody who comes towards the Rue de la Musée from the wicket
leading to the Pont du Carrousel ... may notice some half-score of
houses with ruined façades, which the discouraged owners never
repair, and which are the residue of an ancient quarter in course
of demolition ever since Napoleon resolved to complete the Louvre.
The Rue and Impasse de Doyenné are the only streets within this
sombre, deserted block, the inhabitants of which are probably
phantoms, for one never sees a soul there.... These houses, buried
already by the raising of the Place [du Carrousel], are enveloped
in the eternal shadow projected by the high galleries of the
Louvre, which are blackened on this side by the north wind. The
darkness, the silence, the chilly air, the cavernous depth of the
ground combine to make these houses kinds of crypts, living tombs.
When one passes in a cabriolet along this dead half-quarter, and
one's look penetrates the little alley de Doyenné, a chill strikes
one's soul, and one wonders who can live there and what must
happen there in the evening when that alley changes into a den of
cut-throats, and the vices of Paris, wrapped in the mantle of
night, flourish at their height."
This can hardly be called an engaging description, and even Bohemians,
it might be supposed, would shrink from such a dreadful slum. But Balzac
was writing in 1847, more than ten years after Bohemia had left it, and
he was making a protest against the continued existence of this quarter,
which had probably deteriorated since the days when he sent there
himself to offer Gautier work on the _Chronique de Paris_. However,
whether Balzac was right in making the Rue du Doyenné an inferno or was
only touching it up with livid tones appropriate to Cousine Bette and
the Marneffes, it was certainly a more smiling spot in 1833. True, it
was tumbling down, and lay below the level of the Place du Carrousel, in
the midst of mournful débris, between the Louvre and the Tuileries,
which Napoleon had meant to join after sweeping it away; the houses, as
Gautier says,[21] were old and dark, repairs to them were forbidden, and
they had the air of regretting the days when respectable canons and
advocates were their inhabitants. Yet it was not a den of thieves by any
means. Gérard[22] records that many _attachés_ and Government officials
lived in the quarter, and that by the Place du Carrousel there was a
collection of temporary wooden shops let out to curiosity dealers and
print-sellers. It was enlivened, too, by the presence of a little Dutch
beer-house served by a Flemish maid of considerable attractions. The
view from the upper windows included, naturally, the heaps of stones,
the rubbish, with the nettles and the dock-leaves by which Nature tries
to cover such deformities at once; but it also included a good many
trees, and the ruins of a delightful old priory, with one arch, two or
three pillars, and the end of a colonnade still standing. This was the
Priory of Doyenné, the dome of which, according to Gérard, fell one day
in the seventeenth century upon eleven luckless canons who were
celebrating the office. Its ruins stood out gracefully against the
trees, and of a summer morning or evening, when, amid the peaceful
silence of this forgotten corner, the bright rays of the Parisian sun
lit up the lichen on its stones and a fresh breeze from the neighbouring
Seine gently swayed the branches of its framing trees, it must have been
well to be a-leaning out of a window.
However, Gérard de Nerval did more than find a quiet, romantic corner
hidden away in the busy heart of Paris with a ruined priory to give
distinction to its prospect; he also found an appropriate dwelling. In
one of the old houses of the Impasse du Doyenné there was a set of rooms
remarkable for its _salon_. It was a huge room, decorated in the
old-fashioned Pompadour style with grooved panellings, pier-glasses,
and a fantastically moulded ceiling. This decoration had for a long time
been the despair of its owner and had driven away all prospective
tenants, the taste for curiosities being at that time undeveloped. In
vain had the landlord parcelled it out with party walls; it was still
mouldering on his hands when Gérard came thither on one of his
swallow-flights. He at once persuaded the good-natured Camille Rogier to
transfer his household gods from the Rue des Beaux-Arts, the party walls
were knocked down, and Bohemia entered on its ideal home. Gérard had
still some of his patrimony left, and chose to expend it upon his one
hobby, the collection of pictures and furniture. It was a golden time
for the collector. Society had as yet not learned to appreciate old
works of art, dealers were not too well informed, and the depredations
of the Bande Noire, that, under the Restoration, had sacked so many
ancient ecclesiastical foundations, had brought a large quantity of
precious old furniture, tapestries, and fabrics into the curiosity shops
of Paris. Gérard had acquired a wonderful canopied Renaissance bed
ornamented with salamanders, a Médicis console, a sideboard decorated
with nymphs and satyrs, three of each, and oval paintings on its doors,
a tapestry delineating the four seasons, some medieval chairs and Gothic
stools, a Ribeira--a death of Saint Joseph--and two superb panels by
Fragonard, "L'Escarpolette" and "Colin Maillard," which last he had
bought for fifty francs the pair. It was a magnificent studio, worthy of
_la Bohème galante_. There was no question of bare attics on a sixth
story, their tiny windows looking on a dreary sea of roofs, of rickety
chairs and peeling wall-paper. In spite of its bare floors, its faded
colours, its chipped corners, and the incongruous presence of plain
easels among its ancient splendours, its riches were princely. Bohemian
disorder might reign among paints and palette-knives, ends of paper
inscribed with scraps of verse might dot its unswept floor, the _débris_
of eating and drinking might litter the seats on which fastidious
cavaliers once delicately sat, but no realities of a careless existence
could spoil its romantic atmosphere. Without its merry clan of
inhabitants, no doubt, it would have seemed odd and ghostly; yet if they
brought back to it the necessary colour of youth, it tinged, in turn,
their life with a patina of old gold that never faded from their
reminiscences.
[Illustration: A Festivity in the Impasse du Doyenné]
Camille Rogier was the real lessee, and Gérard his sub-tenant. Gautier
had a couple of rooms in the Rue du Doyenné, which cut the Impasse
crosswise. These at first were the only permanent inhabitants of the new
colony, but the great _salon_ where Rogier and Gautier worked soon
became a meeting-place for a number of friends. Work was stopped at five
o'clock, when Arsène Houssaye was certain to appear, Roger de Beauvoir,
then in his most brilliant day, half Bohemian, half _viveur_, and
Edmond Ourliac, the future dramatist. One evening Houssaye, Roger de
Beauvoir, and Ourliac stayed talking till dawn; Roger departed then to
his more sumptuous apartments, Ourliac to his parents' house in the Rue
Saint Roch, but Arsène Houssaye stayed, on Rogier's invitation, to
complete the inner conclave of Bohemia. His camp-bed was sent for next
day, and he became Rogier's second tenant, paying him indeed no money,
but spending, in revenge, chance gifts from home on luxurious feasts at
the Frères Provençaux.
Such a society in such a setting could not long remain unknown. With its
circle of guests widening it grew in importance, for in this golden age
Bohemia could be important without losing its quality. Gavarni, the
inimitable portrayer of Parisian types, Nanteuil, Châtillon, Marilhat,
even Delacroix, were among the artists who found the gaiety of the
Impasse du Doyenné to their taste; Pétrus Borel looked haggardly in
occasionally; the great Dumas would rush in and out like a storm; the
Roqueplans, Camille and Nestor, showed there in moments spared from
their more elegant wanderings; and the effervescent Roger de Beauvoir as
gaily composed there his witty rhymes as at a supper in the Café de
Paris. It was no hole-and-corner Bohemia at which the superior person
could affect to turn up his nose; it was a truly artistic centre in
Paris and, at the same time, a _coterie_ admission to which was
jealously enough guarded to exclude the half-baked dilettante who is the
ruin of most artistic sets and the very negation of Bohemia. For a
reason which will be obvious in the sequel, ladies with leanings to
artistic society--another impossibility in Bohemia--were equally
debarred from appearing. It was a more or less closely knit society of
young and gifted men, lovers of the beautiful, despisers of convention
without _gasconnade_, neither rich nor desperately poor, avid of
pleasure, and fashioning their conduct easily upon the standards of the
day, yet crowning all their hours, even the most wanton, with a graceful
and light-hearted idealism that shields these pagan heroes of a golden
age from any but an æsthetic judgment, a judgment which, in the case of
their own countrymen, they confronted with serene self-confidence.
In all, the group was fairly large: its membership radiated dimly as far
as the "dandies" on the boulevard and into the obscurer depths of the
Quartier Latin. But radiation was from a central nucleus--the original
Bohemian brethren whose home was in the Impasse du Doyenné: Camille
Rogier, Gérard de Nerval, Théophile Gautier, Arsène Houssaye, and Edmond
Ourliac. The rest were visitors, but they alone were the true dwellers
in _la Bohème galante_. Of their brotherhood and its life Gautier,
Gérard, and Houssaye have all given glimpses, which compose a picture
apt for pleasing and, occasionally, envious contemplation. Arsène
Houssaye in his "Confessions" is the fullest source of reminiscence, and
his words are delightfully illustrated by the poem, originally entitled
"Vingt Ans," but in his complete works "La Bohème de Doyenné." The poem,
addressed to Gautier, begins:
_Théo, te souviens-tu de ces vertes saisons_
_Qui s'effeuillaient si vite en ces vieilles maisons_
_Dont le front s'abritait sous une aile du Louvre?_
_Levons avec Rogier le voile qui les couvre,_
_Reprenons dans nos cœurs les trésors enfouis,_
_Plongeons dans le passé nos regards éblouis._
_Chimères aux cils noirs, Espérances fanées,_
_Amis toujours chantants, Amantes profanées,_
_Songes venus du ciel, flottantes Visions,_
_Sortez de vos tombeaux, jeunes Illusions!_
_Et nous rebâtirons ce château périssable_
_Que les destins changeants ont jeté sur le sable:_
_Replaçons le sofa sous les tableaux flamands;_
_Dispersons à nos pieds gazettes et romans;_
_Ornons le vieux bahut de vieilles porcelaines,_
_Et faisons refleurir roses et marjolaines;_
_Qu'un rideau de damas ombrage encore ces lits_
_Où nos jeunes amours se sont ensevelis._