Part 16

Letters of this doleful nature do not throw a very gay light upon the Bohemian market-place, where there was high competition for a small custom and prices ruled low. They contain a truth which no consideration of Bohemia can omit, but it was not the whole truth, as Murger himself testifies in his stories. It was a life of good days as well as bad, even in the leanest years, or "Scènes de la Vie de Bohème" could never have been written. Murger himself had already begun to hand some small wares over his counter. Rodolphe, the poet, it will be remembered, did not disdain to edit a small fashion paper called _L'Écharpe d'Iris_, in which, to Colline's extravagant delight, he inserted the philosopher's articles on metaphysics. This was a direct touch from life, for Bohemia in more than one instance lent its pen to trade. There was a certain Charles Vincent who edited two papers of the leather trade, _Le Moniteur de la Cordonnerie_ and the _Halle aux Cuirs_. In his editorial capacity he retained all the new pairs of boots and shoes sent in by advertisers, and with these he often paid his contributors. Murger in 1843 edited _Le Moniteur de la Chapellerie_, the industrial fruits of which were, no doubt, less profitable, but even a few hats and a few francs a month were of considerable value in Bohemia. They were, of course, nothing like the editorial profits of to-day. Receipts were extremely precarious, when, even on a well-written literary paper like _L'Artiste_, the application of a contributor for payment caused a considerable rummaging in tills and pockets before twenty-five francs could be found _dans la boutique_.[29] Yet small change was enough to stand a Bohemian holiday, and Murger's gloomy letters must be discounted by balancing them against Rodolphe's expedition to Versailles with Mademoiselle Laure after he had ransacked Paris for the five francs necessary to do that expedition in sufficient style. It would be absurd to suppose that Murger, with Nadar, Schann, and a _grisette_ or two, did not sometimes invade the Chaumière in a joyous band or wake from sleep the serious inhabitants of the Rue de la Tour d'Auvergne.

At the same time, howsoever the balance of pleasure and pain be struck, it is clear that happy memories of this Bohemia could only remain to those for whom it was only a necessary stage in life and not a death-trap. This tendency to poetic melancholy and the painful slowness with which he worked might have caused Henry Murger to sink for ever like many of his friends. He was saved, in the first instance, by Champfleury, who, when he was finally sold up in the Rue de la Tour d'Auvergne, took him to live in the Rue de Vaugirard and induced him to abandon poetry for prose. Jules Husson-Fleury, who was born at Laon in 1821 and became a well-known writer under the name of Champfleury, a great collector of prints and porcelain, on which he wrote some valuable monographs, and finally the director of the Sèvres manufactory, passed through Bohemia during the same years as Murger, and in his "Souvenirs et Portraits de Jeunesse" records many lively experiences. He first came to Paris as shop-boy and assistant in a bookseller's shop where, as I have already said, the future painter Chintreuil was in the same service. Champfleury lost his place for reading the books on his errands instead of delivering them to the customers, but during this year 1839 he saw something of Murger and the colony of the brothers Desbrosses. He then left Paris for a year or two, and returned when Murger was living in the Rue de la Tour d'Auvergne, though the acquaintance was not at once renewed. It was approximately in 1845 that they went to live together in the Rue de Vaugirard, after Champfleury had met Murger again in the hospital. They did not by any means leave Bohemia; in fact, there is reason to suppose that to some extent the character of Marcel was drawn from Champfleury. They wrote a vaudeville together which was never accepted, and attacked the difficult art of writing stories. Murger was able to place some of his work in _L'Artiste_, the editor of which was Arsène Houssaye, and in 1846 the "Scènes de la Vie de Bohème" began to come out in _Le Corsaire_. They were poorly enough paid at the time, but their dramatisation by Barrière in 1849 proved a huge success, and from that time onwards Murger settled down to more serious work and a less disorderly life.

But I am anticipating Champfleury's memories of the last days of Bohemia. In his view, at any rate so far as Murger and he were concerned, the indolence of Bohemia has been much exaggerated. "In reality," he says, "work was the basis of our life." They had a joint library, to which Murger supplied the poets and Champfleury the prose-writers. The latter read voraciously to educate himself, but Murger chiefly thumbed the pages of Victor Hugo and Alfred de Musset; he took regular doses of Shakespeare in a French translation, traces of which appear in "Scènes de la Vie de Bohème," but he had little knowledge of other classic authors. He worked with extraordinary difficulty; a page of prose cost him a night's work and intense intellectual labour, for "Murger n'était plein que de son cœur." Champfleury, for all his friendship, was a shrewd critic when he observed that his whole vision was introspective: "He swept the same chimney so often that in the end the plaster came off and the bricks fell down"; or again: "Besides his little library, his belongings consisted of worn white gloves, a velvet mask, and a withered bouquet hung on the walls. All Murger's work lies in his memories--some faded flowers, a meeting at the Bal de l'Opéra, a heart-ache."

Certain disorders of Bohemia are not excused by Champfleury, particularly that of not paying debts. His friend Fauchéry, an engraver who afterwards went to seek his fortune in Australia, induced him at first to accept the Bohemian code, which was:

1. Never to pay one's rent.

2. To conduct one's removals by the window.

3. To consider all bootmakers, tailors, hatters, and restaurant-keepers as members of Mr. Credit's family.

Some went so far as to maintain that after a clandestine removal through the window no piece of furniture which had passed the gutter in the middle of the street could be reclaimed by the proprietor. This less creditable attitude of Bohemia, which is sufficiently prominent in "Scènes de la Vie de Bohème," was repudiated with some shame in after years by many of Murger's friends. In the book Rodolphe pays his debts when he settles down, and we have it on the authority of Delvau that Schann (Schaunard), who eventually kept a respectable toy-shop, and the original of Musette, who married a chemist, took in their later days a more usual view of money matters. Champfleury confesses that he himself was saved by an amiable girl, who for a time became the divinity of his garret. Unlike Mimi and Musette, she had a horror of debt and vagabondage and inspired him with a pleasure in his own humble hearth, so that he gradually detached himself from his comrades, who were for the most part so ill provided for in the matter of lodging that their chief workroom was a _café_, where they arrived at nine in the morning, to leave at midnight. They read the newspapers, played at dominoes or _tric-trac_, and occasionally did a little work. Fauchéry, in particular, caused considerable surprise among the regular customers by bringing his whole engraving apparatus and solemnly setting to work. Some respect certainly is due to the proprietors of these little eating-houses who so gallantly put up with and gave credit to this noisy and not very profitable _clientèle_, who were capable of perpetrating all the outrages committed by Rodolphe and the rest in their constant asylum, the Café Momus.

Champfleury says little of the amiable goddess who rescued him from vagabondage except that she left him, like Mimi, because she grew tired of cheap muslin, but in another chapter he gives some account of two other idols of Bohemia whom he calls Mademoiselle M. and Mademoiselle P. Mademoiselle M. was dark and merry, a thorough coquette who laughed at wounded hearts; Mademoiselle P. was fair and melancholy, always in tears for the last lover who had left her. A generation of Bohemians were their lovers, poets and painters especially. As the generation grew up the divinities grew wiser, and Mademoiselle M. was the first to do a little mental arithmetic. For her own friends who had a future the days of idleness were over; there was no future for her either among the stranded remainder or in a new generation. Accordingly she departed to more profitable spheres. Mademoiselle P. stayed a little longer, still loving her poets, and weeping _toutes les larmes de son corps_ to find that she had a too formidable rival in the desire for fame which watched at the door of her lovers' hearts, till finally she found a worthy man who was no poet to love her and eventually to marry her. Mademoiselle M., meanwhile, had made by her conquests quite a respectable capital, with which one fine day she set sail for Algiers. Unhappily she left Marseilles in a steamer which sank with all hands, so that she and her gold came to rest at the bottom of the sea--a sad story from which Champfleury in an unworthy moment makes some show of drawing a moral. Neither of these young women can be identified with Murger's heroines. Musette, as I have said, married a chemist; Phémie Teinturière, Schaunard's choice, was according to Delvau, a not over-respectable person resembling a heroine of Paul de Kock; as for Mimi, Delvau asserts that Murger loved her while he wrote the "Scènes de la Vie de Bohème," and that her life and wretched death are matters of fact. However, that we may not be too lugubrious let me add that I have read in the French equivalent of "Notes and Queries" a statement that she cheerfully lived to keep a stall in the market.

One more bead in this string of scattered "facts," and the hungerers for documentary evidence must go away satisfied. The disorder of Bohemia requires no emphasis, but it is curious to note that the persons in whom its more orderly elements were incarnated were Champfleury himself and the original of that odd figure, Carolus Barbemuche, the solemn young tutor who in Murger's story glances so enviously at the _cénacle_ of Rodolphe, Schaunard, and Marcel in the Café Momus, who saves them from disaster by paying for their reckless Christmas Eve supper, who demands so humbly the privilege of being admitted to the clan, who serves so long and expensive an apprenticeship and gives such a splendid festival on his reception, even to the length of lending all his own presentable clothes to his guests for the occasion. Carolus Barbemuche was drawn, much to his disgust, from Charles Barbara, an obscure writer of fantastic stories, who joined Murger's Bohemia after acting as tutor to two boys. He had a face like a sphinx, rarely smiled, and seemed to be afraid of the wild jokes of his friends. Unlike the rest, he lived almost a hermit's life, receiving nobody in his garret, and retiring there every night neither to read nor to write, but to think, a queer occupation for a Bohemian. Of him Champfleury writes:

"He and I represented order in a group doomed to disorder; we were the _bourgeois_ of Bohemia, as much by our ambitions as our manner of living. The details of one day of our life, which continued in the same way for ten years, will show the succession of our studies and our labours. Rising very early, dashing from my bed to my table, I used to write till nine o'clock. An hour sufficed me for breakfast and a walk to the library, where I worked till twelve; there I used to meet Barbara, whom I took to the public lectures at the Collège de France, the Sorbonne, or the Jardin des Plantes. Two lectures, an hour each, exhausted our attention, and, resuming our walk, we arrived at Schann's temple of music, exclusively consecrated to quartets. Two hours of music every day, without counting piano trios three times a week at another house, made us able to read all the chamber music of the German masters.... Barbara was the finest instrumentalist in our band; son and brother of distinguished musicians, he had received in early youth excellent violin lessons, the fruit of which was not lost later, and he brought to the leading of a quartet a restrained emotion which is to be found in some pages of his writings."

It is an unexpectedly pretty glimpse into a part of Bohemia where Murger was not at home. When the quartets took place in a little square of the Quartier Latin, students and _grisettes_ came to listen before the open window, and workpeople on every story put out their heads to watch for the arrival of the musicians. Murger's disreputable Schaunard, with his symphony on _L'influence du bleu dans la musique_, was always, I must confess, my favourite; but to discover that he played the quartets of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and Mendelssohn for two hours a day with Barbemuche and Marcel--well, it was an intoxicating vision. Schaunard, who had a passion for lobsters, the composer (in his fleshly form of Schann) of a famous drinking song, as second violin in a Beethoven quartet--oh pleasant, pleasant fellow, who truly deserved to come into the comfortable harbour of a toy-shop!

Marcel, so far as he was Champfleury, found a haven too, and lived till 1889. Colline retired to found a new religion in Switzerland, and Rodolphe-Murger, though he lingered for some years in the band of artists and writers who haunted the _brasserie_ where Courbet raised the temple of realism, finally turned his back on dissipation and settled at Marlotte, even now a charming village near Fontainebleau. His chief recreation there was hunting, an occupation quite innocuous to the game, if it be true that a certain hare survived his attentions for a whole season, and when an unwary keeper shot it one misty afternoon, he exclaimed with genuine compunction, "Tiens, c'est le lièvre de M. Murger!" In 1861 he came to die in Paris of arteritis, and all the literary world visited his bedside. He died two days after his admission to the hospital, exclaiming, "Pas de musique! Pas de bruit! Pas de Bohème!" Bohemia, indeed, had long been dead, and in his last moments he may have recognized that it was well. There was no longer room for it in a busier, a better-swept world. In its golden age Bohemia did no more than share the imperfections of all human institutions. It had virtues, a liberty, a pride, and an ideal of its own. Murger had seen the beauty become a slattern, pretty no doubt beneath her smuts, gay in the midst of her sorrows, but free by tolerance, not by protest, her pride almost in the dust and her ideals in the possession of others. In the words which Théodore Pelloquet spoke over his grave, Murger belonged to an evil generation:

"Il appartenait à une mauvaise génération, à une génération vieillie avant l'heure, et, malgré sa vieillesse prématurée, sans expérience, sans enthousiasme et sans colère, ayant de la vanité et pas du tout d'orgueil, une vanité niaise, puérile, qui se manifeste surtout par l'affectation d'une ironie mesquine, en face de tous les enthousiasmes et de toutes les grandes causes; à une génération, en un mot, qui laissa périr dans ses mains le magnifique héritage que lui avaient légué les hommes de 1830."

XI

AMUSEMENTS OF BOHEMIA

The pageant of 1830 has passed, and our gaze has been directed to its Bohemian ingredients with the purpose of noting the particular marks and qualities which distinguished Bohemia, and how their particular manifestations were conditioned and varied by the progress of the years. Looking out of the window of the present, we have been unable at any moment to call a halt, lest we should lose a comprehensive view of the main development. Now that this view has been gained it will do no harm to send the procession once more before the mind's eye, that we may fix at leisure any less important details which may seem in themselves attractive. One of the most happy qualities of the Bohemian nature is its capacity for amusing itself. Real boredom and lackadaisical idleness do not come into the list of its shortcomings. The passionate Romantics, indeed, fashionably suffered from "spleen" and "ennui," they proclaimed a "cœur usé comme l'escalier d'une fille de joie," but the Bohemian, so far as he indulged in these peculiarities, was amusing himself. To him "spleen" and "ennui" were part of the game which he embraced with enthusiasm and in which he desired to excel; yet they were parts to which, as a general rule, he did not pay too much attention, preferring the more positive and assertive sides of Romanticism. Neither Gautier nor Gérard de Nerval nor Rodolphe nor Schaunard presents himself to the imagination as suffering from boredom. An unfailing capacity for amusing oneself and finding amusement in one's fellow-men is an essential Bohemian _trait_. The preceding chapters have not been wholly devoid of indications as to the way in which these talents were exercised by the Bohemian clans, but it was necessary to insist rather on the diversions which characterized the _particular_ spirit of each brotherhood than on the general opportunities which they all enjoyed with slight variation. The field is now open without restriction, and it will not be amiss to take a glimpse here and there at the Bohemian enjoying his leisure, if only to add a few vivid touches that will enliven the background of the picture. The work of Bohemia can always be taken for granted; artistic endeavour, whether actively or indolently pursued, varies but little in external feature; the change, the colour, the tragedy and comedy are only to be found within the artist's mind; but the amusement of Bohemia, so far from being hidden, courts publicity. It takes its colour, too, so largely from the changing world around that there is great pictorial value in its easily observable vicissitudes. For that reason I devote this chapter to the subject of its title without further apology, but only with the caution that here the accidents rather than the essentials of Bohemia are regarded. The privilege of amusement is open to everybody, but to see what Bohemia made of its privileges in that respect is, perhaps, to quicken it for the imagination by an extra spark.

Precisians might say that dress hardly comes under the head of amusements and that on certain views it is more properly included in the category of necessities or of nuisances. Yet there is no doubt that for all women--and for more men than would admit it--to be well dressed is an enjoyment, a term only differing from amusement by a smaller suggestion of possible frivolity. It is quite a sufficient warrant, at all events, for giving dress a small part in this chapter; besides, the costume of any individual or society is both a sure indicator of qualities and an apt focus for judgment. In England, the very home of illustrated books and papers, it is not necessary to say much in evoking the costume of a past age, so that the subject may be treated quite shortly, especially as regards the men of Bohemia, whose dress was too often a deplorable tragedy. When Marcel went to Musette's party with "Mathusalem" buttoned up to the neck over a blue shirt dotted with the figures of a boar-hunt he was, as Murger says, "dressed in the worst taste possible." In such a case there is no more to be said; his appearance would vary little from age to age. To the Bohemian in his lean days, certainly, it would be an insult to impute enjoyment of his tattered wardrobe. Those who most enjoyed dressing, without a doubt, were the Bohemian generation who cheered "Hernani" with such frenzy, for they made their _pourpoints_, felt sombreros, Robespierre waistcoats, and Phrygian caps effective details in the general Romantic demonstration and, as such, matters of intense pleasure. But these extravagances have already caught our attention; they were part of that frantic desire for novelty and colour which was a symptom of _le mal romantique_; their proper complement was that rage for fancy-dress balls which broke out shortly after 1830 and laid every nationality and period under contribution for picturesque costumes. So far as the men are concerned, it need only be pointed out that the general dress of the time--against which Bohemia stood out at first and into which it gradually faded--was that of tight pantaloons with straps, long coats with full skirts and accentuated waists, full cravats, lavish jewellery, and high hats in a bewildering variety of shapes, cylindrical, conical, inverted conical, curly, straight, with broad brims and with scarce a brim at all--the civilian uniform, in fact, of our own late Georgian and early Victorian era. It was a dress that only a few could wear with distinction; on the rest it wrinkled and puffed in inevitable ugliness. A Roger de Beauvoir could look immaculately moulded, but one has only to glance at the caricatures of Traviés, Monnier, Daumier, and Gavarni to see how unequivocally hideous were the clothes of an average man. To be out at elbows in this exacting fashion was indeed to be a sorry sight, and one can well imagine poor Lucien de Rubempré to have been in his provincial attire fair game for the sneers of Rastignac and de Marsay. Still, even the Bohemian had a new suit at times, and it lights the memory of Arsène Houssaye, Camille Rogier, Murger, Champfleury, and the rest to recall that it was not for comfortable lounge suits and flannels that they got into debt, but for correct suits of "tails," flowery waistcoats, top-hats, and patent leather boots. It gives a quaint touch of decorum to the picture of their wildest excesses.