"Your piece? What! you don't mean to say that they are still playing
it?"
He could not conceive it possible that his "vagabond" son should
interest anybody's attention.
The very first use Murger made of his increased income was to fly Paris
and to seek the country,--that rural life which Frenchmen abhor.
Marlotte, a little village in the Forest of Fontainebleau, became his
home; there he spent eight months of every year. Too poor, at first, to
rent a cottage for himself, he lodged at the miserable village-inn,
which, with its eccentric drunken landlord, he has sketched in one of
his novels; and when fortune proved less unkind to him, he took a
cottage which lay between the highway and the forest, and there the
first happy years of his life were spent. They were few, and they were
checkered. His chief petty annoyance was his want of skill as a
sportsman. He could never bring down game with his gun, and he was
passionately fond of shooting. On taking up his abode in the country,
the first thing he had made was a full hunting-suit in the most approved
fashion, and this costume he would wear upon all occasions, even when he
came up to Paris. He never attained any nearer approximation to a
sportsman's character. One day he went out shooting with a friend. A
flock of partridges rose at their feet.
"Fire, Murger! fire!" exclaimed his friend.
"Why, great heavens, man, I can't shoot so! Wait until they _light_ on
yon fence, and then I'll take a crack at them."
He could no better shoot at stationary objects, however, than at game on
the wing. Hard by his cottage a hare had burrowed in a potato-field.
Every morning and every evening Murger fired at the hare, but with such
little effect, that the hare soon took no notice either of Murger or his
gun, and gambolled before them both as if they were simply a scarecrow.
Murger bagged but one piece of game in the whole course of his life, and
the way this was done happened in this wise. One day he was asleep at
the foot of a tree in the Forest of Fontainebleau,--his gun by his side.
He was suddenly awakened by the barking of a dog which he knew belonged
to the most adroit poacher that levied illicit tribute on the imperial
domain. The dog continued to bark and to look steadily up into the tree.
Murger followed the dog's eyes, but could discover nothing. The poacher
ran up, saying,--"Quick, Monsieur Murger! quick! Give me your gun. Don't
you see it?"