Part 11

Yet the Bohemians are a great race, and may boast a proud extraction. The founder of their illustrious family was none other than the great father of Western song, who, “living by chance from day to day, wandered about the fertile country of Ionia, eating the bread of charity, and stopped at eventide to hang beside the hearth of hospitality, the harmonious lyre that had chanted the loves of Helen and the fall of Troy.”[23] Descending the centuries to modern times, the Bohemian reckons his ancestors among the prominent figures of every great literary epoch. In the middle ages, the great family tradition is perpetuated among the minstrels and ballad-makers, the devotees of the gay science, the whole tribe of the melodious vagabonds of Touraine; while, as we pass from the days of chivalry to the dawn of the Renaissance, we find “Bohemia still strolling about all the highways of the kingdom, and already invading the streets of Paris itself.” Who does not know of Pierre Gringoire, friend of vagrants and foe to fasting? Who cannot picture him as “he beats the pavements of the town, nose in air, like a dog’s, sniffing the odors of the kitchens and the cook-shops”; and “jingling in imagination—alas, not in his pockets!—the ten crowns, which the aldermen have promised him for the very pious and devout farce he has written for their theatre in the hall of the Palais de Justice”? Who, again, does not recall Master François Villon, “poet and vagabond, _par excellence_,” whose ballads to-day may still make us forget the ruffian, the vagabond, the debauchee? These are names with strange power still over the imagination. And, when we come to the splendid outburst of the Renaissance, is it not to find ourselves face to face with men in whose veins the rich old blood was fierce and strong, with Clément Marot, and the ill-starred Tasso, with Jean Goujon, Pierre Ronsard, Mathurin Regnier, and who shall say how many more? Shakspere, and Molière, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and d’Alembert—these, too, the historian of Bohemia must include in his annals, to say nothing of the long line of great writers in England (whom Murger does not even allude to), by whom the name of Grub Street was made illustrious in the chronicles of the eighteenth century.

Footnote 23:

In this slight historic sketch of Bohemianism, we simply follow, without comment or criticism, Murger’s original preface to the “Scènes de la Vie de Bohème.”

Two groups of Bohemians in Paris—where perhaps alone to-day artistic Bohemianism is still possible—have within more recent years made their voices heard and their influence felt in the literature and art of their time. The first was that which gathered about poor Gérard Labrunie, better known as Gérard de Nerval, the unfortunate young writer whose works have yet to reap their due appreciation, but whose translation of “Faust,” as Goethe told Eckermann, made the great German proud “to find such an interpreter.” That group was composed of such men as Corot, Chesseriau, Arsène Houssaye, Théophile Gautier, Jules Janin, and Stadler; the mere recital of whose names is enough. Shortly after this band was broken up—some, like Nerval, dying tragically and long before their time; others reaching high rank in the world of French letters—another famous _cénacle_ arose, the central figure of which was the prince of modern Bohemia, Henri Murger himself. Among those who toiled and suffered with him, we may make passing mention of Auguste Vitu, Schaune, and Alfred Delvau; but there were, of course, others, whose names are less familiar to the reading public of to-day, especially in this country. The romance of this second Bohemia has been written for us by Murger in the “Scènes de la Vie de Bohème”; and it is to the pages of this fascinating book that we purpose presently to turn. But to understand these aright, to appreciate their pathos and their comedy, to realize their intensity of meaning, we must first of all know something of the writer’s personality and career. I do not mean that it will be necessary for us to retell in detail the whole sad story of Murger’s life. But so much of his character and experiences find embodiment in this book of his, that we should miss half its charm and more than half its significance, if we did not, to begin with, make ourselves acquainted with at least the larger facts of his existence.

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Henri Murger was born in 1822. His father, a Savoyard, moved to Paris either just before or just after his son’s birth; obtained a situation as janitor; and while attending to the demands of this position, carried on at the same time his trade as a tailor. Murger _père_ was a hard, severe, unsympathetic man, totally unable to understand his son’s early-developed literary propensities, and with no higher ambition in life than that of making a decent income by the exercise of his craft. His intention from the beginning was to bring young Henri up as an adept at shears and thimble, so that he might by-and-by turn out a hard-working, thrifty ninth part of a man, like himself. But Henri rebelled; and as his mother sided with him, having, as it would seem, some faith in the child’s talents, or perhaps only a womanly yearning to make a gentleman of him, the long struggle with paternal authority finally closed, though not without the breeding of bitterness, in his favor. The original scheme of training him to manual labor was abandoned, and he received such education as his parents could afford, which, after all, was poor enough.

While still a mere boy he entered the practical business of life through the narrow and dingy portals of a lawyer’s office; but like many another youth under similar conditions, the itch for verse was too strong for him, and he relieved with the inditing of stanzas the dry technicalities of the legal routine. Meanwhile, an academician, M. de Jouy, had taken a fancy to him; and through his influence, at the age of sixteen, he obtained an appointment as secretary to Count Tolstoï, a Russian diplomatist then resident in Paris. Forty francs a month represented the material advantages of this position; not a lordly remuneration, certainly, but acceptable enough, none the less; more especially as the duties, anything but cumbersome at the start, dwindled considerably with lapse of time and presently became almost nominal. With a small definite income to fall back upon, and plenty of leisure on his hands, Murger now began to give free scope to his literary impulses, passing his hours in the study of the poets, and making a humble start in his own productive career. But his good fortune was destined to be of short duration; for through a rather ludicrous misadventure his connection with Tolstoï was after a while brought to a sudden close. At that time he was engaged to furnish a certain amount of daily copy to one of the Parisian papers. It so chanced that during the Revolution of 1848 Tolstoï found it necessary to put his secretarial services once more into active requisition; and, what with getting off his daily supply of matter for the press and preparing dispatches for the Czar of all the Russias, the young man unexpectedly found his energies taxed to the full. One memorable day the functions of diplomatist and author unfortunately became entangled, and in his hurry and excitement he sent off his _feuilleton_ to the Russian Court and his dispatch to the “Corsaire.” With this ill-timed performance, Murger’s political career ignominiously ended, and—what was by far the most serious part of the matter—the monthly recompense of forty francs, which had seemed to him a veritable Peruvian gold-mine, ended also. Nor was this all. Ere this his mother had died, and with the cessation of her mediatorial influence, the feud between himself and his father had broken out afresh. Thus Murger was thrown entirely on his own resources, with nothing but his pen to look to for the means of support. His father peremptorily refused to have anything to do with him. “He contents himself with giving me advice,” wrote Henri to a friend, in a season of special tribulation, “and with insulting me whenever we meet.” And it is well known that one cannot live on advice, while insults, though more stimulating, are not a whit more nutritious.

It was at this point, then, that Henri Murger became a dweller in Bohemia. He was now one of those who, in his own words, have no other means of subsistence beyond that afforded by art itself; one of those described by Balzac, “whose religion is hope, whose code is faith in oneself, whose budget is charity.” Through nearly all the varied experiences of which he was afterwards to write with such wonderfully sustained graphic power, the young man himself now passed; through the days of careless idleness or strenuous exertion; through the nights of homeless wandering or furious dissipation; through all the grim poverty and suffering, all the doubt and restlessness, all the fierce fluctuations of assurance and despair, which presently went to the making of his book. Even while he had still been in receipt of Count Tolstoï’s allowance, things had sometimes gone hardly enough with him; for, needless to state, he was not of the thrifty or frugal kind, “Your friend,” he writes in a letter, as early as 1841, “has found the means of swallowing forty francs in a fortnight; but happily for him there are still forty sous left to carry him to the end of the month. His existence, then, has been during the past fortnight diversified with beefsteaks ... and Havana cigars”; while for the remaining two ill-omened weeks, recourse must be had to that “table d’hôte of chance” already referred to. With the discontinuance of this tiny but periodic dropping from the great Cornucopia of Providence, the beefsteaks and Havana cigars became less and less frequent apparitions in his life, and the famous inn which bears the “Belle Etoile” as its sign and trading token, found in him a pretty constant guest. To make his shoes last more than six months, and his debts forever, now became an urgent problem for him. Sometimes fortune would pay him a flying visit, and on such occasions he describes himself as being temporarily in possession of more money than he knows what to do with; but libraries, tailors, restaurants, cafés, theatres, Turkish tobacco-pipes, and friends, combined to help him over this perplexing difficulty with extraordinary ease and rapidity. Once, in the intense excitement of a sudden windfall, he went to bed and dreamed that he was the Emperor of Morocco and was marrying the Bank of France. But such seasons of miraculous plenty were few and far between, and visions of this extraordinary kind, when they came at all, were less likely to arise from repletion than from an empty stomach; for sometimes he was brought face to face with actual starvation. Now, he reports borrowing right and left from any acquaintance who had a franc to lend; now, again, “S—— is paying me the thirty francs he owes me, fourteen sous at a time.” So from month to month he struggled on, without seeming to get any nearer to the goal he had in view, or, in point of fact, to any goal at all; often tortured with physical pain and privation; often driven half-wild with despair; but, after the fashion of the true Bohemian, keeping always a brave heart, and a ready jest for the good friends who stuck close to him through all, and who would have been only too willing to help him in his need, but for the single unfortunate circumstance that they were as badly off as himself.

Unhappily, Murger was, in one important respect, particularly ill-adapted for the kind of life into which he was thus driven. A man who trusts to his pen for daily bread should at least be a facile and ready writer, able to turn off indefinite quantities of copy in a given time, and willing to undertake the writing up of any subject upon which public interest may be temporarily aroused, and an article required. When literature becomes a business, the higher ambition to produce only good work must almost inevitably be subordinated to the lower and more practical aim of making the thing pay. Now, the difficulty with Murger was, that although literature was his livelihood, his regular trade and calling, he persistently refused to regard it mainly in that light—refused to sacrifice artistic excellence to temporary advantage, and to debase a sacred mission into mere routine work, the immediate, if not indeed the sole, object of which was to turn so much intellectual labor into so much food and clothing. He himself has remarked concerning one of his characters that, after the fashion of genius—a generalization which may or may not be partially true,—he had a tendency to be lazy. Murger was not exactly lazy; but he was whimsical and uncertain; his energies were not always under command; and he did not, with Anthony Trollope, put firmer faith in a piece of beeswax on the seat of his chair than in all the promptings of the divine afflatus. Like Goldsmith, he recognized that the conditions of his life rendered it impossible for him to pay court to the “draggle-tail Muses”; they would simply have left him to starve outright. So he turned to prose; but with prose things were nearly as bad. There were times when he could not and would not write—when the spirit was not upon him; and when he could not work as an artist, he would not work as a day-laborer or publisher’s drudge. And even when he was in full swing, his delicate taste, his almost morbid care in composition, his constant desire to do his best, prevented him from ever producing with the rapidity necessary to make the results really remunerative. Never, even under the greatest stress of circumstances, would he consent to write hastily, or allow his manuscript to leave his hands without what he conceived to be its proper share of thought and revision. Money to him was always the secondary consideration; even hunger had to wait, that the artistic sense might be satisfied. Rather than prove traitor to his lofty ideals, he would live for weeks on dry bread.

Thus he had more than the usual difficulty in making ends meet. But the misfortune did not stop there. A slow and exceedingly painstaking writer, he could produce but little in the normal hours of work; hence, the limit had to be frequently extended; and, for this purpose, recourse was had to the perilous aid of artificial stimulants. We now touch the saddest part of Murger’s sad story. He wrote at night, and generally in bed—a practice which he had probably adopted in days when fuel was a luxury beyond his reach;[24] and his work was almost invariably done with the assistance of strong and incessant potations of coffee. When the house was perfectly quiet, when darkness and silence had fallen over the city, then Murger, like Balzac, commenced the labors of the day. With these desperate measures, there can be little doubt that he began very early to undermine a constitution which had never been robust. The story of the habits thus formed, and of the tyranny they acquired over him, is a terribly tragic one, and might furnish a fearful warning to many a jaded brain-worker, did we not know that it is the everlasting law of human nature that no one shall profit by any one else’s experiences. “I am literally killing myself,” he writes to a friend. “You must break me of coffee. I count on you.” “There are nights,” he declares at another time, “when I have consumed as much as six ounces of coffee, and only end by convincing myself more than ever of my lack of power—and this, yes, this has lasted three months. So that at present I am broken down by the application of these Mochas.... And here I am still passing my nights drinking coffee like Voltaire, and smoking like Jean Bart.” As a direct consequence of these suicidal habits, he gradually contracted a terrible disease—known to medicine as “purpura”—which took him again and again to the hospital. Once, when the hand of sickness had smitten him with more than usual severity, he made a determined attempt to reform. He banished his coffee, and strove, by closing the shutters and lighting the candles, to trick himself into working, not of course by daylight, but simply during the day. But it was too late to inaugurate so radical a change. Ere long his nocturnal instincts reasserted themselves, and continued in full force to the end of his career. Doubtless, it is in the pathological conditions thus brought about, that we have to seek the explanation of the fearful restlessness which presently came to characterize him, and which earned for him the nickname of the Wandering Christian.

Footnote 24:

A story to the point is worth repeating here. When the playwright, Barrière, went to him one afternoon to propose the dramatization of the “Scenes of Bohemian Life,” he found Murger in his attic in the Latin Quarter, in bed. It subsequently came out that a Bohemian friend, having occasion to pay a business visit to some important functionary, had borrowed his only pair of trousers, which had the advantage of being a trifle better than his own; and Murger had to remain in bed, with such patience as he could command, until they should be restored.

It was only after his constitution had been shattered, and he had grown prematurely old, that Murger found his way out of Bohemia. The path into that land of glamour and enchantments had been easy enough, like the road to Avernus; the passage back again into the common world was in his case, as in the case of so many others, a steep and difficult one. But after months and years of toil and waiting, success came at last, and little by little he was able to break with tenacious old associations, and settle down to a more steady and regular routine of life. He established a connection with the “Revue des Deux Mondes”; and with a position now practically assured, took up his abode at Marlotte, near Fontainebleau. Here he had every chance of restoring his enfeebled health, and starting his career anew upon a different and a wiser plan. But the hour had gone by. A brief period of work and quiet happiness was brought to a close in January, 1861, when Henri Murger breathed his last in the house where he had already spent so many weeks of suffering—in the Hôpital St. Louis. He had not completed his thirty-ninth year.

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Of the general work of Murger, this is not the place to speak. It is considerable in quantity, and much of it has substantial claim to critical attention; for his prose is finely wrought, and his lyrics—instance the superb “Chanson de Musette,” so highly but justly praised by Gautier,—are sometimes of rare purity and sweetness. But it is by the “Scenes of Bohemian Life,” and by these alone, after all, that Murger keeps his hold to-day upon the broader reading public. It has been said that he only wrote at his best when he was writing straight out of his own life. This is perhaps at bottom the reason why this one singular book possesses vitality far in excess of all his other productions. These may still be read with enjoyment, though in the tremendous stress of modern affairs, and with the ceaseless activity of the printing-press, they are more likely to be ignored by all but special students. But the “Scenes of Bohemian Life,” as Mr. Saintsbury has rightly insisted, take a permanent place in the literature of humanity. Here we may notice one more illustration of the curiously distorted judgments which authors often pass upon their own works. In later years he was accustomed to speak slightingly and almost petulantly of the volume which has carried his name over into a new generation; even, it is said, going so far as to affirm that “that devil of a book will hinder me from ever crossing the Pont des Arts”—that is, from entering the Academy, which was one of the unfulfilled ambitions of his life. But, in another and finer sense, it has placed his name among those of the Immortals.

We may now pass from the author to his volume, on the title-page of which he might well have written the famous _quorum pars magna fui_ of Virgil’s hero. “Murger, c’est la Bohème, comme la Bohème fut Murger,” was the declaration of one of his personal friends; and the stuff of his wonderful scenes, with all their extravagance and rollicking absurdity, with all their poignant pathos and whimsical humor, is, as we have said, stuff furnished by close observation and intimate experience, though the crude material is transmuted into gold by the secret alchemy of genius. It has been said that many of Murger’s chapters were actually written—in the French phrase, for which we have no satisfactory equivalent—_au jour le jour_; that he made the scenes of his Bohemian life into literature, so to speak, while they were still being enacted. To this effect Théophile de Banville reported that “that which was done by Rodolphe”—who, as we shall presently see, is generally to be identified with Murger himself—“during the month when he was Mademoiselle Mimi’s neighbor, has perhaps had no parallel since letters began. His days he passed in composing verses, sketching plots of plays, and covering Mimi’s hands with kisses as with a glove; but his daily bread was his _feuilleton_ for the ‘Corsaire,’ and as Rodolphe had neither money nor books to invent anything but his own life, each evening he wrote as a _feuilleton_ for the ‘Corsaire’ the life of that day, and each day he lived the _feuilleton_ for the next. It was thus that the morrow of I know not what quarrel, after the fashion of the lovers of Horace, Mimi, leaning on her lover’s arm, was bowed to in the Luxembourg by the poet of the ‘Feuilles d’Automne,’ and returned home quite proud to the _Rue des Canettes_; and that same evening Rodolphe wrote on this theme one of his most delightful chapters.”[25] This account of the connection between Murger’s book and his daily life, probably overstates the matter, or is to be accepted as approximately true only in regard to exceptional occurrences, like the one directly referred to. But that the substance of the volume was throughout furnished by experience is certain. The principal characters, and even some of the minor ones, have long since been traced back to their archetypes; the spots rendered famous by many a memorable scene—such as the Café Momus and the shop of the old Jewish bric-a-brac dealer, Father Médicis—are known to have actually existed in the old Latin Quarter, though in the evolution of modern Paris the historic landmarks have been swept away; while there is no question that in most of his stories Murger either drew immediately upon actual circumstances, or at least built his superstructure of fancy upon a very solid foundation of fact.

Footnote 25:

The passage in which reference is made to the meeting with Victor Hugo will be found at the close of chapter xiv. of the “Scenes.” “After lunching together, they started for the country. In crossing the Luxembourg, Rodolphe met a great poet, who had always behaved to him with charming kindness. For propriety’s sake, he was going to pretend not to see him. But the poet did not allow him time; in passing, he gave him a friendly recognition, and bowed to his young companion with a gracious smile. ‘Who is that gentleman?’ asked Mimi. Rodolphe replied by mentioning a name which made her blush with pleasure and pride. ‘Oh,’ said Rodolphe, ‘this meeting with a poet who has sung so well of love, is a good omen, and will bring luck to our reconciliation.’” Banville’s statement of the way in which Murger fed his fiction day by day upon the happenings of his own life, reminds us somewhat of Mr. Robert S. Hichens’ grim and powerful story, “The Collaborators.”

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