Part 12

The heroes of the “Scenes of Bohemian Life” are four in number. To each member of the strange group—the “Quatuor Murger,” as it came to be called—we will yield the honor of a separate paragraph or two of characterization.

First we have Alexandre Schaunard, who, though he cultivates “the two liberal arts of painting and music,” devotes the larger part of his attention to the latter, and is indeed particularly engaged at the time when we make his acquaintance, in the composition of an elaborate symbolic symphony which might almost be said to anticipate some of the crazy theories of more recent doctrinaires, representing as it does “the influence of blue in the arts.” This strange production had a real existence, and its originator in the book has been identified with Alexandre Schaune, who also drove an artistic tandem with much enthusiasm for a season, though he subsequently forsook Bohemia and adopted a more profitable career in the toy-making business. He and Murger became acquainted in 1841, lived together at one time in the closest intimacy in the Rue de la Harpe, and remained friends till the latter’s death. Schaune survived among “new faces, other minds,” till 1887, and only a short time before he died published some memoirs which contain many matters of interest for the Murger student. He bore among his companions the nickname of Schannard-sauvage, and in Murger’s original manuscript the name was so written—Schannard. By a printer’s error, however, the first _n_ was turned into a _u_, and the historian thought well, in reading the proof, to let the blunder pass.

Schaunard in the book is specially distinguished among his acquaintances for having raised borrowing to the level of a fine art. By dint of many careful observations and delicate experiments he has discovered the days when each one of his friends is accustomed to receive money, and thus, following the periodic ebb and flow of the financial tide, spares himself the trouble and annoyance of appealing to the generosity of those who, at the given moment, are likely to be in as low water as himself. Having, furthermore, “learned the way to borrow five francs in all the languages of the globe,” the painter-musician is able, as a rule, to keep pretty firmly on his feet. By a critical friend he was once described as “passing one half of his time in looking for money to pay his creditors, and the other half in eluding his creditors when the money has been found.”[26] But it should be remembered that this calls for some discount as a friend’s judgment, and likely, therefore, to be a trifle over-colored; and it is but doing justice to Schaunard to say that, towards the immediate companions who had come to his rescue from time to time, he behaved upon a more honorable plan. To facilitate, and at the same time to equalize so far as possible, the “taxes” which he levied, he “had drawn up, in order of districts and streets, an alphabetical list containing the names of all his friends and acquaintances. Opposite each name was inscribed the maximum sum which, having regard to their state of fortune, he might borrow from them, the times when they were in funds, their dinner-hour, and the ordinary bill of fare of the house. Beside this list, Schaunard kept in perfect order a little ledger, in which he entered the amounts lent to him, down to the minutest fractions; for he would never go beyond a certain figure, which was within the fortune of a Norman uncle whose heir he was.[27] As soon as he owed twenty francs to an individual, he closed the account, and liquidated it at a single payment, even if for the purpose he had to borrow from others to whom he owed less. In this way he always kept up a certain credit, which he called his floating debt, and as people knew that he was accustomed to pay when his personal resources permitted, they willingly obliged him when they could.”

Footnote 26:

This passage, like sundry others already cited, is taken from the dramatization of the “Scenes of Bohemian Life,” which was, as we have seen, made by Murger in collaboration with Théodore Barrière, and was extremely successful. It differs in many particulars from the book, the scattered scenes of which are reduced to coherence and unity, but the male characters preserve their general traits.

Footnote 27:

The “Norman uncle” very possibly stands for Schaune’s father, the toy-manufacturer, to whose business he presently succeeded.

Schaunard plays his part to the amusement, if not always to the edification, of the reader in many delightful episodes in the “Scenes.” It is through his misadventures with his landlord that the establishment of the club is largely, though indirectly, brought about; it is he who paints the provincial Blancheron’s portrait in fancy dressing-gown, while Marcel goes off to dine with a deputy in his—the said Blancheron’s—coat; it is he, again, who is hired by an Englishman to play the piano from morning till night, as a means of getting even with an actress living near by, whose parrot and shrill declamation combined, have proved rather too much for even British nerves,—a transaction out of which, we need scarcely add, the _virtuoso_ made a good deal more money than he did from his famous symphony. On the whole, however, of the four friends with whose doings our volume is mainly occupied, Schaunard is by far the least attractive figure. He is coarse and morose; has a harsh, rasping voice; is apt to be put out about trifles; sometimes treats his male friends with scant courtesy; and has an unpleasant habit of employing, with his more intimate associates of the other sex, Captain Marryatt’s _argumentum ad feminam_—in other words, of conversing with them occasionally through the medium of a stout cane. Poor Phémie—the melancholy Phémie—had every right more than once or twice to complain of the strength and efficacy of his logic; nor were matters made very much better for her, we may opine, when, after one of their quarrels, he gave her in grim joke, and as a keepsake, the stick with which he had addressed to her so many telling remarks.

After Schaunard comes Marcel the painter, a character of more amiable type, who appears to be a compound portrait of the two artists, Tabar and Lazare. He is essentially a good fellow, bright, enthusiastic, happy-go-lucky, and shiftless; and though, after the fashion of the world in which he lives, he has an “insolent confidence in luck,” he is manly enough, upon occasion, to “give fortune a helping hand.” He is the hero of many amazing and some very ludicrous adventures, of which we can find space here only for a single specimen. Like Schaunard, he is devoting as much of his time and energy as he can save from the manufacture of pot-boilers and the consideration of the “terrible daily problem of how to get breakfast,” to the composition of one great work, which is to be his _open sesame_ to fame—“The Passage of the Red Sea.”[28] Was ever so much labor expended with such little practical result, one may wonder, by any artist whatsoever—painter, musician, or poet? For five or six years Marcel had worked away at his canvas with unflagging diligence and courage, and “for five or six years this masterpiece of color had been obstinately refused by the jury”; so that, by dint of going and returning from the artist’s studio to the exhibition, and from the exhibition back to the studio, the picture had come to know the way so well, that, had it been set on wheels, it could have gone to the Louvre by itself. Marcel, of course, attributed the policy of the jury to the personal spite of its members, and persisted, in the teeth of all discouragement, in regarding his production as the pendant to “The Marriage in Cana.” Hence, nothing daunted, he returned again and again to his vast design, after indulging in a sufficient amount of abuse to relieve his ruffled temper. At length, under conviction that the child of this world might possibly succeed where the child of light had failed, he began to seek for means whereby, without altering the general plan of his gigantic undertaking, he might deceive the jury in supposing it to be an entirely fresh and hitherto unexamined work. Thus, one year he turned Pharaoh into Cæsar, and the “Passage of the Red Sea” became “The Passage of the Rubicon.” This ruse failing, he covered, as by miracle, the Red Sea with snow, planted a fir-tree in one corner thereof, dressed an Egyptian in the costume of the Imperial Guard, and sent forth his canvas as “The Passage of the Beresina.” But, unfortunately, the jury had wiped its glasses that day and was not to be duped. It recognized the inexorable picture by dint of a multi-colored horse—his “synoptic table of fine colors,” Marcel privately called this astonishing steed—that went prancing about on the top of a wave of the Red Sea; and again the masterpiece was churlishly blackballed. “Till my dying day I will send my picture to the judges,” vowed Marcel, after this new repulse; “it shall be engraved on their memories.”—“The surest way of ever getting it engraved,” remarked Colline, who chanced to be near by. And so the poor painter might have been left to try further and still wilder experiments, but for the kindly intervention of Daddy Médicis, an old Jew who had constant dealings with the Bohemians, and often managed to do them a friendly turn without, as may be imagined, sacrificing himself overmuch in the transaction. This singular individual, coming one evening to Marcel’s room, offered to purchase the famous picture “for the collection of a rich amateur,” and proposed one hundred and fifty francs as a fair price. At first, the artist grumbled; there was at least a hundred and fifty francs’ worth of cobalt in the dress of Pharaoh alone, he protested. But the Jew stood firm, and at last the painter yielded; whereupon Daddy Médicis gave the Bohemians a dinner, at which “the lobster ceased to be a myth for Schaunard, who contracted for this amphibious creature a passion bordering on madness.” As for Marcel himself, his intoxication came near upon having deplorable results. Passing his tailor’s shop, at two o’clock in the morning, he actually wanted to wake up his creditor, and give him on account the hundred and fifty francs he had just received. A ray of reason, which still flitted in the mind of Colline, stopped the artist on the brink of this precipice.

Footnote 28:

This incident of Marcel’s picture is said to have had its prototype in a composition of Tabar’s, originally sketched as “The Passage of the Red Sea,” and afterwards exhibited in the Salon as “Niobe and Her Children Slain by the Arrows of Apollo and Diana.”

And now for the sequel of the story.

“A week after these festivities, Marcel found out the gallery in which his picture had been placed. In passing through the Faubourg St. Honoré, he stopped in the midst of a group which seemed to be watching with curious interest a sign that was being placed over a shop. This sign was neither more nor less than Marcel’s picture, which had been sold by Médicis to a grocer. Only, ‘The Passage of the Red Sea’ had undergone one more change, and bore a new name. A steamboat had been added, and it was now called ‘The Harbor of Marseilles.’ The curious onlookers, when they saw the picture, burst out in a flattering ovation; and Marcel returned home in ecstasy over the triumph, murmuring—‘The voice of the people is the voice of God.’”

What part the synoptic charger was now called on to fill, unfortunately we cannot say.

The third member of our quartet is Gustave Colline, student of “hyperphysical philosophy,” and inveterate perpetrator of alarming puns. He too is a composite character, the principal ingredients of his make-up being furnished by two of Murger’s old associates—Jean Walton and Trapadoux, both of whom were men of immense and curious erudition and many eccentricities. Colline himself, of a somewhat more steady way of life than his companions, gains a fairly regular income by teaching mathematics, botany, Arabic, and various other subjects, as occasion demands, and spends the greater part of it in the accumulation of second-hand books. “What he did with all these volumes,” remarks the historian, “so numerous that the life of a man would never have sufficed to read them, no one knew—he least of all.” But still he goes on adding tome to tome, and when he chances to return to his lodgings at night without bringing a new specimen to his store, he feels that, like the good Titus, he has wasted his day. Thus his strange, shapeless mouth, pouting lips, double chin, shaggy light hair, and threadbare, hazel-colored overcoat, are well known upon the quays and wherever ancient volumes are exposed for sale. His tastes are catholic in the extreme; for he will buy anything and everything that is to be bought, provided only it is rare, out of the way, and for all practical purposes useless. Some idea of the range and versatility of his interests may be given by reference to a single episode in his history. When, in company with Marcel, Rodolphe gave that famous Christmas entertainment, whereof the record is to be found in its proper place in the annals of Bohemia, he insisted on borrowing for the occasion the philosopher’s famous swallowtail coat. Now, this coat, as the chronicler justly suggests, deserves a word or two. By courtesy it was held to be black by candle-light, though it was really of a decided blue. It was also cut upon a wild and startling plan, very short in the waist and exceedingly long in the tails. But its most astonishing features were the pockets—“positive gulfs, in which Colline was accustomed to lodge some thirty of the volumes which he everlastingly carried about with him; which caused his friends to say that during the times when the libraries were closed scientists and men of letters could always seek information in the skirts of Colline’s coat—a library always open to readers.” Well, on this particular day, strange to relate, the great swallowtail apparently harbored only a quarto volume of Bayle, a treatise in three volumes on the hyperphysical faculties, a volume of Condillac, two of Swedenborg, and Pope’s “Essay on Man.” “Hullo!” exclaimed Rodolphe, when the philosopher had turned out this odd collection and allowed the other to don the imposing habit; “the left pocket still feels very heavy; there is still something in it.”—“Ah!” replied Colline, “that is true; I forgot to empty the foreign language pocket.” Whereupon he drew out two Arabic grammars, a Malay dictionary, and “The Perfect Stock-Breeder” in Chinese—his favorite reading.[29] Nor was this quite all. Later on, in looking for his handkerchief, Rodolphe came accidentally upon a small Tartar volume, overlooked in the department of foreign literature.

Footnote 29:

This famous volume appears in an “édition princeps,” with “notes in modern Syriac,” in the very amusing story, “Son Excellence Gustave Colline,” which really forms an episode of the “Scènes de la Vie de Bohème,” though it is published in the collection of miscellanies entitled “Dona Sirène.”

For the rest, Colline is a very agreeable companion, pleasant of manner, and courteous of bearing; and his conversation is amusingly spiced with quaint technical expressions and the most outrageous puns. Unlike his three companions, who are in perpetual bondage to love, he passes on, for the most part, in bachelor meditation, fancy free, as becomes a philosopher of the “hyperphysical school.” Once in a while, we find him flirting a little with the _bonne amie_ of one of his friends, and we recall a single occasion on which, according to his own statement, he had an appointment of a romantic character. We read also, in the most incidental way, of his devotion to a waistcoat-maker, whom he keeps day and night copying the manuscripts of his philosophical works. But at these, as at all other times, the lady of his affections remains “invisible and anonymous.” In general, it may be said that he shows himself markedly superior to the human weakness which does so much to disturb the byways of Bohemia no less than the highways of the outer world.

Music, painting, and philosophy are thus well represented in the Bohemian _cénacle_, and in Rodolphe, the last of the group, the sister art of poetry finds a worthy exponent. Rodolphe is the real hero of the book, and is indeed an approximately faithful sketch of the author himself. In the fancy-poet of the Latin Quarter, the man who, in the very cut of his clothes, manners, appearance, conversation, “confessed his association with the Muses,” many of Murger’s well-known traits of character and personal idiosyncrasies are frankly reproduced. We have a brief but sufficiently detailed description of him when he makes his first appearance in the Café Momus, and there can be no doubt as to the artist’s model from which the study is made. He is presented as “a young man whose face was almost lost in an enormous thicket of many-colored beard. But, as a set-off against this abundance of hair on the chin, a precocious baldness had dismantled his forehead, which looked like a knee, and the nakedness of which a few stray hairs that one might have counted vainly endeavored to cover. He wore a black coat, tonsured at the elbows, and with practical ventilators under the armpits, which could be seen whenever he raised his arm too high. His trousers might once have been black, but his shoes, which had never been new, seemed to have several times made the tour of the world on the feet of the Wandering Jew.” In all this—in the precocious baldness and parti-colored beard especially—we have the historian of Bohemia himself. We do not, therefore, wonder that the character of Rodolphe should stand out from among the other figures of the “Scenes,” by reason of a certain autobiographic distinctness of outline and color, nor that he should prevail upon us by a kind of personal charm which his companions rarely possess.

To follow Rodolphe’s various adventures and enterprises back to their originals in Murger’s life, would be an interesting task, but it is one that cannot be attempted here; and for the time being we must keep to the poet in the book. Like his friends Schaunard and Marcel, this young man has pinned his faith to one ambitious work, a drama called the “The Avenger,” which has already gone the round of all the theatres of Paris, and of which in the course of a couple of years, he has accumulated a dozen or so huge manuscript copies, weighing collectively something like fifteen pounds. “The Avenger” was ultimately produced, and ran for five successive nights, after large portions of these carefully wrought versions had been used up in the humble service of lighting the fire. But this does not come till towards the end of the story; and during the days when we know him best, Rodolphe, awaiting his dramatic triumph, is willing enough to turn his literary talents to account in less dignified ways. The main sources of his income appear to be “The Scarf of Iris,” a fashion-journal, and “The Castor,” a paper devoted to the interests of the hat-trade, both of which he edits, and in which he publishes from time to time his opinions on tragedy and kindred subjects. It is to the columns of the latter periodical, by-the-by, that Gustave Colline contributes a discussion on “The Philosophy of Hats, and Other Things in General”—how much to the amusement and instruction of its readers we are unfortunately not told. Probably the financial advantages of these two undertakings are of a rather slight and unsubstantial character; at any rate, the editor-in-chief shows himself at all times ready to supplement his official emoluments whensoever occasion offers. Witness his most famous piece of hack-work, the composition of “The Perfect Chimney Constructor.” Rodolphe, who has been sadly down on his luck for a time—fluctuating between going to bed without supper and supping without going to bed—happens accidentally to run across his Uncle Monetti, a stove-maker and physician of smoky chimneys, whom he has not seen for an age. Now, Monsieur Monetti is an enthusiast in his art, and has conceived the idea of drawing up for the benefit of future generations, a manual of chimney-construction, in which his own numerous patents shall be given adequate presentation. Finding his nephew fallen upon evil days, he intrusts him with this literary enterprise, promising him a remuneration of three hundred francs, and rashly giving him outright fifty francs on account. Of course, Rodolphe incontinently disappears, and only turns up again when the money has disappeared also. Uncle Monetti then resorts to drastic measures. He locks the volatile young gentleman in a small room, six stories up, with stoves and ovens for his company, and takes away his clothes, leaving in their stead a ridiculous Turkish dressing-gown. In this attic solitude the unfortunate young poet is fain to wax eloquent over ventilators, till he is rescued in the most romantic way by a certain Mademoiselle Sidonia, as the reader will find recorded at length in its proper place in the Bohemian chronicles.

In connection with one extraordinary episode in Rodolphe’s career—his sudden receipt of five hundred francs in hard cash—we have an excellent opportunity of studying some of the mysteries of Bohemian finance. He and Marcel, who was then his fellow-lodger, regarded this colossal sum as practically inexhaustible; they were not a little surprised, therefore, to find, before a fortnight had gone by, that it had vanished into air, as though by magic. The strictest frugality had presided over all their expenditures, and the question was, where in the world the money could have gone to. Into this problem the two economists forthwith made inquisition, analyzing their accounts, and carefully weighing them item by item. This is about the way in which the audit was conducted:—

“March 19.—Received five hundred francs. Paid, one Turkish pipe, twenty-five francs; dinner, fifteen francs; miscellaneous expenses, forty francs,” Marcel read out.

“What in the world are these miscellaneous expenses?” asked Rodolphe.

“You know well enough,” said the other. “It was the evening when we didn’t come home till morning. At any rate, that saved us fuel and candles.”

There is nothing like rigid economy, as we see.

“March 20.—Breakfast, one franc, fifty centimes; tobacco, twenty centimes; dinner, two francs; an opera glass”—needed by Rodolphe, who, as editor of the “Scarf of Iris,” had to write a notice of an art exhibition; and so on, and so on. As the account continued, “miscellaneous expenses” reappeared with ever-increasing frequency; indeed, the two financiers had in the end to admit that this “vague and perfidious title,” as Rodolphe called it, had proved a delusion and a snare.

* * * * *

Such, then, are the four principal characters with whose doings and misdoings the “Scenes of Bohemian Life” are mainly occupied. A word only about the women of the book.