Part 15

For all its light-hearted absurdities La Childebert was not Bohemia, for its existence belonged rather to that of irresponsible students than of artists. I only mention it by way of contrast, as I now mention again Privat d'Anglemont, the author of "Paris Inconnu" and "Paris Anecdote," legendary as a Bohemian, but of a very different type. These two curious and valuable books are a complete study of the seamy side of Paris during the latter part of Louis Philippe's reign. The life of the porters in the Halles, the _chiffonniers_, and all the pliers of obscure trades, with their customs, their dwellings, and their manners, is most faithfully reproduced in them in a manner which could only have been made possible by a complete identification of the author with the subjects of his observation. Such, in fact, was the lifework of Privat d'Anglemont, a Creole born in Guadeloupe. He became the legendary _noctambule_ of Paris, realizing, as Charles Monselet says in his preface to "Paris Anecdote," the popular idea of a Bohemian--that is, simply an eccentric vagabond. In the sense of the word as used in this book, he was not a Bohemian at all, for, though he wrote articles and books upon his experiences, he was in no sense an artist, nor was he striving to make his life conformable to artistic liberty. He was animated simply by a gipsy passion for roaming, combined with a taste for mystery and romancing. Faithful as his books were, he hardly ever _spoke_ the truth: twenty times he told Théodore de Banville the history of his life, and each time it was different. Still, he merits a word here on account of his reputation as the complete Bohemian, a reputation increased by his being an easy peg on which to hang any fantastic story that came into a journalist's brain. Théodore de Banville, who first met him in 1841 and, according to Monselet, idealized him absurdly, gives some curious recollections of him in "Mes Souvenirs." He was a handsome man, dark, tall, and slender, rather resembling the elder Dumas. He passed most of his life wandering about the low quarters of Paris in complete poverty, often begging a meal from one of the _cabaretiers_ of the Halles, who all loved him. Yet, de Banville avers, he was not really unprovided for, since at irregular intervals a relative used to send him about £200 from America in gold pieces. But Privat d'Anglemont preferred to live without money, so that he never hesitated in getting rid of this burden as soon as possible by standing a dinner to all the poor and hungry women he could find in the tiny inn called the "Bœuf Enragé," at the bottom of the Rue de la Harpe. Like Gérard de Nerval, he would set out on a voyage at a moment's notice and without a moment's preparation, and such was his charm that he had affectionate friends in the lower quarters of many a French town. Once during his nightly wanderings he was stopped by some robbers. "But I'm Privat," he said, roaring with laughter. At which the robbers joined in the laugh, and invited him to supper. By a ruined hut they sat down to drink the best champagne in the light of the stars, to smoke, and to tell stories. Privat delighted his hosts, who invited him to meet them again; but he shook his head, saying, "N'engageons pas l'avenir."

Privat d'Anglemont, who eventually died of consumption, did little more than carry on the traditions of the "noctambules," less mischievously than their founder, Rétif de la Bretonne, less modestly and artistically than Gérard de Nerval, but so much more seriously than either of his predecessors that he left little scope for a new departure to his own successor, Alfred Delvau. He was not, in the truest sense, a Bohemian, though he led an existence ever bordering on the confines of Bohemia. The same may be said, in a more transitory sense, of Flaubert, the great renovator and refiner of Romanticism. Most of his life was spent in the country, but there was a short period when he came to study law in Paris, which, if it were not mentioned, might justify a challenge from readers familiar with "L'Education Sentimentale" or Maxime du Camp's "Souvenirs Littéraires." So far as the first of these books is concerned, little time need here be spent in finding relevant points of comparison. The last thing which Flaubert desired to portray in that depressing picture was an existence in any sense artistic. His hero is a provincial youth who, during his student days in Paris, drifts aimlessly and indolently through a variety of second-rate experiences in company with second-rate friends. Flaubert's own experiences are, no doubt, frequently worked into the material, but "L'Education Sentimentale" is nothing so cheap as autobiography served in a thin sauce of fiction. It is a novel in which the author has with the highest exercise of penetrative imagination treated what Mr. Henry James would call the "germ"--the dreary wastefulness, that is, of such a life in case of such a young man as Frédéric Moreau, who with Madame Bovary is Flaubert's contribution to the pathology of _le mal romantique_. Flaubert himself, with all his excitability and extravagance, was of a much stronger stamp; the strength of his artistic conviction saved him from all such flabbiness. He came to Paris to study law, but, having failed to pass his examination, returned to his home in 1843. If he had stayed he might easily have become one of the leading figures, certainly a powerful influence, in that Bohemia which Murger knew. Maxime du Camp, who made his acquaintance early in 1843, shows him as a young man living always at a high pitch with the flamboyant vitality that would have done no dishonour to the Impasse du Doyenné, so far was he from being the victim of Frédéric's weak-kneed desolation. He passed his days in an alternation of prodigality and poverty, spending fifty francs on his dinner one day and feeding on a crust and a slab of chocolate the next. He lived in a kind of intellectual tornado, both frantic and noisy. He went into ecstasies over mediocre works in which he perceived beauties hidden from the rest of the world, but which he loved to point out stridently to his friends, intoning the prose, roaring the verse at the top of his voice, repeating incessantly any word which took his passionate fancy, and filling all the neighbourhood with his din. He would wake up a friend without compunction at three in the morning to show him a moonlight effect on the Seine; one moment he would be inventing sauces to make brill appetizing, and the next he would be plotting to smack Gustave Planche's face for having spoken slightingly of Victor Hugo. The _cénacle_ composed of Louis de Cormenin, Le Poitevin, Du Camp, and himself often dined at Dagneaux's, one of the better restaurants of the Quartier Latin, and stayed talking ceaselessly till the doors were closed. Their ambitions were as wild as their conversation; Flaubert and Du Camp seriously determined to learn everything between the ages of twenty-one and thirty, to produce great works till forty, and then to retire into the country. Except for the fact that, according to his friend, Flaubert disdained the women whom his beauty attracted, this was a promising beginning for Bohemia. As the world knows, fate decreed otherwise, and he retired to develop in that close intellectual atmosphere with Louis Bouilhet and Du Camp, of which the latter says: "Living as we did, in solitude, we exchanged only the same set of ideas apart from all criticism, so that things in general lost their right proportion in our minds."

Flaubert's life in the Rue de l'Est was, at best, only a tentative pathway in Bohemia, like one of those tracks in a suburb that give hope of leading somewhere, but change their mind _en route_. It is too small a digression to be distracting, and I entered upon it, among other reasons, because its little adventure coincides in date with those movements in the central market-place yet to be touched on. One more alley, however, must be taken on the way, for it is, indeed, only just off the market-place. The name upon its wall is that of Charles Baudelaire, a well-known figure whose exact relation to Bohemia is, nevertheless, not so easy to determine. He began very much in the manner of Flaubert, coming as a student to the Quartier Latin and residing at a not very strictly kept _pension_ near the Panthéon between 1839 and 1841, his eighteenth and his twentieth years. I need not repeat the distinction made between student life--_das Burschenleben_--and out-and-out Bohemianism. Baudelaire filled his days to their fullest extent, mixing together indiscriminately the enjoyments of student, dandy, and _viveur_, so far as his means allowed. It was only at the end of this time that his determination to take up literature scandalized his stepfather and caused his enforced sea voyage. When he returned in 1842 he had come of age and possessed a capital of 75,000 francs. He set about spending this money with a gusto and in a manner not unworthy of the golden age of Bohemia. He had various lodgings till he settled for two years in a beautiful apartment in the old Hôtel Pimodan on the Île St.-Louis, where his comrade was the painter Boissard, a good artist who, as Gautier said, exhausted himself in enthusiasms, and in whose wonderful Louis XIV salon the society of _hachischiens_ met. Had Baudelaire been a true Bohemian at heart he might have instituted a second _Bohème galante_, but he was wanting in that simplicity and goodfellowship which are signal qualities in the Bohemian character. He wished to make his life, like his art, a study in exquisite intensity, so that in the days of his splendour his mode of living was rather that of a "dandy" than anything else. He dressed with immense care, but in a bygone fashion; he pursued every kind of sensation, frequented every kind of society, and became the leader of a set who carefully cultivated eccentricity for its own sake, an eccentricity too _posé_ to serve as a type of Bohemian manners. To make himself a subject of astonishment was his chief amusement, to which end his devices--such as entering a restaurant with a friend and feigning to begin a story with the loud exordium: "After I had murdered my poor father----"--were innumerable. So much may be said with a certain pity or amusement, but it must also be admitted that a certain refinement, both social and intellectual, kept him from associating himself entirely with the not over-discriminating Bohemia of his generation. It is all the more fair to say this because after 1844, when his stepfather got a guardian appointed to take charge of his remaining capital and he was reduced to eking out a reduced income by journalism, with all its attendant disappointments and hardships, he chose with some discrimination the extent to which he would throw in his lot with the Bohemian life for which he had by that time every qualification. He became a friend of Murger and many other complete Bohemians, and there is a story of his asking the original of Schaunard to dine and giving him a piece of Brie cheese and two bottles of claret, asking him to imagine that he was enjoying the dessert after a good dinner. Yet his real intimates were a band of young men, Théodore de Banville, Charles Monselet, Villiers de l'Isle Adam, and Leconte de l'Isle, who chose to maintain a certain amount of order in the midst of eccentricity and found boisterous joviality less to their taste than the more delicate affectations of wit. Here again I hold no brief for the complete Bohemians. They had their compensating virtues, but it is hardly doubtful that Baudelaire and his friends were the better educated and the more truly artistic set of the two. This, perhaps, was the greatest tragedy of Bohemia's decline, that its spiritual distinction faded with its material well-being. At any rate, for a combination of reasons, laudable and the reverse, Baudelaire's set was not Bohemia, and if, as I leave them, I may insist particularly on one of the less laudable reasons, it is that pose, which is another form of convention, must by the very conception of Bohemia be excluded from its characteristics. Nadar hits the difference when, in his curious little book on Baudelaire, which is written in an idiom describable as a French version of that elliptical quaintness associated with our own _Pink 'Un_, he writes: "Avec ces épileptiques, combien loin du sans façon tout bonhomme, de la simplesse à la bonne franquette de mon autre bande de Bohème, 'la bande de Murger' et de notre 'Société des buveurs d'eau.' ..."

We return, then, to the author of "Scènes de la Vie de Bohème" at the end of a rather circuitous route. In speaking of the Bohemia which he immortalized I have called it, in distinction from certain modifications or superficial resemblances, the central market-place, but no more need be sought in that phrase than an effort to represent it by a handy image as exhibiting the main civic qualities and manners implied in the generic name. Compared with earlier days, a far less proud and bustling burgherdom trod its rather muddy paving-stones, for it had suffered as some agricultural centre when railways were beginning. Yet any pride of succession which they may have had was legitimately theirs, for, if they were less materially and intellectually endowed, if the peculiarly happy circumstances of their civic foundation had passed to make their ultimate disruption certain under the changed conditions of all that is included in social development, they still preserved the Bohemian character, with its simplicity, gaiety, humour, and courage. To labour the point further is unnecessary, for if it is not already clear, the fault is too remote to be here corrected. In the "Scènes de la Vie de Bohème" all the daily comedy and tragedy of this Bohemia of common mortality finds expression: the life there described so intimately and humorously stands or falls by its artistic truth, to which no amount of possible documentary corroboration adds an iota. Nevertheless, the professed concession to a desire for ascertainable "facts" with which this chapter opened must be made, at the risk of seeming to expose the vanity of the researcher as the real object of indulgence. Since, in the garrulous world of to-day, nobody can make the least incursion into the public eye, much less produce a successful book or picture, without the appearance of a crop of "personal notes," so Murger's picture may be taken for granted, and what follows may appear in the light of "personal notes," claiming no more connexion than a general relation to the picture.

Murger[28] was no son of a landed proprietor nor even sprung from a middle-class family, as most Bohemians naturally were, for the whole life of Bohemia presupposes a more or less literary education seldom vouchsafed to the children of lower social order. His father was a German tailor in the Rue des Trois Frères, who wished, not without reason, that his son should succeed him in his trade. Murger's early education was therefore confined to the rudiments, and his deficiencies in that respect were a burden upon him all his life. The career of a tailor, for all that, aroused his utmost aversion; through his two friends, Emile and Pierre Bisson, who became clerks, he acquired a violent taste for poetry, with the composition of which he judged the shears incompatible. His father took the rebellion hardly, but got him a place, since he liked pens and paper so much, as errand-boy to an _avoué_, an occupation in which he continued to cultivate his poetic inclinations. When seventeen years old, in 1839, through the interest of M. de Jouy, a critic and member of the Academy, he was appointed secretary to a Russian diplomat, M. de Tolstoi. His salary was only 40 francs a month, out of which he had to pay a small _pension_ to his father for board and lodging; still, he was happy. His duties were very light, and his employer, who also had a literary turn, took a certain amount of interest in him and gave him occasional presents of money. During the next two years he made the acquaintance of that group of friends on which he drew for his stories of Bohemia, and experienced two love affairs. The first object of his affections was "la cousine Angèle," the heroine of a chapter in "Scènes de la Vie de Bohème," in which Rodolphe in his draughty garret, by dint of burning his great tragedy in the stove, warms himself sufficiently to write the commemorative poem for the tombstone of a defunct _bourgeois_, buying with the proceeds a bunch of white violets for his disdainful cousin. The second was a certain Marie, who eventually ran away with one of his friends--a tragedy which he relates in "Scènes de la Vie de Jeunesse." By this time he had become a thoroughly developed Bohemian, intolerant of all restraint. He left his father's home, and even for a time gave up his post with M. de Tolstoi.

It was then that Henry Murger's Bohemia was definitely formed, a society described by one of them as "ce demi-quarteron de poètes à l'outrance, mais absolument inédits, réunis dans un tas, sans vestes ni semelles, ne doutant de rien, ni de leur lendemain, ni de leur génie, ni du génie de leur voisin, ni de l'éditeur à venir, ni du succès, ni des belles dames, ni de la fortune--de rien, si ce n'est de leur dîner du soir, trop convaincus, d'ailleurs, quant à la question de leur déjeuner du matin." Their names were the brothers Bisson, Lelioux, Noel, Nadar, Guilbert, Vastine, the brothers Desbrosses, Cabot, Villain, Tabar, Chintreuil, Pottier, Karol, Schann, and Vernet. They called themselves the "Société des Buveurs d'Eau," but they were by no means so quixotic as Murger draws that society in "Scènes de la Vie de Bohème." It was simply a union for mutual help, the rules of which did not bar any commercial occupation. The members lived as they pleased or as they could, and water was only a compulsory beverage at the official monthly meetings, when they all submitted their work to the criticism of their brethren. Their ordinary occupations were various enough. Noel gave drawing lessons; another was a judicial stenographer; Jacques Desbrosses, nicknamed Christ--the original of "Jacques D----" in "Scènes de la Vie de Bohème"--and Cabot drew designs for monumental masons; the other Desbrosses, called Gothique, earned a little money by painting door-signs for midwives; Schann, the original of Schaunard, was a musician, and Wallon, Murger's Colline, who joined the society later, eked out his barren philosophy by giving lessons; Chintreuil, afterwards to become a well-known artist, was then a bookseller's assistant, with Champfleury for his colleague; and Nadar, otherwise F. Tournachon, whom Alphonse Karr describes as "a kind of giant with immense legs, long arms, a long body with a shaggy head of red hair above it, and staring, intelligent, flashing eyes," was the poet and journalist who became a celebrated balloonist and an immensely successful photographer. His caricature hangs in the section of the Musée Carnavalet devoted to early aeronautics in Paris.

We may take it from Murger that the shortcomings of fortune were borne with humorous fortitude on the credit of her occasional smiles, but there was no illusion about the privations. Nadar, Champfleury, and Delvau all agree that a bitter wind blew upon them. It was not so bad, in Nadar's opinion, so long as they lived more or less together, and this they did for a short time in an old house by the Barrière d'Enfer, which looked like a farm with a farmyard inhabited by hens. Champfleury made their acquaintance at this time in a little dairy where they sometimes took their meals. It was a strange society. Some wore blouses, others Phrygian caps, while the brothers Desbrosses had large sky-blue overcoats, turned back with pink satin and fastened by huge mother-of-pearl buttons. These two brothers were the originators of the colony at the Barrière d'Enfer, and its chiefs "surtout par leur misère." They harboured some of the others, who found a resting-place for the night in two hammocks slung in their small room. Murger was among them, the art of painting being for the moment his preoccupation. Fine days were spent lounging on the roof and contemplating the then rural surroundings. Anybody arriving with five francs in his pocket would have been regarded as a millionaire; indeed, they were happy enough when they could afford a few fried potatoes for dinner. Yet they would not have exchanged their hovel for the Garden of Eden, and they fed upon their dreams with inexhaustible confidence. Privation was still worse when the society broke up. One Bohemian lived a whole week on raw potatoes brought by his poor mother from the country; another went three days without food; another passed a winter shirtless in a calico blouse and a lasting waistcoat; another, as a device to keep himself warm, used to carry a log of wood up to his high garret, drop it over the banisters, and run down to fetch it again; an older Bohemian who heard of this manœuvre exclaimed: "Spendthrift, why the log?"

Henry Murger himself, who had abandoned painting and definitely adopted the vocation of a sentimental poet, went to live with his friend Lelioux, first in the Rue Montholon and then in that garret at £4 a year in the Rue de la Tour d'Auvergne where Rodolphe's friends "drank badly filtered water out of eclectic earthenware" at his Wednesday receptions. He had resumed his employment with M. de Tolstoi, but he was too improvident to keep out of misery for many days together. More than once he became so ill with purpura, an eruptive disease due in his case to the abuse of coffee, that he had to go to the hospital. Some extracts from his letters during these years will give an idea of his destitution. On December 14, 1841, he writes:

"Les Desbrosses passent la moitié de la journée à ne pas manger et l'autre à crever de froid. Les chats se méfient d'eux, et, en fait de chéminée, ils ne possèdent que leurs pipes--bien des fois sans tabac."

March 6, 1842:

"Sans le Christ, qui m'a donné à dîner et à déjeuner quatre fois la semaine, je ne sais pas ce que je serais devenu. Ce garçon n'a pas volé son surnom."

April 25, 1843:

"Nous crevons de faim; nous sommes au bout du rouleau. Il faut décidément se faire un trou quelque part ou se faire sauter la cervelle."

March 17, 1844:

"De Charybde en Sylla, mon cher ami! La misère est plus horrible que jamais chez moi et autour de moi. Ma place au _Commerce_ n'a pas eu de suite; je suis de nouveau sur le pavé. C'est horrible! Aussi le découragement m'a-t-il pris et tout à fait submergé. Encore quelques jours de cette position et je me fais sauter la cervelle ou je m'engage dans la marine.--Pardonne-moi ces plaintes! C'est le cri de la _fin_."

Like Colline, he punned even in his misery.