ourselves the pain. That joyous evening, little as it may have seemed
to do so, marked the passing of the golden age. Bohemia's sun henceforth
descended the skies. The next year saw marked changes. The landlord of
the old house in the Impasse du Doyenné saw with relief--Gérard says he
gave them notice to quit--the departure of his turbulent tenants. If
Rogier had not gone to Constantinople it is possible that, even if the
band had been compelled to change its quarters, some reconstruction of
_la Bohème galante_ might have been possible. With him, the stable, the
earner of money, absent, there was no hope. The heroes of Bohemia had to
leave their enchanted garden for the ordinarily circumscribed dwelling
of impecunious mortals, and, like the heroes of Valhalla when Freia is
snatched from them, a certain wanness came over the complexion of their
lives. Joy and beauty and work and love were left, but the magic bloom
had just faded. With smaller resources and in a colder light the
resettlement of Bohemia was a work of compromise, not spontaneous
achievement. Rogier was gone; Ourliac, who produced "Suzanne" with
success, married before long, grew serious, and ended his days in the
fullest odour of piety; Roger de Beauvoir found the boulevard more to
his taste than any less brilliant Bohemia. Gautier, Gérard, and Houssaye
were left, a trio of markedly divergent tastes. They made one attempt at
a common life in the Rue Saint-Germain-des-Prés, which seems to have
lasted a year or two. The details of it given by Gautier[26] and
Houssaye[27] differ considerably. According to Gautier they did their
own cooking: Arsène Houssaye was perfect in the _panade_, Gautier
prepared the macaroni, no doubt remembering Graziano, while Gérard
"went, with perfect self-possession, to buy galantines, sausages, or
fresh pork cutlets with gherkins at the neighbouring cook-shop."
Houssaye, on the other hand, says that they had a rascally valet and a
cook called Margot, and that they broke up because they were at variance
on the degree of luxury to be maintained, Gérard, whom anything
satisfied, departing to a bare _hôtel garni_, Gautier to a sumptuous
apartment in the Rue de Navarin, and Houssaye sharing rooms in the Rue
du Bac, on the left bank, with Jules Sandeau. I do not trouble to
reconcile these two accounts, for the memories of Bohemia are invariably
picturesque. The fact remains that the old days could not come back. The
first Bohemians were growing older, and the world was beginning to claim
its once youthful defiers as servitors. Though Gérard's bed remained
with Gautier as a memory of freer days, he knew too well that the gates
of the prison were closing upon him. For a year or so he might pretend
to mock destiny by producing another book of verses and a novel, or by
making a voyage in Belgium accompanied by Gérard: but he was a doomed
man. About 1838 he became the dramatic critic of _La Presse_, entering
the mill in which he was to grind for over thirty years. Well might he
say in 1867, in an autobiographical notice: "Là finit ma vie heureuse,
indépendante et prime-sautière." Houssaye kept up the pretence a little
longer. Life in the Rue du Bac was gay; there were suppers with Jules
Janin and Sandeau at which Gautier and Ourliac sometimes appeared; there
was dancing; there were the bright eyes of a certain Ninon, who inspired
some pretty stanzas. But these were the last echoes of _la première
Bohème_, as he had to admit. When they died away he completed the
chapter of his youth, as Gautier had done, by travelling.
[Illustration: Gérard de Nerval]
Gérard alone escaped the inevitable superannuation of Bohemia, because
he was too ethereal to become amenable to the ordinary dynamic laws of
society. An attempt was made to catch him in the machinery by making him
Gautier's assistant as dramatic critic of _La Presse_. The sprite within
him would not submit to the drudgery, and in a little while he gave it
up. He preferred, as ever, to wander at his will and at his own hours,
or to sit reading at the dead of night by the light of a brass
chandelier balanced on his head. It is not part of this book's plan to
give complete biographies of those who appear in its pages, but an
exception shall be made in the case of Gérard de Nerval. Between 1837
and 1839 he stayed in Paris, writing a comic opera, "Piquillo," with
Dumas, in which Jenny Colon appeared, several plays, with a certain
number of articles and reviews. His way of life was always eccentric,
but he had his first definite attack of madness in 1839 or 1840, and was
placed in the famous establishment of Doctor Blanche. He came out in
1841 and resumed a career of wider vagabondage than ever, now with
money, now without, but caring little in any case and ready to go to the
ends of the earth with a whim and without a coin. In 1841 he joined
Camille Rogier in Constantinople, and wandered subsequently in other
parts of the East--an experience which gave rise to some of his best
descriptive work. He returned to Paris again, where his spirit dwelt in
the clouds and his body anywhere, though he often allowed it to rest
with one of his many friends, with whom he would leave a shirt to be
washed against his next coming. He continued to write not very
successful plays between 1846 and 1850, when he again went completely
mad and retired to Dr. Blanche's house. His second stay here was longer,
but as he soon became perfectly reasonable his friends were allowed to
take him out for the day occasionally. Once more apparently cured he
came out, but though he made one or two voyages his faculties remained
permanently clouded. Of this he himself was perfectly conscious, but he
bore his afflictions with perfect cheerfulness. His money was all gone,
and the flashes of sanity too rare for him to earn much; he was
homeless, but not friendless, for he never appealed to his friends in
vain. He came for crumbs like a bird in winter, but like a bird he would
not stay. He would have been an appropriate guest at some strange
_Nachtasil_ such as Maxim Gorki describes so powerfully. Who knows, too,
in what haunts he was not a familiar? His comrades of older days could
do no more than greet him and tend him when they saw him, and his
equanimity was too great to drive them to forcible detention. As Paul de
Saint-Victor wrote after his death:
"In vain his friends tried to follow him with their hearts and
eyes; he was lost to sight for weeks, months, years. Then, one fine
day, one found him by chance in a foreign city, a provincial town,
or more often still in the country, thinking aloud, dreaming with
open eyes, his attention fixed on the fall of a leaf, the flight of
an insect or a bird, the form of a cloud, the dart of a ray, on all
those vague and ravishing beauties that pass in the air. Never man
saw a gentler madness, a tenderer folly, a more inoffensive and
more friendly eccentricity. If he woke from his slumber, it was to
recognize his friends, to love them and serve them, to double the
warmth of his devotion and welcome as if he wished to make up to
them for his long absences by an extra amount of tenderness."
It was with a profound shock, therefore, that Paris heard, one morning
in 1857, that Gérard had been found in the small hours, hanged to an
iron railing by a woman's apron-string, in one of the lowest and most
ill-famed streets in Paris, the Rue de la Vieille-Lanterne. The mystery
of his death has never been cleared up. The inquest brought little
light, save that the inmates of a filthy little drink-shop probably knew
more than they would tell. What Gérard was doing in that foul haunt will
never be known. It is possible that he may have been murdered, but, as
he had no money and was the gentlest of men, it is more probable that
with some dreadful cloud upon his brain he destroyed himself. Yet his
very gentleness had made such an end unexpected, for he seemed to be
under the protection of the children's guardian angel. Some sudden
impulse brought him a death alien to the character of his whole life.
"II est mort," said Paul de Saint-Victor, "de la nostalgie du monde
invisible. Paix à cette âme en peine de l'idéal!"
From Gérard's death, which Gustave Doré made more hideous in a ghoulish
picture, it is a long cry back to the Impasse du Doyenné and the
Pompadour _salon_ of which he was the discoverer. Yet I will end this
chapter, as it was begun, with this once festive haunt. Not long did it
outlive its Bohemian colony. The landlord, explosively wrathful at the
sight of the wall paintings, at once covered the mess, as he no doubt
called it, with a coating of distemper. The treasures might, even then,
have been saved in part, had anyone but Gérard de Nerval bought from the
demolishers Corot's panels, the pictures by Wattier, Chassériau, and
Châtillon, and Rogier's portraits of Cydalise and Théophile Gautier. His
hand was one to baulk destiny only for a little. This moonstruck captain
of a rickety craft let his cargo fall needlessly into the seas while he
contemplated the stars and allowed the waves to swing the rudder. So
passed _la Bohème galante_, leaving only a gilded legend.
IX
SCHAUNARD AND COMPANY
_La Bohème carottière et geignarde d'Henry Murger_ ...
LEPELLETIER: "Verlaine"
To follow the heroes into exile would be depressing as well as
unprofitable. It is better to stand respectfully aside from the
_Götterdämmerung_ and wait till Bohemia emerges again from the mists,
when a lapse of years has wrought some patent changes, for it is easier
to contemplate a result than to trace a process. By leaping forward some
ten years from the dispersal of the brotherhood that sanctified by its
presence the Impasse du Doyenné it is possible to steal a march on Time
and anticipate with a rapid glance his changing hand. Yet to catch this
later view it is necessary for the nonce to abandon the world of flesh
and blood and to turn from the acts and reminiscences of actual mortals
to the imaginary scenes and fictitious characters of a book of stories.
The tide of life was too strong upon Théophile Gautier and Arsène
Houssaye for them to pause and stamp out firmly the features of those
precious days in _la Bohème galante_; they only caught fugitive
impressions in retrospect. Henry Murger, less prodigal because less
endowed, crystallized as it passed a moment of Bohemia, the Bohemia of
common mortality, in "Scènes de la Vie de Bohème." As a confectioner
encloses a fresh grape in a transparent coat of candied sugar, so he,
even while he tasted, sour and sweet, the fruit of his days, caught
stray berries in a light film of art and presented them as dessert to
the readers of the _Corsaire_, a small but amusing journal. Sharp and
savoury as they were, Time would have destroyed them, as he destroyed
the ambrosial lusciousness of the Doyenné feasts, but for that light
film. Nobody remembers reminiscences, but a well-told story preserves
even the most trivial events.
Murger's "Scènes de la Vie de Bohème" is a book which has now lived for
nearly seventy years and does not seem likely as yet to pass into the
lumber-room. At the same time, it is to be wished that more people in
England knew it, if only because the presupposition of such knowledge
would make this chapter easier to write. It is not, of course, difficult
to criticize the "Scènes de la Vie de Bohème"; many of Murger's
countrymen, indeed, have done so. Its ethics, its humour, and its style
have been attacked. M. Boucher, an estimable civil servant interested in
literature, in his "Souvenirs d'un Parisien" calls it an effort to
depict the life of low-class students, accuses Murger of insipidity and
repetition, and denies any wit to his "étudiants demi-escrocs,
demi-canailles." M. Pelloquet, who was good enough to pronounce a
discourse over Murger's grave, said: "It is an unhealthy book, in which
vice grimaces, youth paints its cheeks like a superannuated coquette,
and a fictitious _insouciance_ conceals, not a laziness that is
sometimes poetic, but the cowardly indolence of men without courage and
without talent." He was also rash enough to predict that it would not
live. Jules Janin, the critic, in a wiser appreciation, asserted that
with a little more art and a little more poetry Murger might have
created more pardonable heroes and no less charming heroines. Gautier's
dictum about the invertebrate verses of "that feeble appendage to Alfred
de Musset" has already been quoted, and the opinion of Verlaine's
biographer appears at the head of this chapter. Murger's gravest fault,
however, in the eyes of French people is that he wrote bad French. To
them the mishandling of that difficult, elusive, and withal limited
tongue is a crime of which we can hardly comprehend the enormity. It is
perfectly true that Murger was culpable in this respect; he was
deficient in scholarship and in rhythmic sense, so that his poems are
weak and his prose, even where he tried to give it an air of
respectability, betrays its imperfections no less manifestly than M.
Jourdain betrayed his birth. We in England, fastidious as our critics
are in the matter of language, have not our ears tuned to this painful
degree of precision. So long as a style effectively harmonizes with its
environment we are content to let it stand: the Gothic grandeur of
English can suffer without disfigurement the intrusion of the quaint. To
sympathies so trained Murger's style in "Scènes de la Vie de Bohème"
should make a particular appeal, since in that book, for the most part,
he makes no attempt to ape the academician, but writes in the
extravagant jargon of the very Bohemians he is describing--a language
full of comic inversions, extravagances, and lapses from grammar, which
are an essential part of the book's gaiety and charm. Though his matter
is unmistakably Parisian, his humour is, in some respects, remarkably
English, delighting in broad and bustling effects rather than subtle
strokes and sudden flashes. As for the life and the characters that he
depicts, criticism of them will be implicit in the remainder of this
chapter; of the book as a whole no more need be said than that it has
survived when all the rest of Murger's work has been forgotten. It is
not a book to be placed unwarily in the hands of the young and tender;
parts of it are exaggerated, parts may be wished away, but, when all has
been said, it remains, not the picture of _la vie de Bohème_ at its best
and brightest, but the classic expression of the Bohemian spirit--a
frank confession, not the pseudo-pathetic souvenir of a prosperous
greybeard. Its pages are among those rare ones in the world's library
that have caught and held for a moment the intangible freshness, the
poetry, and the gaiety of youth. For this alone it deserves never to
grow old.
Murger's Bohemia is described in a series of scenes taken from the life
of four young men, a quartet as fascinating to read of as Dumas'
Musketeers, though possibly less comfortable companions. They were
Rodolphe, the sentimental poet; Marcel, the painter; Colline, the
peripatetic philosopher and bookworm; and Schaunard, painter and
musician, incomparable rogue whose masterpiece was a symphony "Sur
l'influence du bleu dans la musique"--a sly hit at debased Romanticism.
Chance brought them together. Schaunard, unable to pay his arrears of
rent, was forced to leave his lodging with his furniture in pawn. A
day's peregrination in search of a loan brought him three francs in
cash, which he spent in dinner, together with the less tangible benefit
of Colline's and Rodolphe's acquaintance. He swore brotherhood with
Colline over a dish of stewed rabbit in a little eating-house, and the
pair collected Rodolphe in the Café Momus, where, at Colline's expense,
they passed the rest of a not too abstemious evening. Meanwhile Marcel,
the painter, who had taken Schaunard's room unfurnished in advance,
though having no furniture of his own but a second-hand scenic interior
from the stock of a bankrupt theatre, had been persuaded to take the
lodging furnished with Schaunard's furniture, and had duly moved in.
Late in the evening, when a sharp shower of rain was falling,
Schaunard, in bacchic absence of mind, offered asylum to his two new
comrades. Hastily buying the elements of a supper, they gaily invaded
the apartment of Marcel. Explanations were difficult, but were
accomplished during supper, and next day Marcel and Schaunard agreed to
live together. A dinner and a magnificent supper inaugurated the
foundation of the new clan, which was united, so long as their Bohemian
days continued, by an unbroken bond of friendship. It is these young men
whom Murger's readers follow through their straits and shifts, their
love affairs, their extravagances, their boisterous jokes, and their
naïve pleasures--the poet, the artist, the savant, and the musician,
characters drawn from Murger himself and his living friends, whose coats
were ragged and whose pockets almost always empty, who were the bane of
respectable _concierges_ and proprietors of _cafés_, who bore short
commons with cheerful bravado and succumbed to innocent gluttony in
times of unexpected prosperity, who were really funny even if they were
sometimes vulgar, whose expedients for catching the elusive _pièce de
cent sous_ were as amazing as their puns, who made life, even in a
garret, a sentimental poem and a rollicking ballad, and who had the
sense to become prosaic before the sentiment grew threadbare or the
ballad grew stale. It is a great temptation to follow some of their
adventures in greater detail from the day when Marcel went out to dine
in the sugar-merchant's coat while Schaunard painted the latter's
portrait in his own colour-stained dressing-gown, to the day when
Rodolphe by composing a didactic poem at fifteen sous a dozen lines for
a celebrated dentist, Marcel by painting the portraits of eighteen
grenadiers at six francs a head, and Schaunard by playing the same scale
all day and every day for a month to revenge a rich Englishman on an
actress's parrot, earned enough to give their mistresses new dresses and
take them for a holiday in the fields of Fontenay-aux-Roses. Yet the
impulse to discursive commentary must be checked, for plucking flowers
is a distraction from comparative botany. Murger, after all, tells his
own story infinitely better than any translator could do, and the
purpose which is proper to the present book is to inquire what kind of a
Bohemia appears in Murger's light-hearted pages.
So far as Bohemia was concerned, the generation of 1830 had entirely
passed away by 1846, when Murger's sketches actually appeared, and the
young men of whom Bohemia was composed were formed under less violent
influences. The last flashes of Napoleon's glory had not illuminated
their early days, they knew little of the stifling reign of Charles X,
and the Revolution of 1830 took place when they had only a little while
outgrown the nursery. By the time they grew up the complexion of affairs
in Paris wore a more even tone. Assisted by Guizot, Louis Philippe had
found the _juste-milieu_ to his people's satisfaction, revolutionary
tendencies had been checked or diverted into harmless channels of
humanitarian reform, the _bourgeois_ had firmly grasped his power and
built up an already solid bulwark of commercial interest. In the
artistic world, too, things were quieter. "Hernani," once a scandal, had
become a classic, and there was no further need of red waistcoats and
furious _claques_. Romanticism, indeed, had become so workaday that a
successful little excitement was aroused by a reaction against it in
what was called "l'école de bon sens," whose chief poet, Ponsard, gained
quite a celebrity for a short time with his classic drama "Lucrèce."
Beyond the gadfly of artistic impulse and the natural fermentation of
the adolescent mind, there was little to rouse a young man's passions or
send his blood coursing faster through his veins; there was no
particular idol to worship, no hobby-horse to ride, as a Gautier or a
Borel had worshipped Hugo and mounted the gallant steed called Middle
Ages. The creed of Romanticism was so thoroughly established that there
was nothing left to make any fuss about, with the natural consequence
that its early extravagances had fallen out of fashion and there was no
further need to be satanic or profess excessive sensibility. Literature
was feeling its way to the austerer Romanticism of Flaubert and the
Goncourts, as painting towards the "realism" of Courbet, but the growth
was still below ground and the surface as yet seemed undisturbed. The
generation of Rodolphe and Schaunard found, therefore, in Paris no eager
band to whom they could ally themselves and to whose educative influence
they could submit. Driven by their impulses towards the arts, with souls
naturally romantic, as most young men's souls are, they found no cause
which they could immediately embrace in the manner of the second
_cénacle_. They missed that valuable education which is the idolization
of a great man, and were confined instead to fighting their own battle,
a very much less distinguished affair, which allowed many little
dishonourable compromises with indolence and in which victory meant no
more than individual success. This explains, to some extent, the absence
of intellectual fecundity in Murger's heroes, which even their most
devoted admirers cannot deny. Rodolphe's poems are indeed only pale
imitations of Alfred de Musset, who was an almost inevitable model for
any lyric youngster of the day; his more serious effort, a drama called
"Le Vengeur," good enough to burn for warmth in a draughty garret, is
not vouchsafed to us in quotation by Rodolphe's creator. Marcel was
obviously not a very gifted painter, in spite of his famous _Passage de
la Mer Rouge_, which was sent up in a different guise to each Salon and
inevitably rejected, and when this great work was sold to become a
shop-sign the artist's pride was not in the least revolted. Schaunard
never gives any signs of musical inspiration till at the close he
publishes a successful album of songs, and Colline, polyglot philosopher
as he is dubbed, abandoned his career before anything tangible had been
achieved to make an advantageous marriage and give musical evenings. It
would, of course, be pedantic to insist upon these considerations in the
case of a book of short stories which aims chiefly at amusing, but it is
impossible not to be struck in reading the "Scènes de la Vie de Bohème"
by the absence from the conversation of the characters of any indication
of their artistic ideals. Save when Schaunard tells the sugar-merchant
that he was a pupil of Horace Vernet, murmuring to himself, "Horreur, je
renie mes dieux," and Marcel makes a scornful allusion to the "école de
bon sens," the only proof that they are true artists lies in their
creator's own assertion, of which he is not entirely mindful in the
_dénouement_. The worst sinner of all is Colline, for this mine of
knowledge, throughout the book, is made chiefly remarkable for the
composition of dreadful puns. This may be partly due to that want of "a
little more art and a little more poetry" of which Janin accused Murger,
but the fault was not only personal. The second _cénacle_ and the
brotherhood of the Impasse du Doyenné were, without doubt, just as
commonplace in their ordinary conversation, but what lifted them off the
ground was the enthusiasm of a hotly waged artistic struggle, which by
Murger's day had died down. His four heroes are Romantics in general,
but in no sense champions of any cause.
Another unmistakable fact about Rodolphe and his friends is that they
were inconspicuous. True, they made the Café Momus unbearable to its
more peaceful customers, and were not unknown at the Chaumière, but the
Café Momus was in a back street, and the Chaumière was certainly not the
Bal de l'Opéra. They were miles away from the _viveurs_ upon the
boulevard, and their connexion with the prominent writers and artists of
the day was extremely remote. They made no public appearance, they were
not a force to be reckoned with. They kept up the form of defying
convention, but it was now no more than a convenient form for the
impecunious. Art and the _bourgeoisie_ were beginning to play into one
another's hands; the former had gained its liberty to a great degree,
while the latter by the gilded pill of commercial success had purged
artistic demonstration of its crudities. The time when eccentricity was
a symbol had passed; now it was only a skin to be sloughed, as Marcel
saw when in a very sensible lecture delivered to Rodolphe he said:
"Poetry does not exist only in a disordered life, in improvised
happiness, in love affairs that only last as long as a candle, in
more or less eccentric rebellions against the prejudices which will
for ever be the sovereigns of the world: a dynasty is more easily
overturned than a custom, even a ridiculous one. To have talent it
is not sufficient to put on a summer overcoat in May; one can be a
true poet or artist and yet keep one's feet warm and have one's
three meals a day."