all sorts of disorder and youthful folly might be excused on the plea
that youth must be served, but which could in no sense be regarded as a
part of civic life, much less as the best part, the most truly
disinterested and artistic. This is a significant change of attitude
from the days of _la Bohème galante_, which was one of the centres of
Paris. That, indeed, was transitory and presupposed youth, but it was
not obscure and its inhabitants had no misgivings. It was not they who
gave it up as the writer of Ecclesiastes put away childish things, for
they gloried in it all their days as the best part of their life; it was
that the world claimed them for its business in spite of themselves. In
their disinterested love of art they had made themselves valuable, and
when the command went forth "Come and be paid" they were forced to go.
To guard against any accusation of misunderstanding Murger, it may be
admitted that he calls his heroes only a small section of Bohemia--they
moved, to use his phrase, in the _troisièmes dessous_ of literature and
art--but there is no indication that Murger conceived a Bohemia which
had its part in any higher sphere. When Rodolphe gets a lucky present of
five hundred francs the determination he avows is not to suffuse his
little corner of Bohemia with a more worthy splendour, but to become,
like every other successful man, a _bourgeois_. "These are my projects,"
he cries to an astonished Marcel. "Sheltered from the material
embarrassments of life, I am going to work seriously; I shall finish my
great work, and gain a settled place in public opinion. To begin with, I
renounce Bohemia, I shall dress like everybody else, I shall have a
black coat, and I shall frequent drawing-rooms." Such a speech would
have fallen like a thunderbolt in Camille Rogier's Pompadour _salon_,
and its author considered charitably to be in the first stages of
lunacy. Marcel, however, falls in at once with the ambitious scheme, and
they are only saved by their Bohemianism being stronger than their
resolution. Both in the stories and the preface to the "Scènes de la Vie
de Bohème"--where Murger speaks with a picturesque seriousness--there is
no sign of that former joy in Bohemian life as the life which was alone
worth living by poets and artists. Throughout he regards it as a
necessity conditioned by the artistic impulse combined with poverty, to
be borne with the courage and gaiety of youth, to be regretted "perhaps"
from the vantage-point of subsequent prosperity. The true Bohemia--as
distinct from the Bohemia of mere idealists, incapables, and
amateurs--he regards as a narrow, stony path leading up the sides of an
arduous mountain, beset by the chasms of doubt and misery, but making
for a possible goal, the goal of a sufficient income. Divested of all
its _agréments_--resourcefulness, humour, courage, extravagance, which
are properly attributes of youth, the real illuminant--Murger's Bohemia
is laid bare as a merely economic state. The true Bohemians, he says,
are known upon the literary and artistic market-place, where their wares
are saleable, but at moderate prices; "their existence each day is a
work of genius"--"preceded by a pack of ruses, poaching in all the
industries connected with the arts, they hunt from morn till eve that
ferocious animal which is called the five-franc piece." To Murger, who
wrote of what he knew, the man who had the means to live a stable
existence, howsoever retired, was a fool if he remained in Bohemia: to
the inhabitants of _la Bohème galante_ it was the not being entirely
destitute which made their life peculiarly worth living. If Colline ever
speculated with any profundity he may have seen that his friends and he
lived really in a prison of which poverty, prodigality, and idleness
were warders. The Bohemia of Gautier, Gérard de Nerval, and Houssaye had
all the glory of a voluntary protest, a passionate assertion of liberty,
a revivifying of life in accordance with new artistic ideas.
The difference is not simply one of degree. The brotherhood of the
Impasse du Doyenné were less destitute and more talented than Rodolphe
and his friends, but that is not a point that at this moment requires
stress. The important fact is that in a few years Bohemia had undergone
a great change; that, whereas a few years after 1830 young men with a
little money and some talent deliberately chose to make their life more
picturesque than that of ordinary citizens and to escape from the
suffocating atmosphere of commerce and officialdom, a few years after
1840 the ideal of struggling artists was to become as soon as possible
successful merchants and to escape from the possibility of that
picturesqueness which they welcomed as an alleviation of a state of
transitory discomfort. It would be quite beside the mark to regard
Bohemia as guilty in this of self-degradation; so far, indeed, as the
change was conscious, the majority of mankind must logically find it
praiseworthy, for all human effort is judged by its tendency to
well-being. The change, however, was none of Bohemia's doing, but was
due mainly to the fact that art was beginning, in the modern sense, to
pay. The beginnings were small, but they were quite evident, especially
in the increased profits from journalism and illustration. The old
Bohemia of the golden age rested on the supposition that the artist
worked primarily to please himself, and that money, source of enjoyment
as it was, remained a secondary consideration. The supposition, in the
first forward rush of commercial prosperity, was bound to become
untenable. Writers and artists of obvious talent were too valuable
commercial assets to be left to their careless selves; they had to be
tempted into the cage--an easy task, for, if money be regarded as a
means of more enjoyment, why should a Bohemian resist it? It was
unimportant if individuals held out, or were too uncompromising to suit
the market; the fact remained that there _was_ a market and a list of
quotations, and this fact was the disruption of Bohemia. Whereas it had
been a true fraternity in which art was all-important and individual
celebrity a thing of so little moment that there was complete equality
of intercourse, it now included the last two sections of a trisected
world of artists--the well-paid, the ill-paid, and the not paid at
all--and where money intervenes all equality ceases. The majority of the
well-paid were kept too busy even to see they had lost the old freedom;
they were tempted to live as other people in decent rooms and decent
coats, and as their vanity kept them from complaining, the ill-paid and
the not paid at all naturally envied their state, striving and jostling
for an equally happy captivity, or at least intending to do so as soon
as their irrepressible blood took a staider course through their veins.
The charm of Murger's merry crew is that their blood was too strong for
their business instincts; the Bohemian spirit snatched them along in
spite of Mammon, for Mammon, incomplete as his hold has always been over
youth, was in those days but just learning his strength. Where youth
and art combine the Bohemian spirit is always there; only the
possibilities of Bohemia have in the course of time been crowded out.
But in Murger's Paris Bohemia, shorn of earthly glory as it was, without
lot in the brilliance of the boulevard, cut off from the more thriving
traders in the artistic market-place, was still a possibility because
the Bohemian tradition was still fairly strong, and because Paris was
still a small city, its life little disturbed by a floating population
of aliens and its interests completely self-centred.
The Bohemia described by Murger certainly corresponded in one respect
with the general conception of Bohemianism to-day in that it was devoid
of any material splendour. Neither Rodolphe nor Marcel indicates any
desire for the old furniture, damasks, and other decorations which so
glittered in the eyes of the early Romantics, but at any rate such
things would have been beyond the capacity of their purses. They were
unequivocally poor. When Rodolphe was in funds he could afford a hundred
francs a year for a garret in the Rue de la Tour d'Auvergne; when
Providence was less kind he lived "in the Avenue de Saint-Cloud, on the
fifth branch of the third tree on the left as you leave the Bois de
Boulogne." As for entertainments, they came a long way behind the
costume ball of the Impasse du Doyenné. At Rodolphe's Wednesdays in the
Rue de la Tour d'Auvergne, it was said, one could only sit down morally
and was forced to drink badly filtered water in eclectic earthenware.
Even the grand _soirée_ given by Rodolphe and Marcel, which began with a
literary and musical entertainment and ended with a dance prolonged till
sunrise, only cost the hosts fifteen francs--miraculously acquired at
the last moment--in addition to a set of chairs which fed the stove from
midnight onwards, though, as these belonged to a neighbour, they were
probably not paid for. Their wardrobes were not conspicuous for any
particularly Romantic or medieval effect, but simply, except in times of
exceptional windfalls, for extreme dilapidation. Schaunard's chief
garment was an overcoat worn to a state of utter baldness; Colline's
ulster, crammed with books and papers, had the surface of a file;
Marcel's coat was called "Mathusalem," but he must have acquired it
subsequent to the sugar-merchant's momentous visit, for at that time,
after an hour's search to discover a costume fit to dine out in, the net
results were a pair of plaid trousers, a grey hat, a red tie, a (once)
white glove and a black glove. To dine sufficiently at a small
restaurant was for them no ordinary luxury, and as for entering the
_Rocher de Caucale_, they might as well have aspired to membership of
the Jockey Club. Why, Schaunard had never seen a lobster till the old
Jew gave them all a feast after buying Marcel's _Passage de la Mer
Rouge_. Some days they dispensed with dining altogether, on others the
staple dish was pickled herrings; so it is hardly surprising that on the
proceeds of Marcel's picture they remained at table for five days, the
room filled with a Pantagruelic atmosphere and a whole bed of
oyster-shells covering the floor. It was not that they took up any
quixotic attitude of art for art's sake, like the society called _Les
Buveurs d'Eau_, whom Murger describes in one of his stories and whose
principle was not to make the slightest concession to necessity. They
were imperfect journeymen, indolent, careless, too easily distracted,
but they were among those who were ill-paid rather than those who never
tried to be paid. Rodolphe edited a small fashion paper, _L'Écharpe
d'Iris_; Marcel painted ruined manors for a Jew dealer and portraits of
the lowliest possessor of a few spare francs; Colline gave lessons in
the same range of subjects as Pico di Mirandola professed to discuss;
and Schaunard, besides exhibiting a special ability as a borrower, put
music to bad poetry for hard-hearted music-publishers.
In comparing this Bohemia with that of Gautier and Gérard de Nerval, it
is easy to see the justification of Lepelletier's epithet "carottière."
The graceful adjuncts and by no means contemptible achievements of a
former day had vanished as completely as its enthusiasms. The presence
of Roger de Beauvoir and Nestor Roqueplan in the Rue de la Tour
d'Auvergne is as difficult to imagine as the composition of
"Mademoiselle de Maupin." Yet Rodolphe and his friends were at least as
well off in one respect, that is, in their affairs of the heart, if,
indeed, they had not some advantage. The divinities of the Impasse du
Doyenné, Cydalise excepted, seem to have had their home in the _corps de
ballet_, a body not notable for the tenderness or constancy of their
attachments. Murger, who, like his Rodolphe, was an amorous
sentimentalist, gave some poetic value, if not as much as he intended,
to the figures of Mimi and Musette, the idols of Rodolphe and Marcel,
who play such a prominent part in the "Scènes de la Vie de Bohème," that
it would be an affectation not to speak of them, although an Englishman
must always do so with some reserve. In spite of all that may be said
against them--indeed, _is_ said by their very creator--there is a charm
about Mimi and Musette which must always hold the reader of these
stories, a charm which includes Francine, who died holding the muff
bought for her by her lover, and the vulgar Phémie Teinturière, who
shared the lot of a no more refined Schaunard. Without sympathizing, at
least temporarily, with all the blend of mystery and frankness which a
Frenchman breathes into the word "amour," it is useless to read French
literature. To him love is the highest emotional value--emotion being in
its turn the highest value in life--so that a union, whether it be
celebrated in the Madeleine or in the _mairie_ of the notorious
thirteenth _arrondissement_, is equally sacred and equally interesting.
We in England look at love differently and, as we naturally think,
better, but we are not hindered, nevertheless, from abandoning our view
occasionally. We do so implicitly when we shed tears over "La Dame aux
Camélias," over "Madame Butterfly," and over Mimi herself in Puccini's
"La Bohème." To be honest, then, we must accept Murger's view, if we
enjoy his book, as there is very little doubt that we do. We applaud
Musette when she surreptitiously waters the flowers whose duration is to
measure that of her love for Marcel; we forgive her fickleness because
she follows her fancy without calculation, even though on leaving the
rich young nobleman to visit Marcel she takes six days on the road; we
warm to Mimi because Rodolphe really loved her and she him, though his
jealousy and her love of luxury made their days a burden and their
rupture certain; and if we join heartily in Marcel's ironical tirade
against Mimi the fine lady, we cannot restrain our sadness at Mimi
returning to her old love to die. The life of the Impasse du Doyenné was
so joyous, strong, and full that its _amours passagers_ can be taken for
granted, happy fantasies without regrets; but Murger's Bohemia, with its
frequent moments of despondency and hardship, was forced to rely upon
its heart to supply that relieving colour which its surroundings could
not give. Mimi and Musette, Phémie and Francine, even the little
_giletière_ who corrected Colline's proofs and never appeared, meant so
much more than Lorry or Victorine. So long as their attachment lasted
they made a home out of the barest garret, doing for their men those
thousand little things which men are too lazy or preoccupied to do for
themselves. Besides, they opened a field for the exercise of
unselfishness--a valuable service in itself. In this connexion I need
only cite one delightful little story, to which I have already referred,
entitled "La Toilette des Grâces," an idyll which no afterthought can
spoil. It tells how Rodolphe, Marcel, and Schaunard, having earned a
little money by making their respective arts serve the humblest of
commercial purposes, decided to surprise their mistresses by giving them
new dresses. One fine morning Mimi, Musette, and Phémie were awakened by
the entry of a procession headed by Schaunard, in a new coat of golden
nankeen, playing a horn, and close behind him a shopman bringing
samples. They nearly went mad with joy. Mimi jumped like a young kid,
waving a pretty scarf; Musette, with each hand in a little green boot,
threw her arms round Marcel's neck and clapped the boots like cymbals;
as for Phémie, she could only sob "Ah, mon Alexandre, mon Alexandre!"
The choice was made, the bills discharged, and it was announced to the
dames that they must have their new dresses ready for a day in the
country on the morrow. That was a trifle; for sixteen hours they cut and
stitched, and when next day the Angelus sounded from the neighbouring
church they were already taking their last look into the looking-glass.
Only Phémie had a little sorrow. "I like the green grass and the little
birds," she said, "but one meets nobody in the country. Suppose we made
our excursion on the boulevard." But they went to Fontenay-aux-Roses
instead, and when they returned late at night there were only six francs
left. "What shall we do with it?" asked Marcel. "Invest it in the
funds," said Schaunard.
There are, doubtless, artistic _coteries_ to-day in whose existence
parallels may be found to the "Scènes de la Vie de Bohème," but
reproduction is impossible, for Murger's Bohemia, no less than _la
Bohème galante_, was conditioned by its time. The conditions include a
Paris of provincial narrowness, greater simplicity together with less
conspicuous uniformity in ordinary life, less elaborate amusements, no
Montmartre _cafés_, no swamping proletariat beside whose _mœurs
d'Apaches_ the eccentricities of Bohemia seem mild and unimportant, a
tiny fraction of the present opportunities for advertisement and
publicity, and a lower standard, perhaps, of general education. To these
one other condition may be added--the existence of Musette and Mimi, who
were the last of the _grisettes_. Murger himself, in a passage which I
cannot do better than quote in the original, points out clearly their
transitoriness:
"Ces jolies filles moitié abeilles, moitié cigales, qui
travaillaient en chantant toute la semaine, ne demandaient à
Dieu qu'un peu de soleil le dimanche, faisaient vulgairement
l'amour avec le cœur, et se jetaient quelquefois par la fenêtre.
Race disparue maintenant, grâce à la génération actuelle des jeunes
gens: génération corrompue et corruptrice, mais par-dessus tout
vaniteuse, sotte et brutale. Pour le plaisir de faire de méchants
paradoxes, ils ont raillé ces pauvres filles à propos de leurs
mains mutilées par les saintes cicatrices du travail, et elles
n'ont bientôt plus gagné assez pour s'acheter de la pâte d'amandes.
Peu à peu ils sont parvenus à leur inoculer leur vanité et leur
sottise, et c'est alors que la grisette a disparu. C'est alors que
naquit la lorette."
[Illustration: A Grisette]
The _grisette_ made love for love: like a wild rose, she had to be
plucked, and when men came to prefer buying bouquets in shops, she
naturally died away. Money already tainted Bohemia, even here, in its
heart. The opportunity of luxury tempted both Mimi and Musette to be
unfaithful, but since caprice was ever stronger with them than
self-interest they were not undeserving to be called the last of the
_grisettes_. They were necessary adjuncts to Bohemia, and satisfactory
adjuncts, in spite of their caprices, for the last thing which Bohemian
man required was the Bohemian or--to use an obsolete phrase--the
"emancipated" woman. Too ignorant to meet their lovers, even had they
wished, upon their own ground, they held their place by keeping to their
natural advantage, the woman's desire to please. So they passed through
life, making the feast more festive and the fast less desolate, filling
a void and mending a sorrow as light-heartedly as they darned a sock or
patched a ragged coat. Mimi and Musette were the true counterparts of
Rodolphe and Marcel, and it is with regret that we see them disappear
into an epilogue of prosperity and propriety. Yet it was all they could
do, for what I have called the Bohemia of common mortality became
dangerous long before the age of thirty years. Rodolphe could not have
written in middle age to Marcel as Bouchardy did to Théophile Gautier;
only hypocritically could he have said "nous étions ivres du beau."
Murger escapes any false effect of that kind in his conclusion:
"'We are done for, old fellow,' says Marcel, 'we are dead and
buried. Youth only comes once! Where are you dining to-night?'
"'If you like,' answered Rodolphe, 'we will go and dine for twelve
sous at our old restaurant in the Rue du Four, where the plates are
of village earthenware, and where we were always so hungry when we
had finished eating.'
"'Good heavens, no. I don't mind looking back at the past, but it
shall be across a bottle of decent wine and seated in a good
arm-chair. It is no use, I'm corrupted. I only care now for what is
good!'"
X
MURGER AND HIS FRIENDS
_Si on excepte quelques natures fortement trempées qui se tirèrent des
impasses de la Bohème, le reste fut condamné à vivre difficilement en
face d'un idéal borné et sans avenir. Ni études, ni loisirs, ni aisances
ne permettaient à ces aspirants à l'art de s'élever et de conquérir un
nom._
CHAMPFLEURY:
"Souvenirs et Portraits de Jeunesse"
In order to catch at a glance the result of a lapse of years I lingered
in the last chapter over Rodolphe, Mimi, and their friends, figures
drawn from the moving scene of contemporary life, yet snatched from the
changes of time as permanently as those on Keats's Grecian urn. The
"Scènes de la Vie de Bohème" show, as it seems to me, more clearly than
any other kind of record, the decadence of Bohemia, regarding the degree
of its approach to an ideal of complete artistic existence, since the
great days that followed 1830. This might, indeed, be a warrant for not
returning to more documentary facts at all, but there are always those
to be considered who view Fiction as a sprite so far divorced from
actuality that they are unable to place any trust in her indications.
The teller of stories, in their apprehension, is always on the look-out
for a good effect, to which end he will minimize the essential and
magnify the unessential, distorting sober fact at the call of his
individual imagination. They are the people who read novels, as they
say, for relaxation, while finding wisdom alone in biographies and
memoirs bristling with dates and packed with quotations. The question,
"What, after all, is sober fact?" is sufficient to put them into
confusion, but to propound that ancient problem would be here beside the
mark, for in a book that honestly professes to be as sober in fact as
any it would be unbecoming unduly to press the point on behalf of
fiction. The warrant, therefore, will be allowed to pass, and we return
to those tales which men have told about themselves and their friends
under the names which they bore at baptism, duly signed and dated. Such
information as they give concerning the later years of Bohemia is, at
best, fragmentary, but the fragments have some appearance of falling
together in the light of Murger's picture. A more diligent research
might have produced a more detailed record, but it may be questioned
whether the total effect would have been any clearer. There were scores
of obscure persons in Bohemia, but their daily uprising and lying-down
were not so very widely different. At least this may be asserted, that
after a certain number of facts it is safer to use the imagination for
the rest.
Murger and his friends were the legitimate successors of _la Bohème
galante_, and in view of their fictitious counterparts already
introduced the main interest of this chapter lies with them. Yet before
they appear there are some byways of Bohemia that call for inspection as
an illustration and a contrast. Bohemia was, of course, always bordered
on one side by the student life of the Quartier Latin, the freedom and
licence of which were both different and older in origin, going back to
the days of the schoolmen, when indigent scholars of all nations filled
the great university cities of Europe, forming in each a picturesque but
turbulent community. Even in most prosaic days the students of Paris
have kept up the medieval tradition, but particular manifestations would
naturally be influenced by the manners of the day. It is, therefore, not
surprising that the student quarter was profoundly affected by the
Romantic movement, and reflected its battles and its extravagances with
a hilarious distortion. The motley world of the Quartier Latin and those
who, though no longer students, remained attached to it had their "local
colour," their Gothic enthusiasms, and their orgies. They had dining
clubs with fantastic names, such as "Les 45 jolis cochons," which
indulged in something very like bump-suppers, with loud singing in the
streets, window-breaking, and practical joking to follow. The campaign
of "Hernani" was imitated in the Salle Chanteraine--a theatre for
amateurs--where there was nightly a _fracas_ with fisticuffs between
the various factions. Elaborate farces were organized to mystify the
good people of Paris, of which Maxime du Camp gives a good example in
his "Souvenirs Littéraires." It was called "La grande chevauchée de la
côtelette aux cornichons." Thirty young men, dressed in velvet
waistcoats and nankeen jackets, with long hair and beards, headed by a
certain young teacher of history waving a stick, marched solemnly in
serried single file with a halting step, dangling their arms at the same
time, from the Place Pigalle over the Pont Royal, crying in unison, "Une
deux, une deux, le choléra, le choléra!" At the end of the Pont Royal
they turned round in a body and shouted, "Connaissez-vous le thermomètre
de l'ingénieur Chevalier?" Solemnly facing about again, they proceeded
as before to Sainte-Mandé, where they lunched off pork cutlets.