"Why, a pheasant! a splendid cock! There he is on the top limb!"
The poacher aimed and fired; the pheasant fell at Murger's feet. "Take
the bird and put it in your game-bag, Monsieur Murger, and tell
everybody you killed it."
Murger gratefully accepted the present; and this was the first and only
time that Murger ever bagged a bird.
But the cloud which darkened his sky now was the cloud which had lowered
on all his life,--poverty. He was always fevered by the care and anxiety
of procuring money. Life is expensive to a man occupying such a position
as Murger filled, and French authors are ill paid. A French publisher
thinks he has done wonders, if he sells all the copies of an edition of
three thousand volumes; and if any work reaches a sale of sixteen or
seventeen thousand volumes, the publisher is ready to cry, "Miracle!"
Further, men who lead intellectual lives are almost necessarily
extravagant of money. They know not its value. They know, indeed, that
ten mills make one cent, and that ten cents make one dime, and that ten
dimes make one dollar; but they are ignorant of the practical value of
these denominations of the great medium of exchange. They cannot "jew,"
and know not that the slight percentage they would take off the price
asked is a prize worth contending for. Again, the physical exhaustion or
reaction which almost invariably follows mental exertion requires
stimulants of some kind or other to remove the pain--it is an acute
pain--which reaction brings upon the whole system. These stimulants,
whether they be good dinners, or brilliant company, or generous wines,
or parties of pleasure, are always costly. Besides, life in Paris is
such an expensive mode of existence, the simplest pleasures there are so
very costly, and there are so many microscopic issues through which
money pours away in that undomestic life, in that career passed almost
continually in public, that one must have a considerable fortune, or
lead an extremely retired life. A fashionable author, whose books are in
every book-shop window, and whose plays are posted for performance on
every wall, cannot lead a secluded life; and all the circumstances we
have hinted at conspire to make his life expensive. In vain Murger fled
the great city. It pursued him even in the country. Admirers and
parasites sought him out even in his retreat, and forced their way to
his table. There is another reason for Murger's life-long poverty: he
worked slowly, and this natural difficulty of intellectual travail was
increased by his exquisite taste and desire of perfection. The novel was
written and re-written time and again. The plot was changed; the
characters were altered; each phrase was polished and repolished. Where
ordinary writers threw off half a dozen volumes, Murger found it hard to
fit a single volume for the press. Ordinary writers grew rich in writing
speedily forgotten novels; he continued poor in writing novels which
will live for many years. Then, Murger's vein of talent made him work
for theatres which gave more reputation than ready money. He was too
delicate a writer to construct those profitable dramas which run a
hundred or a hundred and fifty nights and place ten or twenty thousand
dollars in the writer's purse. His original poverty kept him poor. He
could not afford to wait until the seed he had sown had grown and
ripened for the sickle; so he fell into the hands of usurers, who
purchased the crop while it was yet green, and made the harvest yield
them profits of fifty or seventy-five per centum.
His distress during the last years of his life was as great as the
distress of his youth. His published letters tell a sorrowful tale.
They are filled with apprehensions of notes maturing only to be
protested, or complaints of inability to go up to Paris one day because
he has not a shirt to wear, another day because he cannot procure the
seventy-five cents which are the railway-fare from Fontainebleau to
Paris. Here is one of his letters, one of the gayest of them It is
charming, but sad:--
"I send you my little stock. Carry it instantly to Monsieur
Heugel, the music-publisher in the Rue Vivienne, next door to
Michel Levy's. Go the day afterwards to Michel Levy's for the
answer. Read it, and if it shows that Monsieur Heugel buys my
songs, go to him with the blank receipt, herein inclosed, which
you will fill up as he will point out, according to the usual
conditions. It is ten dollars a song; but as there is a poor song
among them, and money I must have, take whatever he gives you; but
you must pretend as if you expected ten dollars for each song.
This money must be used to take up Saccault's note, which is due
the fifteenth. Take the address of the holder, and pay it before
it is protested. You will be allowed till the next day to pay it.
Be active in this matter, and let me hear how things turn out. I
cannot, in reason, in my present situation, take a room at a rent
of a hundred and twenty dollars a year.[E] We have cares enough
for the present; therefore let us not sow that seed of
embarrassment which flowers every three months in the shape of
quarterly rent. Do not give at the outside more than eighty
dollars for the room, even though we be embarrassed by its
smallness. I hope we may have means before long of being more
delicate in our selection; but at present put a leaf to your
patience, for the horizon is black enough to make ink withal.
However, the little dialogue (which has been quite successful) I
have just had with the muses has given me better spirits. I have a
fever of working which is high enough to give me a real fever. I
have shaken the box, and see that it is not empty. But I stood in
need of this evidence, for in my own eyes I had fallen as low as
the Public Funds in 1848. Return here before the money Michel Levy
gave you is exhausted, for I cannot get any more for you. I am
working half the day and half the night. I feel that the great
flood-tide of 'copy' is at hand. My laundress and my pantaloons
have both deserted me. I am obliged to use grape-vine leaves for
my pocket-handkerchief.... There is nothing new here. The dogs are
in good health, but they do not look fat; I am afraid they have
fasted sometimes. Our chimney is again inhabited by a family of
swallows; they say that is a good sign: maybe it means that we
shall have fire all the winter long."
To this letter was added a postscript which one of the dogs was supposed
to have written:--
"My dear lady,--They say here we are going to see mighty hard
times. My master talks of suppressing my breakfast, and he wants
to hire me to a shepherd in order that I may earn some money for a
living. But as I have the reputation of loving mutton-chops,
nobody will hire me to keep sheep. If you see anywhere in Paris a
pretty diamond collar which does not cost more than
five-and-twenty cents, bring it to
"DOG MIRZA.
"_14th March, 1855_."
Hope dawned upon him in 1856. He was promised a pension of three hundred
dollars from the Government out of the literary fund of the Minister of
Public Instruction's budget. It would have been, from its regularity of
payment, a fortune to him. It would have saved him from the anxiety of
quarter-day when rent fell due. But the pension never came. The
Government gave him the decoration of the Legion of Honor, which
certainly gratified him. But money for bread would have been of more
service. When Rachel lay upon that invalid's chair which she was never
to quit except for her coffin, she gazed one morning upon the breakfast
of delicacies spread before her to tempt the return of absent appetite.
After some moments of silence, she took up a piece of bread as white as
the driven snow, and, sighing, said in that whisper which was all that
remained to her of voice,--"Ay, me! Had the world given me a little more
of _this_, and earlier in my life, I had not been here at
three-and-thirty." Those early years of want which sapped Rachel's life
undermined Murger's constitution. His rustic life repaired some of the
damage wrought, and would probably have entirely retrieved it, had his
life then been freer from care, less visited by privation. Had the money
the Government and his friends lavished on his corpse been bestowed on
him living, he had probably still been numbered among the writers
militant of France. Some obscure parasite got the pension. He continued
to work on still hounded by debt. "Five times a week," he wrote in 1858,
"I dine at twelve or one o'clock at night. One thing is certain: if I am
not forced to stop writing for three or four days, I shall fall sick."
In 1860 we find him complaining that he is "sick in soul, and _maybe in
body too_. I am, of a truth, fatigued, and a great deal more fatigued
than people think me." Death's shadow was upon him. The world thought
him in firmer health and in gayer spirits than ever. He knew better. He
felt as the traveller feels towards the close of the day and the end of
the journey. It was not strange that the world was deceived, for
Murger's gayety had always been factitious. He often turned off grief
with a smile, where other men relieve it with a tear. Sensitive natures
shrink from letting the world see their exquisite sensibility. Besides,
Murger's gayety was intellectual rather than physical. It consisted
almost entirely in bright gleams of repartee. It was quickness, 'twas
not mirth. No wonder, then, that the world was deceived; the mind
retained its old activity amid all its fatigue; and besides, the world
sees men only in their hours of full-dress, when the will lights up the
leaden eyes and wreathes the drawn countenance in smiles. Tears are for
our midnight pillow,--the hand-buried face for our solitary study.
So when the rumor flew over Paris, Murger is sick!--Murger is
dying!--Murger is dead! it raised the greatest surprise. Everybody
wondered how the stalwart man they saw yesterday could be brought low so
soon. Where was his youth, that it came not to the rescue? The reader
can answer the question. Of a truth, the last act of the drama we have
sketched in these pages moved rapidly to the catastrophe. He awoke in
the middle of one night with a violent pain in the thigh, which ached as
if a red-hot ball had passed through it. The pain momentarily increased
in violence, and became intolerable. The nearest physician was summoned.
After diagnosis, he declared the case too grave for action until after
consultation. Another medical attendant was called in. After
consultation they decided that the most eminent surgeons of Paris must
be consulted. It was a decomposition of the whole body, attended with
symptoms rarely observed. The princes of medical science in Paris met at
the bedside. They all confessed that their art was impotent to
alleviate, much less to cure this dreadful disease. Murger's hours were
numbered. The doctors insisted upon his being transported to the
hospital. To the hospital he went: 'twas not for the first,--'twas for
the last time. His agonies were distressing. They wrung from him screams
which could be heard from the fifth floor, where he lay, to the street.
Death made his approaches like some skilful engineer against some
impregnable fortress: fibre by fibre, vein by vein, atom by atom, was
mastered and destroyed.
During one of the rare intervals of freedom from torture, he turned to
the sick-nurse who kept watch by his pillow, and, after vacantly gazing
on her buxom form and ruddy cheek, he significantly asked,--"Mammy, do
you find this world a happy place, and life an easy burden?" The
well-fed woman understood not the bitterness of soul which prompted this
question. "Keep quiet, and sleep," was her reply. He fell back upon his
pillow, murmuring, "_I_ haven't! _I_ haven't!" Yet he was only
eight-and-thirty years old, and men's sorrows commonly commence later in
life. A friend came to see him. As the physicians had forbidden him all
conversation, he wrote on a card this explanation of his
situation:--"Ricord and the other doctors were of opinion that I should
come to Dubois's Hospital. I should have preferred St. Louis's Hospital.
I feel more _at home_ there. _Enfin_!..." Is there in the martyrology of
poets any passage sadder than these lines? Just think of a man so bereft
of home and family, so accustomed to the common cot of the hospital, so
familiar to hospital sights and sounds and odors, that he can associate
home with the public ward! Poor Murger!
So lived and so died the poet of youth, and of ambitious, struggling,
hopeful poverty. We describe not his funeral, nor the monument reared
over his grave. Our heart fails us at sight of these sterile honors.
They are ill-timed. What boot they, when he on whom they are bestowed is
beyond the reach of earthly voices? The ancients crowned the live animal
they selected as the sacrifice for their altars; it saw the garlands of
flowers which were laid on its head, and the stately procession which
accompanied it, and heard the music which discoursed of its happiness.
* * * * *