with humorous fortitude on the credit of her occasional smiles, but
there was no illusion about the privations. Nadar, Champfleury, and
Delvau all agree that a bitter wind blew upon them. It was not so bad,
in Nadar's opinion, so long as they lived more or less together, and
this they did for a short time in an old house by the Barrière d'Enfer,
which looked like a farm with a farmyard inhabited by hens. Champfleury
made their acquaintance at this time in a little dairy where they
sometimes took their meals. It was a strange society. Some wore blouses,
others Phrygian caps, while the brothers Desbrosses had large sky-blue
overcoats, turned back with pink satin and fastened by huge
mother-of-pearl buttons. These two brothers were the originators of the
colony at the Barrière d'Enfer, and its chiefs "surtout par leur
misère." They harboured some of the others, who found a resting-place
for the night in two hammocks slung in their small room. Murger was
among them, the art of painting being for the moment his preoccupation.
Fine days were spent lounging on the roof and contemplating the then
rural surroundings. Anybody arriving with five francs in his pocket
would have been regarded as a millionaire; indeed, they were happy
enough when they could afford a few fried potatoes for dinner. Yet they
would not have exchanged their hovel for the Garden of Eden, and they
fed upon their dreams with inexhaustible confidence. Privation was still
worse when the society broke up. One Bohemian lived a whole week on raw
potatoes brought by his poor mother from the country; another went three
days without food; another passed a winter shirtless in a calico blouse
and a lasting waistcoat; another, as a device to keep himself warm, used
to carry a log of wood up to his high garret, drop it over the
banisters, and run down to fetch it again; an older Bohemian who heard
of this manœuvre exclaimed: "Spendthrift, why the log?"
Henry Murger himself, who had abandoned painting and definitely adopted
the vocation of a sentimental poet, went to live with his friend
Lelioux, first in the Rue Montholon and then in that garret at £4 a year
in the Rue de la Tour d'Auvergne where Rodolphe's friends "drank badly
filtered water out of eclectic earthenware" at his Wednesday receptions.
He had resumed his employment with M. de Tolstoi, but he was too
improvident to keep out of misery for many days together. More than once
he became so ill with purpura, an eruptive disease due in his case to
the abuse of coffee, that he had to go to the hospital. Some extracts
from his letters during these years will give an idea of his
destitution. On December 14, 1841, he writes:
"Les Desbrosses passent la moitié de la journée à ne pas manger et
l'autre à crever de froid. Les chats se méfient d'eux, et, en fait
de chéminée, ils ne possèdent que leurs pipes--bien des fois sans
tabac."
March 6, 1842:
"Sans le Christ, qui m'a donné à dîner et à déjeuner quatre fois la
semaine, je ne sais pas ce que je serais devenu. Ce garçon n'a pas
volé son surnom."
April 25, 1843:
"Nous crevons de faim; nous sommes au bout du rouleau. Il faut
décidément se faire un trou quelque part ou se faire sauter la
cervelle."
March 17, 1844:
"De Charybde en Sylla, mon cher ami! La misère est plus horrible
que jamais chez moi et autour de moi. Ma place au _Commerce_ n'a
pas eu de suite; je suis de nouveau sur le pavé. C'est horrible!
Aussi le découragement m'a-t-il pris et tout à fait submergé.
Encore quelques jours de cette position et je me fais sauter la
cervelle ou je m'engage dans la marine.--Pardonne-moi ces plaintes!
C'est le cri de la _fin_."
Like Colline, he punned even in his misery.
Letters of this doleful nature do not throw a very gay light upon the
Bohemian market-place, where there was high competition for a small
custom and prices ruled low. They contain a truth which no consideration
of Bohemia can omit, but it was not the whole truth, as Murger himself
testifies in his stories. It was a life of good days as well as bad,
even in the leanest years, or "Scènes de la Vie de Bohème" could never
have been written. Murger himself had already begun to hand some small
wares over his counter. Rodolphe, the poet, it will be remembered, did
not disdain to edit a small fashion paper called _L'Écharpe d'Iris_, in
which, to Colline's extravagant delight, he inserted the philosopher's
articles on metaphysics. This was a direct touch from life, for Bohemia
in more than one instance lent its pen to trade. There was a certain
Charles Vincent who edited two papers of the leather trade, _Le
Moniteur de la Cordonnerie_ and the _Halle aux Cuirs_. In his editorial
capacity he retained all the new pairs of boots and shoes sent in by
advertisers, and with these he often paid his contributors. Murger in
1843 edited _Le Moniteur de la Chapellerie_, the industrial fruits of
which were, no doubt, less profitable, but even a few hats and a few
francs a month were of considerable value in Bohemia. They were, of
course, nothing like the editorial profits of to-day. Receipts were
extremely precarious, when, even on a well-written literary paper like
_L'Artiste_, the application of a contributor for payment caused a
considerable rummaging in tills and pockets before twenty-five francs
could be found _dans la boutique_.[29] Yet small change was enough to
stand a Bohemian holiday, and Murger's gloomy letters must be discounted
by balancing them against Rodolphe's expedition to Versailles with
Mademoiselle Laure after he had ransacked Paris for the five francs
necessary to do that expedition in sufficient style. It would be absurd
to suppose that Murger, with Nadar, Schann, and a _grisette_ or two, did
not sometimes invade the Chaumière in a joyous band or wake from sleep
the serious inhabitants of the Rue de la Tour d'Auvergne.
At the same time, howsoever the balance of pleasure and pain be struck,
it is clear that happy memories of this Bohemia could only remain to
those for whom it was only a necessary stage in life and not a
death-trap. This tendency to poetic melancholy and the painful slowness
with which he worked might have caused Henry Murger to sink for ever
like many of his friends. He was saved, in the first instance, by
Champfleury, who, when he was finally sold up in the Rue de la Tour
d'Auvergne, took him to live in the Rue de Vaugirard and induced him to
abandon poetry for prose. Jules Husson-Fleury, who was born at Laon in
1821 and became a well-known writer under the name of Champfleury, a
great collector of prints and porcelain, on which he wrote some valuable
monographs, and finally the director of the Sèvres manufactory, passed
through Bohemia during the same years as Murger, and in his "Souvenirs
et Portraits de Jeunesse" records many lively experiences. He first came
to Paris as shop-boy and assistant in a bookseller's shop where, as I
have already said, the future painter Chintreuil was in the same
service. Champfleury lost his place for reading the books on his errands
instead of delivering them to the customers, but during this year 1839
he saw something of Murger and the colony of the brothers Desbrosses. He
then left Paris for a year or two, and returned when Murger was living
in the Rue de la Tour d'Auvergne, though the acquaintance was not at
once renewed. It was approximately in 1845 that they went to live
together in the Rue de Vaugirard, after Champfleury had met Murger
again in the hospital. They did not by any means leave Bohemia; in fact,
there is reason to suppose that to some extent the character of Marcel
was drawn from Champfleury. They wrote a vaudeville together which was
never accepted, and attacked the difficult art of writing stories.
Murger was able to place some of his work in _L'Artiste_, the editor of
which was Arsène Houssaye, and in 1846 the "Scènes de la Vie de Bohème"
began to come out in _Le Corsaire_. They were poorly enough paid at the
time, but their dramatisation by Barrière in 1849 proved a huge success,
and from that time onwards Murger settled down to more serious work and
a less disorderly life.
But I am anticipating Champfleury's memories of the last days of
Bohemia. In his view, at any rate so far as Murger and he were
concerned, the indolence of Bohemia has been much exaggerated. "In
reality," he says, "work was the basis of our life." They had a joint
library, to which Murger supplied the poets and Champfleury the
prose-writers. The latter read voraciously to educate himself, but
Murger chiefly thumbed the pages of Victor Hugo and Alfred de Musset; he
took regular doses of Shakespeare in a French translation, traces of
which appear in "Scènes de la Vie de Bohème," but he had little
knowledge of other classic authors. He worked with extraordinary
difficulty; a page of prose cost him a night's work and intense
intellectual labour, for "Murger n'était plein que de son cœur."
Champfleury, for all his friendship, was a shrewd critic when he
observed that his whole vision was introspective: "He swept the same
chimney so often that in the end the plaster came off and the bricks
fell down"; or again: "Besides his little library, his belongings
consisted of worn white gloves, a velvet mask, and a withered bouquet
hung on the walls. All Murger's work lies in his memories--some faded
flowers, a meeting at the Bal de l'Opéra, a heart-ache."
Certain disorders of Bohemia are not excused by Champfleury,
particularly that of not paying debts. His friend Fauchéry, an engraver
who afterwards went to seek his fortune in Australia, induced him at
first to accept the Bohemian code, which was:
1. Never to pay one's rent.
2. To conduct one's removals by the window.
3. To consider all bootmakers, tailors, hatters, and restaurant-keepers
as members of Mr. Credit's family.
Some went so far as to maintain that after a clandestine removal through
the window no piece of furniture which had passed the gutter in the
middle of the street could be reclaimed by the proprietor. This less
creditable attitude of Bohemia, which is sufficiently prominent in
"Scènes de la Vie de Bohème," was repudiated with some shame in after
years by many of Murger's friends. In the book Rodolphe pays his debts
when he settles down, and we have it on the authority of Delvau that
Schann (Schaunard), who eventually kept a respectable toy-shop, and the
original of Musette, who married a chemist, took in their later days a
more usual view of money matters. Champfleury confesses that he himself
was saved by an amiable girl, who for a time became the divinity of his
garret. Unlike Mimi and Musette, she had a horror of debt and
vagabondage and inspired him with a pleasure in his own humble hearth,
so that he gradually detached himself from his comrades, who were for
the most part so ill provided for in the matter of lodging that their
chief workroom was a _café_, where they arrived at nine in the morning,
to leave at midnight. They read the newspapers, played at dominoes or
_tric-trac_, and occasionally did a little work. Fauchéry, in
particular, caused considerable surprise among the regular customers by
bringing his whole engraving apparatus and solemnly setting to work.
Some respect certainly is due to the proprietors of these little
eating-houses who so gallantly put up with and gave credit to this noisy
and not very profitable _clientèle_, who were capable of perpetrating
all the outrages committed by Rodolphe and the rest in their constant
asylum, the Café Momus.
Champfleury says little of the amiable goddess who rescued him from
vagabondage except that she left him, like Mimi, because she grew tired
of cheap muslin, but in another chapter he gives some account of two
other idols of Bohemia whom he calls Mademoiselle M. and Mademoiselle P.
Mademoiselle M. was dark and merry, a thorough coquette who laughed at
wounded hearts; Mademoiselle P. was fair and melancholy, always in tears
for the last lover who had left her. A generation of Bohemians were
their lovers, poets and painters especially. As the generation grew up
the divinities grew wiser, and Mademoiselle M. was the first to do a
little mental arithmetic. For her own friends who had a future the days
of idleness were over; there was no future for her either among the
stranded remainder or in a new generation. Accordingly she departed to
more profitable spheres. Mademoiselle P. stayed a little longer, still
loving her poets, and weeping _toutes les larmes de son corps_ to find
that she had a too formidable rival in the desire for fame which watched
at the door of her lovers' hearts, till finally she found a worthy man
who was no poet to love her and eventually to marry her. Mademoiselle
M., meanwhile, had made by her conquests quite a respectable capital,
with which one fine day she set sail for Algiers. Unhappily she left
Marseilles in a steamer which sank with all hands, so that she and her
gold came to rest at the bottom of the sea--a sad story from which
Champfleury in an unworthy moment makes some show of drawing a moral.
Neither of these young women can be identified with Murger's heroines.
Musette, as I have said, married a chemist; Phémie Teinturière,
Schaunard's choice, was according to Delvau, a not over-respectable
person resembling a heroine of Paul de Kock; as for Mimi, Delvau
asserts that Murger loved her while he wrote the "Scènes de la Vie de
Bohème," and that her life and wretched death are matters of fact.
However, that we may not be too lugubrious let me add that I have read
in the French equivalent of "Notes and Queries" a statement that she
cheerfully lived to keep a stall in the market.
One more bead in this string of scattered "facts," and the hungerers for
documentary evidence must go away satisfied. The disorder of Bohemia
requires no emphasis, but it is curious to note that the persons in whom
its more orderly elements were incarnated were Champfleury himself and
the original of that odd figure, Carolus Barbemuche, the solemn young
tutor who in Murger's story glances so enviously at the _cénacle_ of
Rodolphe, Schaunard, and Marcel in the Café Momus, who saves them from
disaster by paying for their reckless Christmas Eve supper, who demands
so humbly the privilege of being admitted to the clan, who serves so
long and expensive an apprenticeship and gives such a splendid festival
on his reception, even to the length of lending all his own presentable
clothes to his guests for the occasion. Carolus Barbemuche was drawn,
much to his disgust, from Charles Barbara, an obscure writer of
fantastic stories, who joined Murger's Bohemia after acting as tutor to
two boys. He had a face like a sphinx, rarely smiled, and seemed to be
afraid of the wild jokes of his friends. Unlike the rest, he lived
almost a hermit's life, receiving nobody in his garret, and retiring
there every night neither to read nor to write, but to think, a queer
occupation for a Bohemian. Of him Champfleury writes:
"He and I represented order in a group doomed to disorder; we were
the _bourgeois_ of Bohemia, as much by our ambitions as our manner
of living. The details of one day of our life, which continued in
the same way for ten years, will show the succession of our studies
and our labours. Rising very early, dashing from my bed to my
table, I used to write till nine o'clock. An hour sufficed me for
breakfast and a walk to the library, where I worked till twelve;
there I used to meet Barbara, whom I took to the public lectures at
the Collège de France, the Sorbonne, or the Jardin des Plantes. Two
lectures, an hour each, exhausted our attention, and, resuming our
walk, we arrived at Schann's temple of music, exclusively
consecrated to quartets. Two hours of music every day, without
counting piano trios three times a week at another house, made us
able to read all the chamber music of the German masters....
Barbara was the finest instrumentalist in our band; son and brother
of distinguished musicians, he had received in early youth
excellent violin lessons, the fruit of which was not lost later,
and he brought to the leading of a quartet a restrained emotion
which is to be found in some pages of his writings."
It is an unexpectedly pretty glimpse into a part of Bohemia where Murger
was not at home. When the quartets took place in a little square of the
Quartier Latin, students and _grisettes_ came to listen before the open
window, and workpeople on every story put out their heads to watch for
the arrival of the musicians. Murger's disreputable Schaunard, with his
symphony on _L'influence du bleu dans la musique_, was always, I must
confess, my favourite; but to discover that he played the quartets of
Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and Mendelssohn for two hours a day
with Barbemuche and Marcel--well, it was an intoxicating vision.
Schaunard, who had a passion for lobsters, the composer (in his fleshly
form of Schann) of a famous drinking song, as second violin in a
Beethoven quartet--oh pleasant, pleasant fellow, who truly deserved to
come into the comfortable harbour of a toy-shop!
Marcel, so far as he was Champfleury, found a haven too, and lived till
1889. Colline retired to found a new religion in Switzerland, and
Rodolphe-Murger, though he lingered for some years in the band of
artists and writers who haunted the _brasserie_ where Courbet raised the
temple of realism, finally turned his back on dissipation and settled at
Marlotte, even now a charming village near Fontainebleau. His chief
recreation there was hunting, an occupation quite innocuous to the game,
if it be true that a certain hare survived his attentions for a whole
season, and when an unwary keeper shot it one misty afternoon, he
exclaimed with genuine compunction, "Tiens, c'est le lièvre de M.
Murger!" In 1861 he came to die in Paris of arteritis, and all the
literary world visited his bedside. He died two days after his admission
to the hospital, exclaiming, "Pas de musique! Pas de bruit! Pas de
Bohème!" Bohemia, indeed, had long been dead, and in his last moments he
may have recognized that it was well. There was no longer room for it in
a busier, a better-swept world. In its golden age Bohemia did no more
than share the imperfections of all human institutions. It had virtues,
a liberty, a pride, and an ideal of its own. Murger had seen the beauty
become a slattern, pretty no doubt beneath her smuts, gay in the midst
of her sorrows, but free by tolerance, not by protest, her pride almost
in the dust and her ideals in the possession of others. In the words
which Théodore Pelloquet spoke over his grave, Murger belonged to an
evil generation:
"Il appartenait à une mauvaise génération, à une génération
vieillie avant l'heure, et, malgré sa vieillesse prématurée, sans
expérience, sans enthousiasme et sans colère, ayant de la vanité et
pas du tout d'orgueil, une vanité niaise, puérile, qui se manifeste
surtout par l'affectation d'une ironie mesquine, en face de tous
les enthousiasmes et de toutes les grandes causes; à une
génération, en un mot, qui laissa périr dans ses mains le
magnifique héritage que lui avaient légué les hommes de 1830."
XI
AMUSEMENTS OF BOHEMIA
The pageant of 1830 has passed, and our gaze has been directed to its
Bohemian ingredients with the purpose of noting the particular marks and
qualities which distinguished Bohemia, and how their particular
manifestations were conditioned and varied by the progress of the years.
Looking out of the window of the present, we have been unable at any
moment to call a halt, lest we should lose a comprehensive view of the
main development. Now that this view has been gained it will do no harm
to send the procession once more before the mind's eye, that we may fix
at leisure any less important details which may seem in themselves
attractive. One of the most happy qualities of the Bohemian nature is
its capacity for amusing itself. Real boredom and lackadaisical idleness
do not come into the list of its shortcomings. The passionate Romantics,
indeed, fashionably suffered from "spleen" and "ennui," they proclaimed
a "cœur usé comme l'escalier d'une fille de joie," but the Bohemian,
so far as he indulged in these peculiarities, was amusing himself. To
him "spleen" and "ennui" were part of the game which he embraced with
enthusiasm and in which he desired to excel; yet they were parts to
which, as a general rule, he did not pay too much attention, preferring
the more positive and assertive sides of Romanticism. Neither Gautier
nor Gérard de Nerval nor Rodolphe nor Schaunard presents himself to the
imagination as suffering from boredom. An unfailing capacity for amusing
oneself and finding amusement in one's fellow-men is an essential
Bohemian _trait_. The preceding chapters have not been wholly devoid of
indications as to the way in which these talents were exercised by the
Bohemian clans, but it was necessary to insist rather on the diversions
which characterized the _particular_ spirit of each brotherhood than on
the general opportunities which they all enjoyed with slight variation.
The field is now open without restriction, and it will not be amiss to
take a glimpse here and there at the Bohemian enjoying his leisure, if
only to add a few vivid touches that will enliven the background of the
picture. The work of Bohemia can always be taken for granted; artistic
endeavour, whether actively or indolently pursued, varies but little in
external feature; the change, the colour, the tragedy and comedy are
only to be found within the artist's mind; but the amusement of Bohemia,
so far from being hidden, courts publicity. It takes its colour, too, so
largely from the changing world around that there is great pictorial
value in its easily observable vicissitudes. For that reason I devote
this chapter to the subject of its title without further apology, but
only with the caution that here the accidents rather than the essentials
of Bohemia are regarded. The privilege of amusement is open to
everybody, but to see what Bohemia made of its privileges in that
respect is, perhaps, to quicken it for the imagination by an extra
spark.
Precisians might say that dress hardly comes under the head of
amusements and that on certain views it is more properly included in the
category of necessities or of nuisances. Yet there is no doubt that for
all women--and for more men than would admit it--to be well dressed is
an enjoyment, a term only differing from amusement by a smaller
suggestion of possible frivolity. It is quite a sufficient warrant, at
all events, for giving dress a small part in this chapter; besides, the
costume of any individual or society is both a sure indicator of
qualities and an apt focus for judgment. In England, the very home of
illustrated books and papers, it is not necessary to say much in evoking
the costume of a past age, so that the subject may be treated quite
shortly, especially as regards the men of Bohemia, whose dress was too
often a deplorable tragedy. When Marcel went to Musette's party with
"Mathusalem" buttoned up to the neck over a blue shirt dotted with the
figures of a boar-hunt he was, as Murger says, "dressed in the worst
taste possible." In such a case there is no more to be said; his
appearance would vary little from age to age. To the Bohemian in his
lean days, certainly, it would be an insult to impute enjoyment of his
tattered wardrobe. Those who most enjoyed dressing, without a doubt,
were the Bohemian generation who cheered "Hernani" with such frenzy, for
they made their _pourpoints_, felt sombreros, Robespierre waistcoats,
and Phrygian caps effective details in the general Romantic
demonstration and, as such, matters of intense pleasure. But these
extravagances have already caught our attention; they were part of that
frantic desire for novelty and colour which was a symptom of _le mal
romantique_; their proper complement was that rage for fancy-dress balls
which broke out shortly after 1830 and laid every nationality and period
under contribution for picturesque costumes. So far as the men are
concerned, it need only be pointed out that the general dress of the
time--against which Bohemia stood out at first and into which it
gradually faded--was that of tight pantaloons with straps, long coats
with full skirts and accentuated waists, full cravats, lavish jewellery,
and high hats in a bewildering variety of shapes, cylindrical, conical,
inverted conical, curly, straight, with broad brims and with scarce a
brim at all--the civilian uniform, in fact, of our own late Georgian and
early Victorian era. It was a dress that only a few could wear with
distinction; on the rest it wrinkled and puffed in inevitable ugliness.
A Roger de Beauvoir could look immaculately moulded, but one has only
to glance at the caricatures of Traviés, Monnier, Daumier, and Gavarni
to see how unequivocally hideous were the clothes of an average man. To
be out at elbows in this exacting fashion was indeed to be a sorry
sight, and one can well imagine poor Lucien de Rubempré to have been in
his provincial attire fair game for the sneers of Rastignac and de
Marsay. Still, even the Bohemian had a new suit at times, and it lights
the memory of Arsène Houssaye, Camille Rogier, Murger, Champfleury, and
the rest to recall that it was not for comfortable lounge suits and
flannels that they got into debt, but for correct suits of "tails,"
flowery waistcoats, top-hats, and patent leather boots. It gives a
quaint touch of decorum to the picture of their wildest excesses.