Part 4

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!"