Part 10

Gérard threw in his lot with the _cénacle_, but, though he even wrote some revolutionary poems in 1830, for which he was imprisoned in Sainte Pélagie, he was never quite at ease with Borel and the _Bousingot_ faction. The flamboyant side of Romanticism and its noisy gatherings had little appeal for him. He was an eccentric and a solitary by nature, as his writings, with their strong reminiscence of Heine, show. In the time of the _cénacle_ he was, according to Gautier, a gentle and modest young man, who blushed like a girl, with a pink-and-white complexion and soft, grey eyes. Under his fine, light golden hair his forehead, beautifully shaped, shone like polished ivory. He was usually dressed in a black frock-coat with enormous pockets, in which, like Murger's Colline, he buried a whole library of books picked up on the _quais_, five or six notebooks, and a large collection of scraps of paper on which he wrote down the ideas that occurred to him on his long walks. He was the perfect peripatetic: as he once said, he would have liked to walk through life unrolling an endless roll of paper on which he could jot his reflections. He lived at this time with Camille Rogier, the artist, in the Rue des Beaux Arts, but his friends could never be sure where to find him. For him no hour was sacred to rest. He wandered about Paris at all times of the day and night, dropping in on a friend for an hour or two, ready to ride a hobby-horse with him in any direction, then darting off again, his thoughts in the clouds, nobody knew whither, and returning in the small hours, only to flit from his bed at the dawn. Of all the gay companions of Bohemia he was the best loved, for his childlike simplicity and his gentle manners won all hearts. He went through life to his terrible death with complete unworldliness, almost like a ghost, unconscious of the material side of existence, directing his feet only by the light of his spirit. Gautier, writing after his death, protested vehemently that his was no ordinary tragedy of neglected genius; he had money enough, but money was nothing to him, so he spent it without a thought; his work was always accepted by editors, and his plays, though not successful, were all produced. But success was the last of his preoccupations. He was a wanderer living in a world of his own fantasies. As he will appear again in these pages, we may bid him farewell for the moment, with the conviction that it would be pleasant to be transported for a season back to that turbulent _vie de Bohème_ if only to find the kindly Gérard's arm passed through one's own and to hear his gentle murmur: "Tu as une fantaisie; je la promènerai avec toi."

I ought, perhaps, to apologize for allowing the persons of the _cénacle_ to take up so much space before coming to their life, yet I imagine, on the whole, that I have said too little rather than too much. To go back to a past of which one has no experience is a matter of such extreme difficulty that a historian must often despair at the impossibility of reproducing the whole congeries of scattered detail from which alone his own mental picture could have taken shape. The first Bohemia, that of the second _cénacle_, was less a common life than a common recreation. It was an incomplete _vie de Bohème_ in so far as its members were united, not by a desire to share all the joys and difficulties of life, but by a particular artistic enthusiasm. There is no record that any of them worked or dwelt together, that they took part in joint expeditions of amusement, or that the mutual acquaintance of those female divinities for whom they plied so "fatally" their emotional bellows is to be presumed--and these are marked characteristics of Murger's _vie de Bohème_. When they ate together it was at the obscure _cabaret_ kept by the Neapolitan Graziano for the needs of his compatriots who worked in Paris. Here, in a plain whitewashed room with a sanded floor, a dresser covered with violently coloured faience and plain wooden benches, they were initiated by their host--a man of senatorial presence, with an immense but perfectly correct nose and big black beard, who seemed to dream all the while of his beloved Italy--into the delights of _spaghetti_, _stufato_, _tagliarini_, and _gnocchi_. They were delicious meals, seasoned with good spirits, and--to use the delightful French phrase--"bedewed" with sound wine of Argenteuil or Suresnes christened magnificently with the names of the most exclusive vineyards in Médoc or Burgundy. Still, they were felt at times to be a trifle wanting in Romantic glamour. It was all very well, the grumblers remarked, to be enjoying incomparable macaroni, but when all was said and done there was little that an impartial observer could descry in these banquets to differentiate them from the prosaic meals of a Joseph Prudhomme. Something was wanting, some tincture of the Newstead spirit, some infernal joy in the food, some shudder in the drinking. The macaroni remained obstinately matter-of-fact, but a brilliant idea was mooted that would give a charnel flavour to the wine. Graziano's glasses were only glasses of quite modern exiguousness; the true brotherhood should drink out of a skull. A skull was accordingly procured by Gérard from his father, the doctor, and ingeniously mounted by Gautier, who screwed to its side an old brass handle from a chest of drawers. In truth it was a noble bowl, and the pious company drank from it with bravado, each concealing with more or less ill-success his natural repugnance. Familiarity, however, bred contempt, till one uncompromising youth surprised his companions by noisily commanding the waiter to fill with sea-water.

"Why sea-water?" exclaimed a simple soul.

"Why sea-water! Because the master in 'Hans d'Islande' says 'he drank the water of the sea from the skulls of the dead.' It is my desire to do the same."

Yes, the _Petit Moulin Rouge_, for all its good cheer and its death's-head mounted with a drawer-handle, was too workaday for these eclectics. They reached their true glory only in the gatherings which took place in Jehan du Seigneur's studio. It was a room over a little fruiterer's shop that the _cénacle_ sanctified as their conventicle. "In a little chamber," wrote an older Gautier, "which had not seats enough for all its occupants, gathered the young men, really young and different in that respect from the _young_ men of to-day, who are all more or less quinquagenarians. The hammock in which the master of the dwelling took his siesta, the narrow couchlet in which the dawn often surprised him at the last page of a book of verses, eked out the insufficiency of conveniences for conversation. One really talked better standing up, and the gestures of the orator or declaimer only gained a more ample scope. Still, it was extremely unwise to make too free with your arms for fear of knocking your knuckles against the sloping ceiling." It was a poor man's room, but not without ornament, for it contained sketches by the two Dévérias, a head after Titian or Giorgione by Boulanger, two earthenware vases full of flowers on the chimneypiece, the inevitable death's-head instead of a clock, a looking-glass, and a small shelf of books. On either side of the glass and in the embrasures of the windows were hung the portrait medallions which Jehan made of his friends. They had no money to get them cast in bronze, so the world has lost in them a valuable appendix to the well-known busts of his contemporaries executed by the more distinguished Romantic sculptor, David d'Angers. Here they would all gather of an evening: Gérard if he happened to be passing in his amiable wanderings, Bouchardy the Maharajah, Gautier--not yet the burly critic of _La Presse_, but a thin youth of nineteen--Nanteuil with his Gothic nimbus, Vabre bursting with some new joke, Borel swinging off his long cloak with a scowl, O'Neddy shedding Dondey in the street, Mackeat and the rest, each bursting with eloquence or roaring the "Chasse du Burgrave" at the top of his voice. When Maxime du Camp once asked Gautier what they talked about, he answered: "About everything, but I haven't the least idea what they said, because everybody talked at once." However, a very good idea of a typical evening in the _cénacle_ is given in Philothée O'Neddy's "Feu et Flamme," the first poem in which, called "Pandæmonium," is a gorgeous description of their cave of harmony. It is freely decorated with "local colour," which on a Romantic's lips meant the borrowing of all he could carry away from the medieval stage-property room, but it was drawn from life with all seriousness and sincerity. The poem opens by depicting them all seated round the punch-bowl--punch, it must be stated, was the only really respectable drink for a thorough-paced Romantic. He mixed it in a large bowl and set light to the fumes, as the students are supposed to do in the first act of the "Contes d'Hoffmann," and derived enormous satisfaction from sitting in an obscurity only lit by this bluish flame. Thus to recall the witches' cauldron and the fires of the Inferno had an unfailing success as a stimulant to eloquence. The scene, then, opens thus powerfully:

_Au centre de la salle, autour d'une urne en fer,_ _Digne émule en largeur des coupes d'enfer,_ _Dans laquelle un beau punch, aux prismatiques flammes,_ _Semble un lac sulfureux qui fait houler ses lames,_ _Vingt jeunes hommes, tous artistes dans le cœur,_ _La pipe ou le cigare aux lèvres, l'œil moqueur,_ _Le temporal orné du bonnet de Phrygie,_ _En barbe Jeune-France, en costume d'orgie,_ _Sont pachalesquement jetés sur un amas_ _De coussins dont maint siècle a troué le damas,_ _Et le sombre atelier n'a point d'éclairage_ _Que la gerbe du punch, spiritueux mirage._

Smoking, it would be well to add, was considered part of the whole duty of a Romantic man. The cigar, being Byronic, was affected by the "fatally" inclined; the pipe came, not from England, but from Germany; it was Faust-like, Hoffmannesque; it was also Flemish, of course, and the Flemish painters, like Steen and Teniers, were in high repute. A pipe signified a more jolly potatory spirit than a cigar, but it was always possible for the irreconcilable satanics to regard the breathing out of smoke from either as symbolically demoniac. The cigarette was not despised, but its popularity was due also to its picturesque associations. Spain was the home of the cigarette, the _papelito_ as Borel and his friends fondly called it. When they rolled their fragrant Maryland lovingly in the _papel_ they assumed a Spanish _allure_, Granada rose before their eyes, and invisible guitars played "Avez-vous vu dans Barcelone?" However, cigarettes would have been out of place in the prismatic flames of the punch-bowl. Their Spanish nonchalance suited better the light of day: evening shadows were consecrated to gloom and frenzy, Northern spirits. Hence it is not surprising to hear that all the company had

_De haine virulente et de pitié morose_ _Contre la bourgeoisie et le Code et la prose;_ _Des cœurs ne dépensant leur exultation_ _Que pour deux vérités, l'art et la passion!_

The conversation is compared with some aptitude to a Spanish town devastated by an earthquake, which confounds in one ruin palaces and huts, churches and houses of ill-fame. So in their talk the ideal and the grotesque, poetry and cynical jesting are confounded pell-mell. Silence is made while a passage from Victor Hugo is declaimed, after which four discourses are pronounced. Three are by Borel, Clopet, and Bouchardy respectively, concealed in the names of Reblo, Noel, and Don José, and the second discourse is delivered by the swarthy O'Neddy himself, who,

_Faisant osciller son regard de maudit_ _Sur le conventicule,_

pours out a passionate complaint that poets have too long been under the yoke of governments and codes of law. The evening closes with a violent tumult. The punch has done its work, and the _cénacle_ is a-screaming with the ecstasy of energumens.

_Ce fut un long chaos de jurons, de boutades,_ _De hurrahs, de tollés et de rhodomontades._

They danced and sang like the demon crew in the master's "Ronde du Sabbat,"

_Et jusques au matin les damnés Jeune-Frances_ _Nagèrent dans un flux d'indicibles démences._

It is to be hoped that the worthy fruiterer was sleeping quietly in another part of Paris, and only the potatoes were kept awake and sleep banished from the pears.

If at this point our reader feels inclined to throw up his hands and exclaim "How disgusting!" he will be well advised to put down the book. One cannot approach Bohemia without a certain sympathy for youthful excesses, howsoever opposed they may be to one's personal predilections. If the _cénacle_ indulged in occasional orgies--which, even allowing a good deal for "local colour" in O'Neddy's "Pandæmonium," they certainly did--they had a great many compensating virtues, such as complete disinterestedness and a consuming love of art, which were not conspicuous in Paris at the time. Maxime du Camp in his memoir on Gautier sets the extreme limit to which reasonable criticism of them can go when, after remarking on the promise given by a violent youth for a fruitful middle age, he says:

"From that should we conclude that the young men who composed the _cénacle_ were all destined to become great men? Certainly not; there were among them dreamers with illusions about themselves, sterile dupes of the comedy that they played, failures in whose case the brilliant future which they promised themselves fell naturally into obscurity. To more than one of them the saying of Rivarol could have been applied: 'It is a terrible advantage never to have done anything, but it should not be abused.' In short, only one of them has made a name that will not perish: Théophile Gautier. Gérard de Nerval, by whom he had been distanced at the beginning of his life, never passed a very moderate level, did not push his way in the crowd, and came early to grief. On the other hand, most of them were celebrated in the group, I might say in the _coterie_, to which they belonged, but their reputation never went beyond the circle in which they lived."

Maxime du Camp takes a very superior point of view which is less than just. The members of the _cénacle_, it may be admitted, overrated one another's talents and were ready, in some instances, to take posturing for performance; but Bohemia is not to be blamed because all her children were not great men any more than Eton because all her _alumni_ are not scholars. As a matter of fact, in this first Bohemia of the _cénacle_ there were very few of whom it could be said that their lives were ruined. Gérard died a violent death, but he was afflicted with mental disease. Apart from his eccentricity he was a scholar and a gentleman whose attainments equalled those of Gautier himself, though he could not bring himself to exploit them. Pétrus Borel was the one real failure, the _poseur_ who inevitably came to grief. His Bohemian career reached its apogee at his masked ball in 1832--a caricature of Dumas' own famous ball--held at his lodgings in the Rue d'Enfer, an appropriate address. He left Paris shortly afterwards, and, after earning for some years a precarious livelihood and publishing "Madame Putiphar," he became an inspector of Mostaganem, in Algeria, in which country he died wretchedly. The rest, though they did not quite achieve their proud dreams, continued, most of them, in the paths of art with rectitude and some success, Bouchardy and Maquet as dramatists, du Seigneur as a sculptor, Nanteuil as an artist. O'Neddy, once the _cénacle_ dissolved, as it did towards 1833, found poetry a resource in solitude, and poor Vabre, if he made no figure in the world, at least set himself the highest of ideals in devoting his life to the study of Shakespeare.

The first Bohemia, for what that is worth, was singularly respectable in its results. Even had they been far worse, sufficient praise to stifle carping would be found in the indelibly beautiful memory which it left on the minds of its members. In 1857 Bouchardy wrote of it to Gautier in these words:

"It was a holy and beautiful comradeship, my dear Théo, in which each was the loving brother, the devoted friend, the fellow-traveller who makes his friend forget the length and the fatigue of the road. It was a more beautiful comradeship than one can say, in which all wished the success of all without insensate exaggeration and without collective vanity, in which each of us offered to lend his shoulder to the foot of him who wished to climb and to reach his goal.... It was a happy time, dear Théophile, of which we ought to be proud, for when one has traversed this life so often saddened by so much bitterness, we ought to be proud of having found in it some hours of joy, we ought to boast of having been happy!"

Even Maxime du Camp admits that the effect of the _cénacle_ on Gautier was incalculable: its disinterested friendship and its enthusiasm made his individuality. All his life he remained "the mystic companion of Victor Hugo's first disciples." Weighed down in after years by the irksome tasks of journalism, the slave who remembered his years of freedom with regret, he responded to Bouchardy with tender melancholy from beside the rivers of Babylon:

"No doubt such joy could not last. To be young and intelligent, to love one another, to understand and commune in every realm of art--a more beautiful manner of life could not be conceived, and from the eyes of all those who followed it its dazzling splendour has never been obliterated."

At another time he wrote to Sainte-Beuve: "Nous étions ivres du beau, nous avons eu la sublime folie de l'art."

These words, issuing from a soul ever animated during its days on earth by a Bohemian spirit, cast a protecting spell round the memory of the first Bohemian brotherhood through which no Philistine anathemas can break.

VIII

LA BOHÈME GALANTE

_O le beau temps passé! Nous avions la science,_ _La science de vivre avec insouciance;_ _La gaieté rayonnait en nos esprits moqueurs,_ _Et l'Amour écrivait des livres dans nos cœurs!_

ARSÈNE HOUSSAYE

The _cénacle_ broke up towards 1833 and its members scattered. All Bohemian _coteries_ must be short-lived, but this one was specially doomed to a quick dissolution. It was, I will not say too romantic, but too romantically ritualistic, too much concerned with the vestments and incense and celebrations incident to the profession of "Hugolâtry." It is not hard to imagine how the too mystic significance given to its gatherings, its feasts, and even its individual actions became to some of the brethren, now that Romanticism was firmly established, either unreal or merely tiresome: divergences of taste and opinion began to creep in till, in the end, this attempted Bohemia became a deserted shrine. But the Bohemian spirit could not thus be quenched; indeed, it was only then fully kindled. The deacons and acolytes, whom the mere symbolism had mainly attracted, were gone; paid off the Swiss Guard whom the return of peace called back to civil life. Those who remained, the most advanced of the initiated, saw that the time had come for the casting away of symbols and the cessation of noisy worship. Bohemia had originated in a literary creed, but in its consummation it was to pass beyond the letter and take hold of human life. This consummation came with extraordinary rapidity; there were no feeble tentatives, no half-successes. A new community arose in Paris, almost out of the ashes of the _cénacle_, vastly different though it was from the obscure group in Jehan du Seigneur's humble studio. It was animated by all that was best in Romanticism--its disregard for academic convention, its colour, its joyousness, its warmth of feeling, and its sympathy with all human passions; but, unlike the _cénacle_, it did not trammel itself with Romantic convention, it set creation above imitation, and--greatest of all differences--it was no society meeting at intervals for spiritual and corporeal refreshment, but a genuine life in common lived just for the sake of living by a set of high-spirited, joyous young men, most of them true artists, neither maniacs, nor ne'er-do-wells, nor idlers. The _cénacle_ was dead, but _la vie de Bohème_ was born, and its golden age came first. The brotherhood of the Impasse du Doyenné was, in A. Delvau's words, "une Bohème dorée, avec laquelle celle de Schaunard n'a que des rapports très éloignés."[20] Delvau, who was of Murger's generation, knew well how quickly the glory departed. Yet at least Murger's Bohemians had this connexion with what Gérard de Nerval named _la Bohème galante_ that they could look back to it as the Romans to the reign of Saturn. It was constituted informally, even fortuitously; it existed without self-advertisement, but it remained, in the phrase of another French writer, "la patrie de toutes les Bohèmes littéraires."

In 1832 another Bohemian of the golden age had come to Paris, a brave and merry soul called Arsène Houssaye, who had only breathed this terrestrial atmosphere for seventeen years. It was not to champion a cause that he came, but he was called thither by the poet within him to take his part in infusing a new vitality into life and letters. Like Gautier, he was a natural _enfant de Bohème_, yet did not at first find the brotherhood which he was to hymn in prose and verse; it was still only a potentiality. For a few months he lived in an odd little Bohemia of his own with a friend called Van dell Hell in a _hôtel garni_. They wrote songs for a living, wore the red hats by which the more violent students of the Quartier Latin proclaimed their republicanism, and consoled themselves for the rebuffs of editors with the smiles of a certain "Nini yeux noirs." Houssaye in those amusing volumes which he called "Les Confessions" bears witness to the deplorable state of the literary market at the time. Novels and plays could not be sold, poetry was not wanted as a gift, and the newspapers regarded mere men of letters as too frivolous for employment. Poverty among the struggling writers was acute, but nobody cared a fig about money when all cared so much about art--a merciful dispensation of Providence. Yet, if commercialism did not affect art, the same can hardly be said of politics. Far too many of the young poets and artists, who would have scorned to drive a mercenary bargain at the expense of their art, exulted in defiling their artistic convictions with the reddest and most insensate republicanism, not seeing that if art does not need to regard gold pieces, neither does it need to trouble itself whether a king's head or a cap of liberty is their stamp. Arsène Houssaye, careless wretch, nearly missed the glory of Bohemia entirely by mixing himself up in the insurrection of the Cloître Saint-Merri. He was arrested, but a friendly commissary of police saved him from trial and imprisonment by sending him home to his wealthy, loyal, and scandalized family. The ungrateful lad, instead of settling down to some solid profession, simply bided his time till the disturbance was over, and returned to Paris, only so far profiting by his warning that he left politics henceforth to look after themselves. Houssaye's father, worthy man, felt that money would be thrown away on such a ruffian, so Arsène was left to his own resources, which, if they were meagre in early days, kept him alive for another sixty-three years.