the new spirit was a certain tumble-down barrack, No. 9 Rue Childebert,
a street on the south side of that beautiful old church
Saint-Germain-des-Prés, and now merged in the Boulevard Saint-Germain.
This house, familiarly called "La Childebert," was five or six stories
high and thoroughly decayed, for its owner, a Madame Legendre, refused
to carry out any repairs. She was justified in this attitude to some
extent by the fact that few of her tenants paid any rent. Indeed,
according to one witness, no man in his senses would have paid any rent
for a room upon the top floor from 1837 onwards. One student, however,
an ingenious fellow called Lepierre, who both lived on the top floor and
paid his rent, succeeded in forcing the stingy lady to repair the roof.
Having been drenched one night during a hard storm, he took his revenge
by removing a portion of his flooring, and hiring all the peripatetic
water-carriers that could be found to pour water down the hole. The
_concierge_ remonstrated, but in vain, and Madame Legendre was sent for
in hot haste. When she arrived in a cab she was gaily serenaded by the
inhabitants, and on proceeding to the flooded room she was horrified to
find Lepierre in the costume of Adam before the Fall, who claimed a
right, he said, to have a bath at his _own_ convenience. Madame Legendre
fled, but the roof was repaired. The gay desperadoes of La Childebert
were capable of carrying through any _charge_, howsoever lurid. One of
the most successful was known as "le nez de Bouginier." Bouginier was an
artist, the size of whose nose inspired his friend Fourreau with the
idea of an exaggerated caricature in which this feature was made
enormous. A stencil was cut and copied, and for many days Bouginier's
nose appeared on all the walls in Paris. It is even alleged that two
parties of students, about to travel in the East and wishing to meet on
the voyage, hit on the simple plan of following Bouginier's nose. The
party starting first took a stencil with them, so that the second
party, leaving a fortnight later, were able to track them to
Marseilles, Malta, Alexandria, and Suez. In a certain medallion in the
Passage du Caire, just south of the Boulevard Bonne Nouvelle,
Bouginier's nose is still immortalized. La Childebert was always "up to"
something, but a certain fancy-dress _conversazione_ completely
convulsed the neighbourhood. The schools of art and poetry dressed
according to their views, and by universal consent the Romantics, for
all they could do in pourpoints, doublets, and general local colour,
were easily beaten by the Classicists. Romulus and Remus with their wolf
and Hercules with the Nemean lion created a _furore_; so great was the
real consternation of the district at the apparition of these wild
beasts that the commissary of police had to intervene. The wolf and the
lion suffered themselves to be led with great docility to his office,
where they turned out to be a great Dane and a mastiff respectively,
painted and padded with diabolical cleverness.
La Childebert was strongly represented in a revellers' club called "Les
Badouillards," that flourished between 1835 and 1838. In "Paris
Anecdote" Privat d'Anglemont, who is the chief authority on the
Childebertian doings, describes the qualifications of a perfect
Badouillard. He had to pass a regular test before entering the bacchic
brotherhood; he had to be strong and agile, a clever and ready boxer,
fencer, and wrestler, he must have proved his courage in several
encounters, shown a fine taste in choreographic fantasy at the
Chaumière and an ability to engage in a duel of slang with any chance
person, and have sworn eternal feud against the sleep and peace of mind
of all _bourgeois_. The initiation was a solemn and trying ceremony. It
began with a copious dinner, followed by a ceaseless absorption of
various liquors till the time came for going to the ball. Here the
candidate stayed all night, behaving as outrageously as possible. He
then adjourned without sleep to breakfast, and passed the rest of the
day in the _cafés_ of the Quartier Latin, drinking, playing billiards,
and flirting. At night the programme was repeated, and if by the third
night he had accepted every challenge, never fallen asleep, nor tumbled
under any table, he was allowed to seek his bed a perfect Badouillard.
For all its light-hearted absurdities La Childebert was not Bohemia, for
its existence belonged rather to that of irresponsible students than of
artists. I only mention it by way of contrast, as I now mention again
Privat d'Anglemont, the author of "Paris Inconnu" and "Paris Anecdote,"
legendary as a Bohemian, but of a very different type. These two curious
and valuable books are a complete study of the seamy side of Paris
during the latter part of Louis Philippe's reign. The life of the
porters in the Halles, the _chiffonniers_, and all the pliers of obscure
trades, with their customs, their dwellings, and their manners, is most
faithfully reproduced in them in a manner which could only have been
made possible by a complete identification of the author with the
subjects of his observation. Such, in fact, was the lifework of Privat
d'Anglemont, a Creole born in Guadeloupe. He became the legendary
_noctambule_ of Paris, realizing, as Charles Monselet says in his
preface to "Paris Anecdote," the popular idea of a Bohemian--that is,
simply an eccentric vagabond. In the sense of the word as used in this
book, he was not a Bohemian at all, for, though he wrote articles and
books upon his experiences, he was in no sense an artist, nor was he
striving to make his life conformable to artistic liberty. He was
animated simply by a gipsy passion for roaming, combined with a taste
for mystery and romancing. Faithful as his books were, he hardly ever
_spoke_ the truth: twenty times he told Théodore de Banville the history
of his life, and each time it was different. Still, he merits a word
here on account of his reputation as the complete Bohemian, a reputation
increased by his being an easy peg on which to hang any fantastic story
that came into a journalist's brain. Théodore de Banville, who first met
him in 1841 and, according to Monselet, idealized him absurdly, gives
some curious recollections of him in "Mes Souvenirs." He was a handsome
man, dark, tall, and slender, rather resembling the elder Dumas. He
passed most of his life wandering about the low quarters of Paris in
complete poverty, often begging a meal from one of the _cabaretiers_ of
the Halles, who all loved him. Yet, de Banville avers, he was not
really unprovided for, since at irregular intervals a relative used to
send him about £200 from America in gold pieces. But Privat d'Anglemont
preferred to live without money, so that he never hesitated in getting
rid of this burden as soon as possible by standing a dinner to all the
poor and hungry women he could find in the tiny inn called the "Bœuf
Enragé," at the bottom of the Rue de la Harpe. Like Gérard de Nerval, he
would set out on a voyage at a moment's notice and without a moment's
preparation, and such was his charm that he had affectionate friends in
the lower quarters of many a French town. Once during his nightly
wanderings he was stopped by some robbers. "But I'm Privat," he said,
roaring with laughter. At which the robbers joined in the laugh, and
invited him to supper. By a ruined hut they sat down to drink the best
champagne in the light of the stars, to smoke, and to tell stories.
Privat delighted his hosts, who invited him to meet them again; but he
shook his head, saying, "N'engageons pas l'avenir."
Privat d'Anglemont, who eventually died of consumption, did little more
than carry on the traditions of the "noctambules," less mischievously
than their founder, Rétif de la Bretonne, less modestly and artistically
than Gérard de Nerval, but so much more seriously than either of his
predecessors that he left little scope for a new departure to his own
successor, Alfred Delvau. He was not, in the truest sense, a Bohemian,
though he led an existence ever bordering on the confines of Bohemia.
The same may be said, in a more transitory sense, of Flaubert, the great
renovator and refiner of Romanticism. Most of his life was spent in the
country, but there was a short period when he came to study law in
Paris, which, if it were not mentioned, might justify a challenge from
readers familiar with "L'Education Sentimentale" or Maxime du Camp's
"Souvenirs Littéraires." So far as the first of these books is
concerned, little time need here be spent in finding relevant points of
comparison. The last thing which Flaubert desired to portray in that
depressing picture was an existence in any sense artistic. His hero is a
provincial youth who, during his student days in Paris, drifts aimlessly
and indolently through a variety of second-rate experiences in company
with second-rate friends. Flaubert's own experiences are, no doubt,
frequently worked into the material, but "L'Education Sentimentale" is
nothing so cheap as autobiography served in a thin sauce of fiction. It
is a novel in which the author has with the highest exercise of
penetrative imagination treated what Mr. Henry James would call the
"germ"--the dreary wastefulness, that is, of such a life in case of such
a young man as Frédéric Moreau, who with Madame Bovary is Flaubert's
contribution to the pathology of _le mal romantique_. Flaubert himself,
with all his excitability and extravagance, was of a much stronger
stamp; the strength of his artistic conviction saved him from all such
flabbiness. He came to Paris to study law, but, having failed to pass
his examination, returned to his home in 1843. If he had stayed he might
easily have become one of the leading figures, certainly a powerful
influence, in that Bohemia which Murger knew. Maxime du Camp, who made
his acquaintance early in 1843, shows him as a young man living always
at a high pitch with the flamboyant vitality that would have done no
dishonour to the Impasse du Doyenné, so far was he from being the victim
of Frédéric's weak-kneed desolation. He passed his days in an
alternation of prodigality and poverty, spending fifty francs on his
dinner one day and feeding on a crust and a slab of chocolate the next.
He lived in a kind of intellectual tornado, both frantic and noisy. He
went into ecstasies over mediocre works in which he perceived beauties
hidden from the rest of the world, but which he loved to point out
stridently to his friends, intoning the prose, roaring the verse at the
top of his voice, repeating incessantly any word which took his
passionate fancy, and filling all the neighbourhood with his din. He
would wake up a friend without compunction at three in the morning to
show him a moonlight effect on the Seine; one moment he would be
inventing sauces to make brill appetizing, and the next he would be
plotting to smack Gustave Planche's face for having spoken slightingly
of Victor Hugo. The _cénacle_ composed of Louis de Cormenin, Le
Poitevin, Du Camp, and himself often dined at Dagneaux's, one of the
better restaurants of the Quartier Latin, and stayed talking ceaselessly
till the doors were closed. Their ambitions were as wild as their
conversation; Flaubert and Du Camp seriously determined to learn
everything between the ages of twenty-one and thirty, to produce great
works till forty, and then to retire into the country. Except for the
fact that, according to his friend, Flaubert disdained the women whom
his beauty attracted, this was a promising beginning for Bohemia. As the
world knows, fate decreed otherwise, and he retired to develop in that
close intellectual atmosphere with Louis Bouilhet and Du Camp, of which
the latter says: "Living as we did, in solitude, we exchanged only the
same set of ideas apart from all criticism, so that things in general
lost their right proportion in our minds."
Flaubert's life in the Rue de l'Est was, at best, only a tentative
pathway in Bohemia, like one of those tracks in a suburb that give hope
of leading somewhere, but change their mind _en route_. It is too small
a digression to be distracting, and I entered upon it, among other
reasons, because its little adventure coincides in date with those
movements in the central market-place yet to be touched on. One more
alley, however, must be taken on the way, for it is, indeed, only just
off the market-place. The name upon its wall is that of Charles
Baudelaire, a well-known figure whose exact relation to Bohemia is,
nevertheless, not so easy to determine. He began very much in the manner
of Flaubert, coming as a student to the Quartier Latin and residing at a
not very strictly kept _pension_ near the Panthéon between 1839 and
1841, his eighteenth and his twentieth years. I need not repeat the
distinction made between student life--_das Burschenleben_--and
out-and-out Bohemianism. Baudelaire filled his days to their fullest
extent, mixing together indiscriminately the enjoyments of student,
dandy, and _viveur_, so far as his means allowed. It was only at the end
of this time that his determination to take up literature scandalized
his stepfather and caused his enforced sea voyage. When he returned in
1842 he had come of age and possessed a capital of 75,000 francs. He set
about spending this money with a gusto and in a manner not unworthy of
the golden age of Bohemia. He had various lodgings till he settled for
two years in a beautiful apartment in the old Hôtel Pimodan on the Île
St.-Louis, where his comrade was the painter Boissard, a good artist
who, as Gautier said, exhausted himself in enthusiasms, and in whose
wonderful Louis XIV salon the society of _hachischiens_ met. Had
Baudelaire been a true Bohemian at heart he might have instituted a
second _Bohème galante_, but he was wanting in that simplicity and
goodfellowship which are signal qualities in the Bohemian character. He
wished to make his life, like his art, a study in exquisite intensity,
so that in the days of his splendour his mode of living was rather that
of a "dandy" than anything else. He dressed with immense care, but in a
bygone fashion; he pursued every kind of sensation, frequented every
kind of society, and became the leader of a set who carefully cultivated
eccentricity for its own sake, an eccentricity too _posé_ to serve as a
type of Bohemian manners. To make himself a subject of astonishment was
his chief amusement, to which end his devices--such as entering a
restaurant with a friend and feigning to begin a story with the loud
exordium: "After I had murdered my poor father----"--were innumerable.
So much may be said with a certain pity or amusement, but it must also
be admitted that a certain refinement, both social and intellectual,
kept him from associating himself entirely with the not
over-discriminating Bohemia of his generation. It is all the more fair
to say this because after 1844, when his stepfather got a guardian
appointed to take charge of his remaining capital and he was reduced to
eking out a reduced income by journalism, with all its attendant
disappointments and hardships, he chose with some discrimination the
extent to which he would throw in his lot with the Bohemian life for
which he had by that time every qualification. He became a friend of
Murger and many other complete Bohemians, and there is a story of his
asking the original of Schaunard to dine and giving him a piece of Brie
cheese and two bottles of claret, asking him to imagine that he was
enjoying the dessert after a good dinner. Yet his real intimates were a
band of young men, Théodore de Banville, Charles Monselet, Villiers de
l'Isle Adam, and Leconte de l'Isle, who chose to maintain a certain
amount of order in the midst of eccentricity and found boisterous
joviality less to their taste than the more delicate affectations of
wit. Here again I hold no brief for the complete Bohemians. They had
their compensating virtues, but it is hardly doubtful that Baudelaire
and his friends were the better educated and the more truly artistic set
of the two. This, perhaps, was the greatest tragedy of Bohemia's
decline, that its spiritual distinction faded with its material
well-being. At any rate, for a combination of reasons, laudable and the
reverse, Baudelaire's set was not Bohemia, and if, as I leave them, I
may insist particularly on one of the less laudable reasons, it is that
pose, which is another form of convention, must by the very conception
of Bohemia be excluded from its characteristics. Nadar hits the
difference when, in his curious little book on Baudelaire, which is
written in an idiom describable as a French version of that elliptical
quaintness associated with our own _Pink 'Un_, he writes: "Avec ces
épileptiques, combien loin du sans façon tout bonhomme, de la simplesse
à la bonne franquette de mon autre bande de Bohème, 'la bande de Murger'
et de notre 'Société des buveurs d'eau.' ..."
We return, then, to the author of "Scènes de la Vie de Bohème" at the
end of a rather circuitous route. In speaking of the Bohemia which he
immortalized I have called it, in distinction from certain modifications
or superficial resemblances, the central market-place, but no more need
be sought in that phrase than an effort to represent it by a handy image
as exhibiting the main civic qualities and manners implied in the
generic name. Compared with earlier days, a far less proud and bustling
burgherdom trod its rather muddy paving-stones, for it had suffered as
some agricultural centre when railways were beginning. Yet any pride of
succession which they may have had was legitimately theirs, for, if they
were less materially and intellectually endowed, if the peculiarly happy
circumstances of their civic foundation had passed to make their
ultimate disruption certain under the changed conditions of all that is
included in social development, they still preserved the Bohemian
character, with its simplicity, gaiety, humour, and courage. To labour
the point further is unnecessary, for if it is not already clear, the
fault is too remote to be here corrected. In the "Scènes de la Vie de
Bohème" all the daily comedy and tragedy of this Bohemia of common
mortality finds expression: the life there described so intimately and
humorously stands or falls by its artistic truth, to which no amount of
possible documentary corroboration adds an iota. Nevertheless, the
professed concession to a desire for ascertainable "facts" with which
this chapter opened must be made, at the risk of seeming to expose the
vanity of the researcher as the real object of indulgence. Since, in the
garrulous world of to-day, nobody can make the least incursion into the
public eye, much less produce a successful book or picture, without the
appearance of a crop of "personal notes," so Murger's picture may be
taken for granted, and what follows may appear in the light of "personal
notes," claiming no more connexion than a general relation to the
picture.
Murger[28] was no son of a landed proprietor nor even sprung from a
middle-class family, as most Bohemians naturally were, for the whole
life of Bohemia presupposes a more or less literary education seldom
vouchsafed to the children of lower social order. His father was a
German tailor in the Rue des Trois Frères, who wished, not without
reason, that his son should succeed him in his trade. Murger's early
education was therefore confined to the rudiments, and his deficiencies
in that respect were a burden upon him all his life. The career of a
tailor, for all that, aroused his utmost aversion; through his two
friends, Emile and Pierre Bisson, who became clerks, he acquired a
violent taste for poetry, with the composition of which he judged the
shears incompatible. His father took the rebellion hardly, but got him a
place, since he liked pens and paper so much, as errand-boy to an
_avoué_, an occupation in which he continued to cultivate his poetic
inclinations. When seventeen years old, in 1839, through the interest of
M. de Jouy, a critic and member of the Academy, he was appointed
secretary to a Russian diplomat, M. de Tolstoi. His salary was only 40
francs a month, out of which he had to pay a small _pension_ to his
father for board and lodging; still, he was happy. His duties were very
light, and his employer, who also had a literary turn, took a certain
amount of interest in him and gave him occasional presents of money.
During the next two years he made the acquaintance of that group of
friends on which he drew for his stories of Bohemia, and experienced two
love affairs. The first object of his affections was "la cousine
Angèle," the heroine of a chapter in "Scènes de la Vie de Bohème," in
which Rodolphe in his draughty garret, by dint of burning his great
tragedy in the stove, warms himself sufficiently to write the
commemorative poem for the tombstone of a defunct _bourgeois_, buying
with the proceeds a bunch of white violets for his disdainful cousin.
The second was a certain Marie, who eventually ran away with one of his
friends--a tragedy which he relates in "Scènes de la Vie de Jeunesse."
By this time he had become a thoroughly developed Bohemian, intolerant
of all restraint. He left his father's home, and even for a time gave up
his post with M. de Tolstoi.
It was then that Henry Murger's Bohemia was definitely formed, a society
described by one of them as "ce demi-quarteron de poètes à l'outrance,
mais absolument inédits, réunis dans un tas, sans vestes ni semelles, ne
doutant de rien, ni de leur lendemain, ni de leur génie, ni du génie de
leur voisin, ni de l'éditeur à venir, ni du succès, ni des belles dames,
ni de la fortune--de rien, si ce n'est de leur dîner du soir, trop
convaincus, d'ailleurs, quant à la question de leur déjeuner du matin."
Their names were the brothers Bisson, Lelioux, Noel, Nadar, Guilbert,
Vastine, the brothers Desbrosses, Cabot, Villain, Tabar, Chintreuil,
Pottier, Karol, Schann, and Vernet. They called themselves the "Société
des Buveurs d'Eau," but they were by no means so quixotic as Murger
draws that society in "Scènes de la Vie de Bohème." It was simply a
union for mutual help, the rules of which did not bar any commercial
occupation. The members lived as they pleased or as they could, and
water was only a compulsory beverage at the official monthly meetings,
when they all submitted their work to the criticism of their brethren.
Their ordinary occupations were various enough. Noel gave drawing
lessons; another was a judicial stenographer; Jacques Desbrosses,
nicknamed Christ--the original of "Jacques D----" in "Scènes de la Vie
de Bohème"--and Cabot drew designs for monumental masons; the other
Desbrosses, called Gothique, earned a little money by painting
door-signs for midwives; Schann, the original of Schaunard, was a
musician, and Wallon, Murger's Colline, who joined the society later,
eked out his barren philosophy by giving lessons; Chintreuil, afterwards
to become a well-known artist, was then a bookseller's assistant, with
Champfleury for his colleague; and Nadar, otherwise F. Tournachon, whom
Alphonse Karr describes as "a kind of giant with immense legs, long
arms, a long body with a shaggy head of red hair above it, and staring,
intelligent, flashing eyes," was the poet and journalist who became a
celebrated balloonist and an immensely successful photographer. His
caricature hangs in the section of the Musée Carnavalet devoted to early
aeronautics in Paris.