Would you know something of the way in which men live in Paris? Would
you penetrate a little beneath the brilliant, glossy epidermis of the
French capital? Would you know other shadows and other sights than those
you find in "Galignani's Messenger" under the rubric, "Stranger's
Diary"? Listen to us. We hope to be brief. We hope to succeed in
tangling your interest. We don't hope to make you merry,--oh, no, no,
no! we don't hope that! Life isn't a merry thing anywhere,--least of all
in Paris; for, look you, in modern Babylon there are so many calls for
money, (which Southey called "a huge evil" everywhere,) there are so
many temptations to expense, one has to keep a most cool head and a most
silent heart to live in Paris and to avoid debt. Few are able
successfully to achieve this charmed life. The Duke of Wellington, who
was in debt but twice in his life,--first, when he became of age, and,
like all young men, _felt_ his name by indorsing it on negotiable paper,
and placing it in a tradesman's book; secondly, when he lived in Paris,
master of all France by consent of Europe,--the Duke of Wellington
involved himself in debt in Paris to the amount of a million of dollars.
Blücher actually ruined himself in the city he conquered. The last heir
to the glorious name and princely estates of Von Kaunitz lost everything
he possessed, even his dignity, in a few years of life in Paris. Judge
of the resistless force and fury of the great maelström!
And I hope, after you have measured some degree of its force and of its
fury by these illustrious examples, that you may be softened into
something like pity and terror, when I tell you how a poor fellow, who
had no name but that he made with his pen, who commanded no money save
only that he obtained by transmuting ink and paper into gold, strove
against it with various success, and often was vanquished. You will not
judge him too harshly, will you? You will not be the first to throw a
stone at him, neither will you add your stone, to those that may be
thrown at him: hands enough are raised against him! We do not
altogether absolve him for many a shortcoming; but we crave permission
to keep our censure and our sighs for our study. Permit us to forbear
arraigning him at the public bar. He is dead,--and everybody respects
the dead, except profligate editors, prostitutes, and political
clergymen. Besides, his life was such a hard one,--so full of clouds,
with so few gleams of sunshine,--so agitated by storm,--so bereaved of
halcyon days,--'twould be most cruel to deny him the grave's dearest
privilege, peace and quiet. Amen! Amen! with all my heart to thy
benediction and prayer, O priest! as, aspersing his lifeless remains
with holy-water, thou sayest, _Requiescat!_ So mote it be! _Requiescat!
Requiescat! Requiescat in pace!_
Approach, then, reader, with softest step, and we will, in lowest
whispers, pour into your ear the story of the battle of life as 'tis
fought in Paris. We will show you the fever and the heartache, the
corroding care and the panting labor which oppress life in Paris. Then
will you say, No wonder they all die of a shattered heart or consumed
brain at Paris! No wonder De Balzac died of heart-disease! No wonder
Frederic Souliè's heart burst! No wonder Bruffault went crazy, and
Eugene Sue's heart collapsed, and Malitourne lives at the mad-house! It
is killing!
We will show you this life, not by didactic description, but by example,
by telling you the story of one who lived this life. He was born in the
lowest social station, he battled against every disadvantage, the
hospital was his sick-chamber, his funeral was at the Government's
expense, and everybody eminent in literature and art followed his
remains to the grave, over which, after a proper interval of time, a
monument was erected by public subscription to his memory. His father
was a porter at the door of one of the houses in the Rue des Trois
Frères. He added the tailor's trade to his poorly paid occupation. A
native of Savoy, he possessed the mountaineer's taciturnity and love of
home. War carried him to Paris. The rigors of conscription threw him
into the ranks of the army; and when the first Empire fell, the child of
Savoy made Paris his home, married a young seamstress, and obtained the
lodge of house No. 5 Rue des Trois Frères. This marriage gave to French
letters Henry Murger. It had no other issue.
Henry Murger was born March 24th, 1822. His earlier years seemed likely
to be his last; he was never well; his mother gave many a tear and many
a vigil to the sickly child she thought every week she must lose. To
guard his days, she placed him, to gratify a Romish superstition, under
the special protection of the Blessed Virgin, and in accordance with
custom clad him in the Madonna's livery of blue. His costume of a blue
smock, blue pantaloons, and a blue cap procured for him the name of
_Bleuet_, or, as we should perhaps say, Blueling, if indeed we may coin
for the occasion one of those familiar, affectionate diminutives, so
common in the Italian, rarer in the French, and almost unknown in our
masculine tongue. An only child, and an invalid, poor Bleuet was of
course a spoiled child, his mother's darling and pet. His wishes, his
sick-child's caprices were her law, and she gratified them at the cost
of many a secret privation. She seemed to know--maternal love hath often
the faculty of second-sight--that her poor boy, though only the child of
the humblest parentage, was destined to rise one day far above the
station in which he was born. She attired him better than children of
his class commonly dressed. She polished his manners as much as she
could,--and 'twas much, for women, even of the lowest classes, have
gentle tastes and delicacy. She could not bear to think that her darling
should one day sit cross-legged on the paternal bench, and ply needle
and scissors. She breathed her own aspirations into the boy's ears, and
filled his mind with them. O mothers, ye do make us what ye please! Your
tears and caresses are the rain and the sun that mature the seed which
time and the accidents of life sow in our tender minds! She filled him
with pride,--which is a cardinal virtue, let theologians say what they
will,--and kept him aloof from the little blackguards who toss and
tumble over the curb-stones, losing that dignity which is man's
chastity, and removing one barrier between them and crime.
He was, even in his earlier years, exquisitely sensitive. La Blache, the
famous singer, occupied a suite of rooms in the house of which his
father was porter. One day La Blache's daughter, (now Madame Thalberg,)
who was confined to her rooms by a fall which had dislocated her ankle,
sent for the sprightly lad. He was in love with her, just as boys will
adore a pretty face without counting years or differences of position
(at that happy age a statesman and a stage-driver seem equal,--if,
indeed, the latter does not appear to occupy the more enviable position
in life). He dressed himself with all the elegance he could command, and
obeyed Mademoiselle La Blache's summons, building all sorts of castles
in the air as he arranged his toilet and while he was climbing the
staircase. His affected airs were so laughable, she told him in a
mock-heroic manner what she wished of him, and probably with something
of that paternal talent which had shaken so many opera-houses with
applause:--"I have sent for you to teach me the song I hear you sing
every day." This downfall from his castles in the air, and her manner,
brought blushes to his cheek and flames to his eyes, which amused her
all the more; so she went on,--"Oh, don't be afraid! I will pay--two
ginger-cakes a lesson." So sensitive was the child's nature, this
innocent pleasantry wounded him with such pain, that he fell on the
carpet sobbing and with nerves all jangled. How the pangs poverty
attracts must have wrung him!--But let us not anticipate the course of
events.
As he advanced in life he outgrew his disease, and became a
chubby-cheeked boy, health's own picture. He was the favorite of the
neighborhood, his mother's pride, and the source of many a heartache to
her; for, as he grew towards manhood, his father insisted every day more
strenuously that he should learn some trade. His poor mother obstinately
opposed this scheme. Many were the boisterous quarrels on this subject
the boy witnessed, sobbing between his parents; for his father was a
rough, ill-bred mountaineer, who had reached Paris through the barrack
and the battle-field, neither of which tends to smooth the asperities of
character. The woman was tenacious; for what will not a mother's heart
brave? what will it not endure? Those natures which are gentle as water
are yet deep and changeless as the ocean. Of course the wife carried her
point. Who can resist a mother struggling for her son? The boy was
placed as copying-clerk in an attorney's office. All the world over, the
law is the highway to literature. The lad, however, was uneducated; he
wrote well, and this was enough to enable him to copy the law-papers of
the office, but he was ignorant of the first elements of grammar, and
his language, although far better than that of the lads of his class in
life, was shocking to polite ears. It could not well be otherwise, as
his only school was a petty public primary school, and he was but
fourteen years old when his father ordered him to begin to earn his
daily bread. But he was not only endowed with a literary instinct, he
had, too, that obstinate perseverance which would, as one of his friends
said of him, "have enabled him to learn to read by looking at the signs
in the streets, and to cipher by glancing at the numbers on the houses."
Murger always attributed a great deal of influence upon his life to the
accident which had given his father artists for tenants. Not only La
Blache, but Garcia and his incomparable daughters, Marie Malibran and
Pauline Viardot, and, after they left, Baroilhet, the opera-singer, had
rooms in the house. The handsome boy was constantly with them, and this
early and long and intimate association with Art gave him elegance and
grace and vivacity. The seeds sown during such intercourse may for years
lie buried beneath the cares and thoughts of a laborious life, and yet
grow and bring forth fruit as soon as a more propitious atmosphere
environs them. Comrades in the office where he wrote likewise had
influence upon his career. He found among the clerks two brothers,
Pierre and Emile Bisson, gentlemen who have now attained reputation by
their admirable photographic landscapes, especially of Alpine scenery.
They were then as poor and as uneducated as Henry Murger. They lived in
a house inhabited by several painters, from whom they caught a love and
some knowledge of Art. They communicated the contagion to their new
comrade, and the moment office-hours were over all three hastened, as
fast as they could go, to the nearest public drawing-school. All three
aspired to the fame of Rubens and of Paul Veronese. Murger had no talent
for painting. One day, after he had been guilty of some pictures which
are said to be--for they are still in existence--enough to make the hair
of a connoisseur of painting stand on end, Pierre Bisson said to him,
"Throw away the pencil, Murger; you will never make a painter." Murger
accepted the decree without appeal. He felt that painting was not _in
him_.[B] He took up the pen and wrote poetry. There is nothing equal to
the foolhardiness of youth. It grapples with the most difficult
subjects, and _knows_ it can master them. As all of Murger's friends
were painters, except his father and mother, and they were illiterate,
his insane prose seemed as fine poetry as was ever written, because it
turned somersets on feet. Nobody noticed whether it was on five or six
or fifteen feet. His father, however, had heard what a dangerous disease
of the purse poetry was, and forbade his son from trying to catch
it,--vowing, that, if he heard again of its continued pursuit, he would
immediately make a tailor of him. Of course, the threat did not deter
Murger from the chase; but instead of pursuing it openly, he pursued it
by stealth. The sportsman became a poacher. Pierre and Émile Bisson
quitted the attorney's office and opened a studio: they were painters
now. Henry Murger managed to filch an hour every day from the time
allotted to the errands of the office about Paris to spend in the studio
of his friends, where he would write his poetry and hide his
manuscripts. Here he made the acquaintance of artists and literary young
men as unfledged as himself, but who possessed the advantages of a
regular scholastic education. They taught him the rules of prosody and
the exercises proper to overcome the mere mechanical difficulties of
versification. This society made Murger more than ever ambitious; a
secret instinct told him that the pen was the arm with which he would
win fame and fortune. He determined to abandon the law-office.
His father was furious enough at this resolution, and more than one
painful scene took place between them. The boy was within an ace of
bring kicked out of doors, when his troubles reached the ears of a
literary tenant of the house: this was no other than Monsieur de Jouy, a
member of the French Academy, and quite famous in his day for "L'Ermite
de la Chaussée d'Antin," and a tragedy, "Sylla," which Talma's genius
threw such beams upon as made it radiant, and for an imprisonment for
political offences, a condiment without which French reputations seem to
lack savor. Heaven knows what would have become of the poor boy but for
this intervention, as his mother was dead and he was all friendless.
Monsieur de Jouy procured him the place of private secretary to Count
Tolstoy, a Russian nobleman established by the Czar in Paris as his
political correspondent. The salary given was meagre enough, but in this
world all things have a relative as well as an intrinsic value, and
eight dollars a month seemed to the poor lad, who had never yet earned
a cent, a fragment of El Dorado or of Peru. It gave him independence.
His contemporaries have described him as gay, free, easy, and happy at
this period. He had ceased to be dependent upon anybody; he lived upon
his own earnings; he was in the full bloom of health and youth; and the
horizon before him, even though clouded, wore all the colors of the
rainbow. His father gave him a garret in the house, and continued to
allow him a seat at the table, but he made young Murger give him six of
the eight dollars earned. The rest of his salary was spent among the
boxes of books which line the parapet of the Paris quays,--a sort of
literary Morgue or dead-house, where the still-born and deceased
children of the press are exhibited, to challenge the pity of
passers-by, and so escape the corner grocer and the neighboring
trunk-maker. Here Murger purchased all the volumes of new poems he could
discover. When his friends jested him upon his wasteful extravagance in
buying verse good for nothing but to cheapen the value of the paper on
which it was printed, he replied, that a poet should keep himself
informed of the progress of Art. He has since confessed that his object
in buying this trash was simply to compare his efforts with those which
had been deemed worthy to see print. His ambition then was to be pale,
consumptive, to drink the dregs of poverty's poisoned chalice, and to
toss on a hospital-bed. He found it hard work to gratify these desires.
His plethoric person, his rubicund cheeks and high health, gave him much
more the appearance of a jovial monk of Bolton Abbey than of a Werther
or a Chatterton or a Lara. But as he was determined to look the poet of
the Byron school, for a fortnight he followed a regimen "which would
have given phthisis to Mount Atlas"; he studied in some medical treatise
the symptoms of the consumption, and, after wading through thirty miles
of the mud and mire to be found in the environs of Paris, drenched to
the skin by an autumnal rain, he went to the hospital and was admitted.
He was delighted. He instantly wrote an ode to "Hallowed Misery," dated
from the "House of Woe," sent it off to the Atlantic Monthly of Paris,
and lay in bed dreaming he should find himself famous next morning, and
receive the visits of all Paris, from Monsieur Guizot, then
Prime-Minister, to the most callous poetaster of the Latin Quarter, and
be besieged by every publisher, armed with bags full of money. He woke
the next morning to find himself in perfect health, and to hear the
physician order him to clear out of the hospital. He had no news from
the magazine nor from Monsieur Guizot.
'Tis ill playing with edge-tools! The hospital is not to be coquetted
with. There is no such thing as romping with misery. One might as well
amuse himself toying with the rattlesnake or playing with fluoric acid.
Wait a moment, and the hospital will reappear in the story of his life,
sombre, pitiless, fatal, as it is in reality. A little patience, and
misery will come, in its gaunt, wolf-like shape, to harry and to harass.
Play not with fire!
Distress soon came. The young poet fell into bad company. He came home
late one night. His father scolded: 'tis a porter's infirmity to fret at
late-comers. Another night he came home later. The scolding became a
philippic. Again he did not come home at all. His father ordered him
never more to darken his doors. Murger took him at his word, and went to
share a friend's bed in another garret. The friend was little better off
in worldly goods; he lived in a chamber for which he paid twenty dollars
a year, and which was furnished "with one of those lots of furniture
which are the terror of landlords, especially when quarter-day comes."
Murger now began to know what it was to be poor, to go to bed without
having tasted a morsel of food the whole day, to be dressed ludicrously
shabby. He had never before known these horrors of poverty; for under
his father's roof the meals, though humble, were always regularly
served, and quarter-day never came. As eight dollars,--less by a great
deal than an ordinary servant earns by sweeping rooms and washing
dishes, besides being fed and lodged,--which Count Tolstoy gave his
secretary, was not enough to enable Murger to live, he tried to add
something to his income by his pen. He wrote petty tales for children's
magazines, and exerted himself to gain admission into other and more
profitable periodicals, but for a long time without success. Many and
many a sheet must be blotted before the apprentice-writer can merit even
the lowest honors of print: can it be called an honor to see printed
lines forgotten before the book is closed? Yet even this dubious honor
cannot be won until after days and nights have been given to literary
composition.
Murger was for some time uncertain what course to adopt. His father sent
him word that the best thing he could do would be to get the place of
body-servant to some gentleman or of waiter in some _café_! He himself
half determined, in his hours of depression, when despair was his only
hope, to ship as a sailor on board some man-of-war. He would at other
times return to his first love, and vow he would be a painter; then
music would solicit him; medicine next, and then surgery would tangle
his eyes. These excursions, which commonly lasted three months each,
were not fruitless; they increased his stock of information, and
supplied him with some of his most striking images. He became joyous
about this period, and his hilarity _broke out_ all at once. One night
Count Tolstoy had ordered Murger to color several thousand strategic
maps, and, after he had postponed the labor repeatedly, he asked several
of his friends to aid him. They sat up all night. He suddenly became
very gay, and told story after story in a most vivid and humorous
manner. His friends roared with laughter, and one of them begged him to
abandon poetry and become a prose-writer, predicting for him a most
brilliant career. But poetry has its peculiar fascinations, and is not
relinquished without painful throes. Murger refused to cease versifying.
He had pernicious habits of labor. He never rose until three o'clock in
the afternoon, and never began to write until after the lamp was
lighted. He wrote until daybreak. If sleep came, if inspiration lagged,
he would resort to coffee, and drink it in enormous quantities. One may
turn night into day without great danger, upon condition of leading a
temperate and regular life; for Nature has wonderful power of adapting
herself to all circumstances, upon condition that irregularity itself he
regular in its irregularity. He fell into this habit from poverty. He
was too poor to buy fuel and comfortable clothes, so he lay in bed to
keep warm; he worked in bed,--reading, writing, correcting, buried under
the comfortable bedclothes. He would sometimes drink "as many as six
ounces of coffee." "I am literally killing myself," he said. "You must
care me of drinking coffee; I reckon upon you." His room-mate suggested
to him that they should close the windows, draw the curtains, and light
the lamp in the daytime, to deceive habit by counterfeiting night. They
made the attempt in vain. The roar of a great city penetrates through
wall and curtain. They could not work. Inspiration ceased to flow.
Murger returned to his protracted vigils, and to the stimulus of coffee,
and never more attempted to break away from them. This sort of life, his
frequent privations, his innumerable disappointments, drove him in good
earnest to the hospital. He announces it in this way to a friend:--
"_Hospital Saint Louis, 23 May, 1842_.
"MY DEAR FRIEND,--Here I am again at the hospital. Two days after
I sent you my last letter I woke up feeling as if my whole body
were on fire. I felt as if I were enveloped in flames. I was
literally burning. I lighted my candle, and was alarmed by the
spectacle my poor self presented. I was red from my feet to my
head,--as red as a boiled lobster, neither more nor less. So I
went to the hospital this morning, as early as I could go, and
here I am,--Henry IV.'s ward, bed No. 10. The doctors were
astonished at my case; they say it is _purpura_. I should say it
was! The purple of the Roman emperors was not, I am very sure, as
purple as my envelope.... My disease is now in a stage of
reaction, and the doctors do not know what to do, I cannot walk
thirty paces without stumbling. I have thousands of trumpets
blowing flourishes in my ears. I have been bled, re-bled,
mustard-plastered, all in vain. I have swallowed down my poor
throat more arsenic than any three melodramatists of the
Boulevards. I do not know how all this is going to end. The
physician tells me that he will cure me, but that it will take
time. To-day they are going to put all sorts of things on my body,
and among them leeches to remove my giddiness.... I am greatly
fatigued by my life here, and I pass some; very gloomy days,--and
they are the gloomier, because there is not a single day but I see
in the ward next to mine men die thick as flies. A hospital may be
very poetical, but it is, too, a sad, sad place."
Many and many a time afterwards did he return to the hospital, all sad
as it was. His garret was sadder in _purpura's_ hour. Want had taken up
its abode with him. He wanted bread often. His clothes went and came
with painful regularity from his back to the pawnbroker's. His father
refused to do anything for him. "He saw me without bread to put in my
mouth, and offered me not a crumb, although he had money belonging to me
in his hands. He saw me in boots full of holes, and gave me to
understand that I was not to come to see him in such plight." Such was
the poor fellow's distress, that he was almost glad when the _purpura_,
with its intolerable pains, returned, that he might crawl to the
hospital, where he could say, that, "bad as the hospital-fare is, it is
at least certain, and is, after all, ten times better than that I am
able to earn. I can eat as many as two or three plates of soup, but then
I am obliged to change my costume to do so, for it is only by cheating
that one can get it." But all the time he was in the hospital he was
tormented by the fear that he would lose during his absence his wretched
place as Count Tolstoy's secretary, and which, wretched as it was,
nevertheless was something,--was as a plank in the great ocean to one
who, it gone, saw nothing but water around him, and he no swimmer. He
did lose the situation, because one day he stayed at home to finish a
poem, instead of appearing at his desk. The misfortune came at the worst
possible time. It came when he owed two quarters' rent, fifteen dollars,
to his landlord, and ten dollars to other people. "I am half dead of
hunger. I am at the end of the rope. I must get a place somewhere, or
blow my brains out." The mental anguish and physical privation brought
back the _purpura_. He went to the hospital,--for the fifth time in
eleven months and seven days,--all his furniture was sold for rent, and
he knew not where he was to go when he quitted the hospital. Yet he did
not give up in despair. "Notwithstanding all this, I declare to you, my
dear friend," he wrote, "that, when I feel somewhat satisfied with what
I have written, I am ready to clap my hands at life.... Everything is
against me, and yet I shall none the less remain in the arena. The wild
beasts may devour me: so be it!"
After leaving the hospital, he formed the acquaintance of Monsieur Jules
Fleury, or, as he is better known to the world of letters, Monsieur
Champfleury,--for, with that license the French take with their names,
so this rising novelist styles himself. This acquaintance was of great
advantage to Henry Murger. Monsieur Champfleury was a young man of
energy and will, who took a practical view of life, and believed that a
pen could in good hands earn bread as well as a yardstick, and command,
what the latter cannot hope, fame. He believed that independence was
the first duty of a literary man, and that true dignity consists in
diligent labor rather than in indolent railing at fate and the scoffings
of "uncomprehended" genius. Monsieur Champfleury was no poet. He
detested poetry, and his accurate perception of the world showed him
that poetry is a good deal like paper money, which depends for its
current value rather upon the credit possessed by the issuer than upon
its own intrinsic value. He pressed Murger to abandon poetry and take to
prose. He was successful, and Murger labored to acquire bread and
reputation by his prose-compositions. He practised his hand in writing
vaudevilles, dramas, tales, and novels, and abandoned poetry until
better days, when his life should have a little more silk and a little
more gold woven into its woof. But the hours of literary apprenticeship
even of prose-writers are long and arduous, especially to those whose
only patrimony is their shadow in the sun. Monsieur Champfleury has
given in one of his works an interesting picture of their life in
common. We translate the painful narration:--
"T'other evening I was sitting in my chimney-corner looking over a
mountain of papers, notes, unfinished articles, and fine novels
begun, but which will never have an end. I discovered amid my
landlords' receipts for house-rent (all of which I keep with great
care, just to prove to myself that they are really and truly paid)
a little copy-book, which was narrow and long, like some mediæval
piece of sculpture. I opened this little blue-backed copy-book; it
bore the title, ACCOUNT-BOOK. How many memories were contained in
this little copy-book! What a happy life is literary life, seen
after a lapse of five or six years! I could not sleep for thinking
of that little copy-book, so I rose and sat down at my table to
discharge on these sheets all the delightful blue-backed copy-book
memories which haunted my head. Were any stranger to pick up this
little copy-book in the street, he would think it belonged to some
poor, honest family. I dare say you have forgotten the little
copy-book, although three-fourths of its manuscript is in your
hand-writing. I am going to recall its origin to you.
"Nine years ago we lived together, and we possessed between us
fourteen dollars a month. Full of confidence in the future, we
rented two rooms in the Rue de Vaugirard for sixty dollars a year.
Youth reckons not. You spoke to the porter's wife of such a
sumptuous set of furniture that she let the rooms to you on your
honest face without asking references. Poor woman, what thrills of
horror ran through her when she saw our furniture set down before
her door! You had six plates, three of which were of porcelain, a
Shakspeare, the works of Victor Hugo, a chest of drawers in its
dotage, and a Phrygian cap. By some extraordinary chance, I had
two mattresses, a hundred and fifty volumes, an arm-chair, two
plain chairs, a table, and a skull. The idea of making a grand
sofa belongs to you, I confess; but it was a deplorable idea. We
sawed off the four feet of a cot-bedstead and made it rest on the
floor; the consequence of which was, that the cot-bedstead proved
to be utterly worthless. The porter's wife took pity upon us, and
lent us a second cot-bedstead, which 'furnished' your chamber,
which was likewise adorned with several dusty souvenirs you hung
on the wall, such as a woman's glove, a velvet mask, and various
other objects which love had hallowed.
"The first week passed away in the most delightful manner. We
stayed at home, we worked hard, we smoked a great deal. I have
found among this mountain of papers a blank sheet on which is
written,--
Beatrix,
A Drama in Five Acts,
By Henry Murger,
Played at the ---- Theatre on the ---- day of 18--.
This sheet was torn out of an enormous blank copy-book; for you
were guilty of the execrable habit of using all our paper to write
nothing else but titles of dramas; you wrote 'Played' as seriously
as could be, just to see what effect the title-page would produce.
Our paper disappeared too fast in this way. Luckily, when all of
it had disappeared, you discovered, Heaven knows where or how,
some old atlas of geography whose alternate leaves were blank,--a
discovery which enabled us to do without the stationer.
"Hard times began to press after the first week flew away. We had
a long discussion, in which each hurled at the other reproaches on
the spendthrift prodigality with which we threw away our money.
The discussion ended in our agreeing, that, the moment the next
instalment of our income should be received, I should keep a
severe account of our expenses, in order that no more quarrels
should disturb the harmony of our household, each of us taking
care every day to examine the accounts. This is the little book I
have found. How simple, how touching, how laconic, how full of
souvenirs it is!
"We were wonderfully honest on the first of every month. I read at
the date of November 1st, 1843, 'Paid Madame Bastien forty cents
for tobacco due.' We paid, too, the grocer, the restaurant, (I
declare there is 'restaurant' on the book!) the coal-dealer, etc.
The first day of this month was a merry day, I see: 'Spent at the
_café_ seven cents'; a piece of extravagance for which I am sure
you must have scolded me that evening. The same day you bought
(the sight still makes me tremble!) thirteen cents' worth of
pipes. The second of November we bought twenty-two cents' worth of
ribbon: this enormous quantity of ribbon was purchased to give the
last touches to our famous sofa. Our sofa's history would fill
volumes. It did us yeoman's service. My pallet on the floor,
formed of one single mattress and sheets without counterpane, made
a poor show in our 'drawing-room,' especially as a
restaurant-keeper lived in our house, and you pretended, that, if
we made him bring our meals up to our 'drawing-room,' he would be
so dazzled by our splendor he could not refuse us credit. I
demurred, that the odd appearance of my pallet had nothing capable
of fascinating a tradesman's eye; whereupon we agreed that we
would spread over it a piece of violet silk which came, Heaven
knows where from; but, unfortunately, the silk was not large
enough by one-third. After long reflection we thought the library
might be turned to some account: the quarto volumes of Shakspeare,
thrown with cunning negligence on the pallet, hid the narrowness
of the silk, and concealed the sheets from every eye. We managed
in this way to contrive a sofa. I may add, that the keeper of the
restaurant dedicated to the 'Guardian Angel,' who had no customers
except hack-drivers and bricklayers, was caught by our innocent
intrigues. On this same second of November we paid an immense sum
of money to the laundress,--one whole dollar. I crossed the Pont
des Arts, proud as a member of the Institute, and entered with a
stiff upper-lip the Café Momus. You remember this beneficent
establishment, which we discovered, gave half a cup of coffee for
five cents, until bread rose, when the price went up to six cents,
a measure which so discontented many of the frequenters that they
carried their custom elsewhere. I passed the evening at Laurent's
room. I must have been seized with vertigo,--for I actually lost
ten cents at _écarté_, ten cents which we had appropriated to the
purchase of roasted chestnuts. Poor Laurent, who was such a
democrat, who used to go 'at the head of the schools' to see
Béranger, is dead and gone now! His poems were too revolutionary
for this world.
"You resolved on the third of November that we would cook our own
victuals as long as the fourteen dollars lasted; so you bought a
soup-pot which cost fifteen cents, some thyme and some laurel:
being a poet, you had such a marked weakness for laurel, you used
to poison all the soup with it. We laid in a supply of potatoes,
and constantly bought tobacco, coffee, and sugar. There was
gnashing of teeth and curses when the expenses of the fourth of
November were written. Why did you let me go out with my pockets
so full of money? And you went to Dagneaux's and spent five cents.
What in the name of Heaven could you have gotten at Dagneaux's for
five cents?[C] Good me! how expensive are the least pleasures!
Upon pretext of going with a free-ticket to see a drama by an
inhabitant of Belleville, I bought two omnibus-tickets, one to go
and the other to return. Two omnibus-tickets! I was severely
punished for this prodigality. Seventy-four cents ran away from
me, making their escape through a hole in my pocket. How could I
dare to return home and confront your wrath? Two omnibus-tickets
alone would have brought a severe admonition on my head; but
seventy-four cents with them--! If I had not begun to disarm you
by telling you the Belleville drama, I should have been a doomed
man. Nevertheless, the next day, without thinking of these
terrible losses, we lent G---- money; he really seemed to look
upon us as Messrs. Murger and Co., his bankers. I wonder by what
insidious means this G---- contrived to captivate our confidence,
and the only solution I can discover is the inexperience of giddy
youth; for two days afterwards G---- was audacious enough to
reappear and to ask for another loan. Nothing new appears on the
pages of the book, except fifteen cents for wine: this must have
been one of your ideas: I do not mean to say that you were ever a
wine-bibber, but we were so accustomed to water, we drank so much
water without getting tired of it, that this item, 'wine,' seems
very extraordinary to me. We added up every page until the eighth
of November, when the sum total reached eight dollars and twelve
cents; here the additions ceased. We doubtless were averse to
trembling at the sight of the total. The tenth of November, you
purchased a thimble: some men have skill enough to mend their
clothes at their leisure moments. A few days ago I paid a visit to
a charming literary man, who writes articles full of life and wit
for the newspapers. I opened the door so suddenly, he blushed as
he threw a pair of pantaloons into the corner. He had a thimble on
his finger. Ah! wretched cits, who refuse to give your daughters
in marriage to literary men, you would be full of admiration for
them, could you see them mending their clothes! Smoking-tobacco
absorbed more than one-third of our money; we received too many
friends, and then there was a celebrated artisan-poet who used to
be brought to our rooms, and who used to bawl so many stanzas I
would go to bed.
"Monsieur Credit made his reappearance on the fourteenth of
November. He went to the grocer, to the tobacco-shop, to the
fuel-dealer, and was received tolerably well; he was especially
successful with the grocer's daughter when he appeared in your
likeness. Did Monsieur Credit die on the seventeenth of November?
I ask, because I see on the 'credit' side of our account-book,
'Frock-coat, sixty cents.' These sixty cents came from the
pawnbroker's. How his clerks humiliated us! I could make a long
and terrible history of our dealings with the pawnbroker; I shall
make a short and simple story of it. When money failed us, you
pointed out to me an old cashmere shawl which we used as a
table-cover. I told you, 'They will give us nothing on that.' You
replied, 'Oh, yes, they will, if we add pantaloons and waistcoats
to it.' I added pantaloons and waistcoats to it, and you took the
bundle and started for the den in Place de la Croix Rouge. You
soon came back with the huge package, and you were sad enough as
you said, 'They are disagreeable _yonder_; try in the Rue de
Condé; the clerks, who are accustomed to deal with students, are
not so hard-hearted as they are in the Place de la Croix Rouge.'
I went to the Rue de Condé. The two pair of pantaloons, the famous
shawl, and the waistcoats were closely examined; even their
pockets were searched. 'We cannot lend anything on that,' said the
pawnbroker's clerk, disdainfully pushing the things away from him.
You had the excellent habit of never despairing. You said, 'We
must wait until this evening; at night all clothes are new; and to
take every precaution, I shall go to the pawnbroker's shop in the
Rue du Fouare, where all the poor go; as they are accustomed there
to see nothing pledged but rags and tatters, our clothes will
glitter like barbaric pearl and gold.' Alas! the pawnbroker in the
Rue du Fouare was as cruel as his brethren. So the next morning in
sheer despair I went to pledge my only frock-coat, and I did this
to lend half the sum to that incessant borrower, G----. Lastly, on
the nineteenth of November, we sold some books. Fortune smiled on
us; we had a chicken-soup with a superabundance of laurel. Do you
remember an excellent shopkeeper of the Rue du Faubourg Saint
Jacques, near the city-gate, who, we were told, not only sold
thread, but kept a circulating library? What a circulating library
it was! Plays, three odd volumes of Anne Radcliffe's novels,--and
if the old lady had never made our acquaintance, the inhabitants
of the Faubourg Saint Jacques would never have known of the
existence of 'Letters upon Mythology' and 'De Profundis,' two
books I was heartless enough to sell, notwithstanding all their
titles to my respect. The authors were born in the same
neighborhood which gave me birth: one is Desmoustiers, the other
Alfred Mousse. Maybe Arsène Houssaye would not be pleased, were I
to remind him of one of the _crimes_ of his youth, where one sees
for a frontispiece skeletons--'twas the heyday of the Romantic
School--playing tenpins with skulls for balls! The sale of 'De
Profundis' enabled us to visit Café Tabourey that evening. You
sold soon afterwards eighty cents' worth of books. Allow me to
record that they came from your library; my library remained
constantly upon the shelves; notwithstanding all your appeals, I
never sold any books, except the lamentable history of Alfred
Mousse. Monsieur Credit contrived to go to the tradesmen's with
imperturbable coolness; he went everywhere until the first of
December, when he paid every cent of debt. I have but one regret,
and this is, that the little account-book suddenly ceases after a
month; it contains only the month of November. This is not enough!
Had I continued it, Its pages would have been so many mementos to
recall my past life to me."
Monsieur Champfleury introduced Henry Murger to Monsieur Arsène
Houssaye, who was then chief editor of "L'Artiste," and it happened
oddly enough that Murger wrote nothing but poetry for this journal.
Monsieur Houssaye took a great fancy to Murger, and persuaded him, for
the sake of "effect" on the title-pages of books and on the backs of
magazines, to change Henri to Henry, and give Murger a German
physiognomy by writing it Mürger. As Frenchmen treat their names with as
much freedom as we use towards old gloves, Murger instantly adopted
Monsieur Houssaye's suggestion, and clung as long as he lived to the new
orthography of his name. He began to find it less difficult to procure
each day his daily bread, but still the gaunt wolf, Poverty, continued
to glare on him. "Our existence," he said, "is like a ballad which has
several couplets; sometimes all goes well, at other times all goes
badly, then worse, next worst, and so on; but the burden never changes;
'tis always the same,--Misery! Misery! Misery!" One day he became so
absolutely and hopelessly poor, that he was undecided whether to enlist
as a sailor or take a clerk's place in the Messrs. de Rothschilds'
banking-house. He actually did make application to Madame de Rothschild.
Here is the letter in which he records this application:--
"_15th August, 1844._
"I am delighted to be at last able to write you without being obliged to
describe wretchedness. Ill-fortune seems to begin to tire of pursuing
me, and good-fortune appears about to make advances to me. Madame
Rothschild, to whom I wrote begging her to get her husband to give me a
situation, informed her correspondent of it, and told him to send for
and talk with me. I could not obtain a place, but I was offered ten
dollars rather delicately, and I took it. As soon as I received it, I
went as fast as I could to put myself in condition to be able to go out
in broad daylight."
We scarcely know which is the saddest to see: Henry Murger accepting ten
dollars from Madame de Rothschild's generous privy purse,--for it is
alms, soften it as you may,--or to observe the happiness this paltry sum
gives him. How deeply he must have been steeped in poverty!
But now the very worst was over. In 1848 he sent a contribution to "Le
Corsaire," a petty newspaper of odds and ends, of literature and of
gossip. The contribution was published. He became attached to the paper.
In 1849 he began the publication in "Le Corsaire" of the story which was
to make him famous, "La Vie de Bohême," which was, like all his works,
something in the nature of an autobiographical sketch. Its wit, its
sprightly style, its odd images, its odd scenes, its strange mixture of
gayety and sadness, attracted attention immediately. But who pays
attention to newspaper-articles? However brilliant and profound they may
be, they are forgotten quite as soon as read. The best newspaper-writer
on his most successful day can only hope to be remembered from one
morning to another; if he commands attention for so long a period, his
utmost ambition should consider itself satisfied.
It was not until Murger had rescued his book from the columns of the
newspaper that he obtained reputation. He was indebted to Monsieur Jules
Janin, the eminent theatrical reporter of the "Journal des Débats," for
great assistance at this critical hour of his life. One morning Henry
Murger entered Monsieur Jules Janin's study, carrying under his arm an
immense bundle of old newspapers, secured by a piece of old twine. He
asked Monsieur Jules Janin to read the story contained in the old
newspapers, and to advise him if it was worth republication, and what
form of publication was best suited to it. As soon as Murger retired,
Monsieur Jules Janin took up the newspapers. Few bibliopoles in Paris
are more delicate than Monsieur Janin; it is positive pain to him to
peruse any volume, unless the margin be broad, the type excellent, the
printing executed by a famous printer, and the binding redolent of the
rich perfume of Russian leather. These newspapers were torn and
tattered, stained with wine and coffee and tobacco. They were not so
much as in consecutive order. Conceive the irritation they must have
produced on Monsieur Janin! But when he once got fairly into the story
he forgot all his delicacy, and when Henry Murger returned, two days
afterwards, he said to him,--"Sir, go home and write us a comedy with
Rodolphe and Schaunard and Nini and Musette.[D] It shall be played as
soon as you have written it; in four-and-twenty hours it will be
celebrated, and the dramatic reporters will see to the rest." The
magnificent promises to the poverty-racked man fevered him almost to
madness; he took up the packet, (which Monsieur Janin had elegantly
bound with a rose-colored ribbon,) and off he went, without even
thinking to thank Monsieur Janin for his kindness, or to close the door.
Murger carried his story to a friend, Theodore Barrière, (since famous
as a play-writer,) and in three months' time the piece was ready for the
stage, was soon brought out at the "Variétés," and the names of Murger
and Barrière were on every lip in Paris.
We have nothing like the French stage in the suddenness and
extensiveness of the popularity it gives men. We have no means by which
a gifted man can suddenly acquire universal fame,--can "go to bed
unknown and wake famous." The most brilliant speech at the bar is heard
within a narrow horizon. The most brilliant novel is slow in making its
way; and before its author is famous beyond the shadow of the
publisher's house, a later new novel pales the lustre of the rising
star. The French stage occupies the position our Congress once held,
when its halls were adorned by the great men, the Clays, Calhouns,
Websters, of our fathers' days, or the Supreme Court occupied, when
Marshall sat in the chief seat on its bench, and William Pinckney
brought to its bar his elaborate eloquence, and William Wirt his ornate
and touching oratory. The stage is to France what Parliament is to
England. It is more: it is the mirror and the fool; it glasses society's
form and pressure; it criticizes folly. Murger's success on the stage
opened every door of publicity to him. His name was current, it had a
known market-value. The success of the piece assured the success of the
book. The "Revue des Deux Mondes" begged Murger to write for its pages.
Murger's fortune seemed assured.
There was but one croak heard in all the applause. It came from Murger's
father. He could not believe his eyes and his ears, when they avouched
to him that his son's name and praises filled every paper and every
mouth. It utterly confounded him. The day of the second performance of
the piece Murger went to see his father.
"If you would like to see my piece again to-day, you may take these
tickets."