Part 7

The science of practical joking was sedulously cultivated by Roger and his friends, who rejoiced to bring off successful "mystifications." One of Roger's best was played upon Duponchel, the director of the Opéra. One day the whole street where Duponchel lived was set all agog by the appearance of a magnificent funeral procession, consisting of a hearse and fifty carriages, with Roger and his friend Cabanon occupying the first carriage as chief mourners; the head of the procession drew up at Duponchel's door, to his great indignation. The joke up to this point was of no especial originality, but Roger gave it a turn of his own. The Romantic fashion dictated that every chapter in a novel should be headed by an epigraph, as extravagant as possible, from the work of some Romantic author. Roger therefore headed a chapter in his novel "Pulchinella," which was just appearing, "Feu Duponchel (Histoire contemporaine)." Even after he was hopelessly in debt he remained a joker. Being saddled with a thin and dirty bailiff, he gave him ten francs a day, washed him, dressed him as a Turk, and gave an evening party in honour of his Pasha, who could only talk in signs. The supreme _mystificateurs_, however, were Romieu and Monnier. Romieu was reputed to be the most amusing man in Paris, and so firmly founded was his reputation that nobody ever took him seriously. When he became prefect of Quimperlé--an easy post which enabled him to take many a holiday upon the boulevard--he was faced with the problem of dealing with a plague of cockchafers in the prefecture. He hit upon the wise and perfectly successful device of offering fifty francs for every bushel of dead cockchafers. The Bretons were grateful enough, but all Paris was in a roar. Here was the crowning farce of which only its lost joker would have been capable, and it supplied the smaller comic papers with copy for several days. Romieu made Monnier's acquaintance in an appropriate way. About eleven o'clock one night the artist heard a knock at his door, which he opened to a stranger, who came in and entered into a polite conversation without a word of introduction. Monnier made no comment, but replied with equal affability. After an hour or so, as the stranger remained, he ransacked his sideboard and entertained his guest with an impromptu supper. Time passed, the small hours struck, and still the stranger made no sign of going. Monnier therefore announced that he was ready for bed and that his sofa was at his guest's disposition. So they parted for the night, and next morning when they met Monnier's first words were "You are Romieu," a compliment returned by "You are Monnier."

Monnier, says Champfleury in his memoir, belonged to Bohemia till the end of his life; but it is clear that this Bohemia was that of the boulevards and cafés. He was no real Romantic, and far too fond of a good time to stay in the Bohemia which Champfleury himself knew so well. As a writer of short stories and dialogues, an actor, and an artist he had a huge success in the thirties, and he followed the pleasures of life with inexhaustible zest. Balzac drew him as Bixiou in "Les Employés." The portrait, according to Champfleury, was very true, but unjust:

"Intrépide chasseur de grisettes, fumeur, amuseur de gens, dîneur et soupeur, se mettant partout au diapason, brillant aussi bien dans les coulisses qu'au bal des grisettes dans l'allée des Veuves, il étonnait autant à table que dans une partie de plaisir; en verve à minuit dans la rue, comme le matin si vous le preniez au saut du lit, mais sombre et triste avec lui-même, comme la plupart des grands comiques. Lancé dans le monde des actrices et des acteurs, des écrivains, des artistes, et de certaines femmes dont la fortune est aléatoire, il vivait bien, allait au spectacle sans payer, jouait à Frascati, gagnait souvent. Enfin cet artiste, vraiment profond, mais par éclairs, se balançait dans la vie comme sur une escarpolette, sans s'inquiéter du moment où la corde casserait."

Innumerable stories are told of his practical jokes. Being an expert ventriloquist, he was wont to enter an omnibus and without moving a muscle utter in a feminine voice: "Je vous aime, monsieur le conducteur," at which there would be tremendous consternation among the petticoats. The dames swept the company with searching glares of outraged decency, the _demoiselles_ blushed, and the embarrassed conductor looked in vain for his temptress. One evening he was burdened with a bore in some illuminated public garden. To escape the tedium of conversation he pretended to be greatly interested in some matter which necessitated his walking carefully all round the garden and gazing intently at all the gas-lamps. After half an hour of these mysterious peregrinations the bore, who had been forced to keep silence, asked with impatience what was the matter. "I bet you five francs," said Monnier, "that there are here seventy-nine _becs de gaz_ (gas-jets)." The bore accepted the challenge with delight, and another half-hour was spent in silent perambulation and calculation. At length he announced triumphantly that he only counted seventy-eight. "Ah," said Monnier as he made his escape, and pointing to the orchestra, "vous avez oublié le bec de la clarinette."

Monnier, the great artist, the disappointed actor, was at the other end of the scale to Lord Seymour and his friends. They had a position without activity: his activity made his position. No great artist remains long in Bohemia. Some work their way out on foot: he rose from it, one might say, in a balloon, by which, after disporting himself for some years above the mists, he was landed for his later days in the obscurity of a province. Such a man, at home in all society, is restricted by none. As he was not the perfect Bohemian, so he was not the whole-hearted _viveur_, for whose complete picture I must return to Roger de Beauvoir and his set, some of whom are described in Roger's own little book, "Soupeurs de mon Temps." It is a melancholy epitaph of a brilliant company. The sparkling wit of their gatherings has vanished with the bubbles of the champagne they drank, and little is left on record but the capacity of their stomachs. They took an immense pride in their consumption of champagne. Briffaut, a clever journalist and a particular friend of Roger's, was the king of topers. To him was due the invention of "ingurgitation," which consisted in pouring a bottle of champagne into a bell-shaped glass cover, such as was used to protect cheese, and swallowing it at a draught. He once challenged a noted English toper and gave him a glass a bottle; the victory was easily his, for he disposed of a dozen. Among other champions who helped to make Veuve Clicquot's fortune were Armand Malitourne, a singularly gifted man, a journalist, and at one time secretary to the minister Montalivet; Béquet, whose good taste Roger himself extolled; and Bouffé, the director of the Vaudeville. Then there was Emile Cabanon, who lives in Romantic annals as the author of the extravagant "Roman pour les Cuisinières." Champfleury,[15] on the authority of Camille Rogier, the artist, says that he appeared one day upon the boulevard and won himself forthwith a place by his gifts as a story-teller, becoming a favourite with all from Prince Belgiojoso downwards. He is one of the reputed originals--there are two or three--of Balzac's Comte de la Palférine (in "Un Prince de la Bohème"), who, being struck with the appearance of a lady passing along the street, at once attached himself to her: in vain she tried to get rid of the importunate by saying she was going to visit a friend, for her cavalier came too and mixed with all urbanity in the conversation, rising to take his leave at the same time as the object of his sudden passion. This assiduity so captivated the besieged one's heart that she struck her colours. It is _à propos_ of Cabanon that Champfleury refers with some contempt to "les gentilshommes de lettres du boulevard de Gand, qui nageaient comme des poissons dans le fleuve de la dette, se fiaient plus sur leurs relations que sur leur plume, dépensaient de l'esprit comptant en veux-tu en voilà." Alfred Tattet,[16] the rich son of an _agent de change_, who was introduced to the _viveurs_ by Félix Arvers, the poet of one sonnet, was another of the crew. Alfred de Musset, Roger de Beauvoir, Romieu, and others made merry at his sumptuous entertainments till he varied the monotony by running over the frontier with a married woman, leaving Arvers to look after his affairs. In 1843 he returned to settle down at Fontainebleau with the wife of a German in Frankfort. Another young man, with the promising name of Chaudesaigues--a corruption of the Latin for "hot water"--came to Paris in 1835 with a fortune of 30,000 francs, which he squandered in a few years, and then struggled on as a journalist till he died of apoplexy.

I should wrong the _viveurs_ if I allowed it to be implied that they were all purely pleasure-seekers. Some of them were successful business men besides. Lautour-Mézéray, for instance, who was distinguished by the white camellia in his buttonhole, laid the foundations of his fortune by starting a paper called _Le Voleur_, which was entirely composed of cuttings from other papers. Like Andoche Finot, he went on from small to great, founding _La Mode_ and _Le Journal des Enfants_, the first children's paper. He helped to start _La Presse_ with Emile de Girardin, who was another of the more solid among the _viveurs_. Doctor Véron, stout and self-important, his face half hidden in a huge cravat, held an important place among them. He began life as a medical practitioner, but made a fortune by exploiting a certain Pâte Regnault and took to political journalism. Between 1831 and 1835 he was an extremely successful director of the Opéra, and in 1838 bought _Le Constitutionnel_, which he sold fourteen years later for two million francs. To him, it is said, is due the invention of the _tournedos_. Certainly, he was a prominent gastronome, and the terror of head waiters, for he was no mere swiller of champagne, but one who insisted on perfect vintages combined with perfect cooking. In the thirties, when "Robert le Diable" was filling the Opéra and his own pocket, he was a constant diner at the restaurants, but in later years he never dined except at his own house, where Sophie, his cook and majordomo, alone preserved the proper traditions of gastronomy. Mæcenas-like, he made a certain literary set free of his table. Their places were always laid, they helped themselves, and they remained as long as they pleased, whether their host left them or no. Théodore de Banville and many others have celebrated the excellent "cuisine" and its accompaniment of wit, but a reader of Véron's "Souvenirs d'un bourgeois de Paris" will be inclined to suspect that the doctor himself was rather a prosy humbug, who only supplied the appropriate stimulus for the wit of his guests. The chief of these, another celebrated _viveur_, was Nestor Roqueplan, whose toilette was unsurpassed and whose wit inexhaustible. He was a Parisian to the marrow; a day from Paris was to him a day out of Paradise. Like most of his generation, he began as a journalist, but diverged to become a director of theatres. The Panthéon, Nouveautés, Saint-Antoine, Variétés, Opéra, Opéra Comique, and Châtelet passed successively under his sway, and he lost money at them all except at the Variétés, during his management of which he wrote those sparkling "Nouvelles à la main" which are perhaps the freshest examples of purely ephemeral contemporary wit.

The Revolution of 1848 dispersed the _viveurs_ for ever. It was not that Paris diminished in gaiety during the Second Empire nor that the _cafés_ ceased to be invaded by merry bands of _fêtards_, but simply that Paris became too gay, too large, and too cosmopolitan. The boulevard was no longer to be kept sacred for a chosen few, and a new generation was rising, which found other channels for its energies than ingurgitatory wit-combats. Under the new _régime_ there was a court and a more exciting foreign policy. The aristocracy threw off its sulks, the prosperous industrial conquered his diffidence, the pleasure-loving stranger found that all railways led to Paris. The old guard was overwhelmed, or rather would have been overwhelmed if not already well-nigh crumbled away. Men with clear heads and practical aims, who had only devoted their leisure to enjoyment, like Véron, Roqueplan, de Girardin, survived to retire with all the honours of war, forming small _coteries_ for the cultivation of wit and good cheer, but shunning, instead of affronting, the public eye. But the rest, the _viveurs_ of every hour, where were they? Dead, worn-out, shattered in health, paying the dismal reckoning for the dissipation of their heyday, poor, neglected, forgotten. Misfortune overtook the gay Roger from the moment he married Mademoiselle Doze, the actress. For six years he was pestered with lawsuits for separation, till a divorce was finally procured. He had drunk, as he said, 150,000 francs worth of champagne and written 300 songs. The francs were gone, the songs lost, and nothing was left but the gout.

_Jadis j'étais des plus ingambes,_ _Mais hélas! destins inhumains,_ _Le papier que j'avais aux mains,_ _A présent je le porte aux jambes._

He could jest to the last, but in his last days he was a pathetic sight, fat, prematurely old, infirm, confined to a wretched chamber, and denied even the champagne which could charm away his regrets. The dapper figure that had once filled a frock-coat so jauntily was now a shapeless corpulence hidden in the loose folds of a greasy dressing-gown. He died of gout, as Alfred de Musset died of drink. Malitourne, after sinking lower and lower in drunkenness, died mad; apoplexy carried off Chaudesaigues and Charles Froment; Arvers died of spinal paralysis; Béquet ended in a hospital; gout killed Cabanon and Tattet; while Briffaut expired in a mad-house. The mental pronouncement of their funeral orations I leave to any moralist who chooses, bidding him remember that if they failed as individuals to fulfil the highest destinies of mankind they were victims of a strange fever in common with all the generation of 1830.

Of that generation they were a part, perhaps the most conspicuous part at the time. I might almost liken them to the set of "swells" in some public school, privileged themselves yet censorious of others, always in the eye of their small world, influential in their smallest acts, embodying conspicuously the current fashion and expressing the prevailing tone, shining inevitably as a pattern, envied by most, respected, outwardly, by all. In Louis Philippe's time Parisian society was as limited a corporation as a school. Its "swells" attained their position, as all "swells" do, by excelling in a pursuit in which excellence is universally admired. They excelled in tinging their life with a medieval splendour of colouring, they had some prowess in poetry and letters, they performed miracles of wit in the new spirit of busy, ever-bubbling, _bruyant_ fun. As the "swells" of Romanticism they justified their position so long as the conditions allowed. Bohemia, in some respects, was like a "house" in the same school, with a smaller corporate life of its own, yet influenced by the powers outside it, the more so because some of its members had risen themselves to the company of "swells." In this not very exalted, but true, simile is my reason for devoting space to the _viveurs_. They were not Bohemians for the most part, but many Bohemians hoped to be _viveurs_ as Etonians hope to be in "Pop." On them rested the high lights of the picture, but we can now peer into the background and discern the true Bohemia of 1830.

VI

LA BOHÈME ROMANTIQUE

MIL HUIT CENT TRENTE! _Aurore_ _Qui m'éblouis encore,_ _Promesse du destin,_ _Riant matin!_

_Aube où le soleil plonge!_ _Quelquefois un beau songe_ _Me rend l'éclat vermeil_ _De ton réveil._

_Jetant ta pourpre rose_ _En notre ciel morose,_ _Tu parais, et la nuit_ _Soudain s'enfuit._

THÉODORE DE BANVILLE

The Romantic Bohemia has been the theme of so many French writers, from the time when the first reminiscences appeared to the present day, when a Léon Séché and a Philibert Audebrand, following the lead of Charles Asselineau, the pious _chiffonnier_ of Romanticism, industriously collect the very last scraps of authentic information, that a foreigner with all a foreigner's limitations may well hesitate to mar the pretty edifice erected to the memory of 1830 by some clumsy addition of his own. Yet I take heart from the consideration that even in France there is, at least to my knowledge, no complete account of this Bohemia. Those who would follow its annals in their original tongue must do so in a multitude of books, published at different times, some of which are rarities only to be found in museums and the largest libraries. Moreover, the French chronicler writes from a point of view which a foreigner cannot adopt, and makes assumptions which a foreigner cannot grant. All the historical and literary associations on which I have touched in a former chapter make it a subject which even to-day excites passionate enthusiasm and equally passionate reprobation across the Channel. The foreigner can approach in a cooler temper, though I postulate in my readers a general sympathy for Gautier's scarlet _pourpoint_ and all that it symbolized. In this cooler temper, then, not seeing red, but with a tendency, at least, to see rosy, a foreigner may glance at a life, so essentially limited by its period and its nationality, without challenging unfavourable comparisons.

The Romantic Bohemia was part of Parisian society, a fact of which I have already tried to point out the implications. It might add to the general picture to know how society judged Bohemia. Contemporary record is scarce, not only because Bohemia itself so largely supplied the personal element in the journalism of its time, but also because the conception--indeed, the name--was so new. There is, however, something to be picked up from allusions here and there which is of some service in the definition of boundaries. Nestor Roqueplan, for instance, in his little book, "La Vie Parisienne," defines Bohemia as comprehending "all those in Paris who dine rarely and never go to bed." He distinguishes sloth and debt as the salient faults in the general disorder of its life, and he is not too appreciative of its abilities, though he admits that there is an inner Bohemia, "intelligente et spirituelle," composed of a certain number of young men with the makings of excellent ministers, irreproachable officials, and daring men of business. In conclusion he asserts the great truth that "Bohemia must be young; it must be continually renewed. If the Bohemian were more than thirty, he might be confused with the rogue." This is excellent testimony from a man who, himself no real Bohemian, had extensive relations with Bohemia as one on whom its young playwrights inflicted the reading of their plays. Balzac is the next witness, though it is remarkable that his only specific reference to Bohemia is in the short story, "Un Prince de la Bohème," which tells how the young Comte de la Palfèrine, a penniless son of a general who died after Wagram, satisfied his vanity in the person of his mistress, Madame du Bruel. He was debarred by his position from having a wife worthy of his aristocratic pride, but that at least his mistress might be worthy, Madame du Bruel, an actress married to a writer of _vaudevilles_, worries her husband into the acquisition of riches, political power, and a peerage. At the beginning of this story--one of Balzac's most curious--he gives a general definition of Bohemia:

"Bohemia, which ought to be called the wisdom of the Boulevard des Italiens, is composed of young men all over twenty, and under thirty, years of age, all men of genius in their manner, still little known, but destined to make themselves known and then to be very distinguished; they are already distinguished in the days of the carnival, during which they discharge the plethora of their wit, which is confined during the rest of the year, in more or less comic inventions. In what an age do we live! What absurd authority allows immense forces thus to be dissipated! In Bohemia there are diplomats capable of upsetting the plans of Russia, if they felt themselves supported by the power of France. One meets in it writers, administrators, soldiers, journalists, artists! In a word, all kinds of capacity and intellect are represented in it. It is a microcosm. If the Emperor of Russia were to buy Bohemia for some twenty millions, supposing it willing to quit the asphalt of the boulevards, and were to deport it to Odessa, in a year Odessa would be Paris. There it is, the useless, withering flower of that admirable youth of France which Napoleon and Louis XIV cherished, and which has been neglected for thirty years by that gerontocracy under which all things in France are drooping.... Bohemia has nothing and lives on that which it has. Hope is its religion, self-confidence is its code, charity passes for its budget. All these young men are greater than their misfortunes--below fortune, but above destiny."

The narrator of the story, the witty Nathan, goes on to give some particular _traits_ of La Palférine, who would be King of Bohemia, if Bohemia could suffer a king. Some of these are rather vulgar pleasantries which display the bluntness of Balzac's sense of humour rather than La Palférine's wit, as when the Bohemian, angrily accosted by a _bourgeois_ in whose face he had thrown the end of his cigar, calmly replied: "You have sustained your adversary's fire; the seconds declare that honour is satisfied." La Palférine was never solvent: once, when he owed his tailor a thousand francs, the latter's head clerk, sent to collect the debt, found the debtor in a wretched sixth-floor attic on the outskirts of Paris, furnished with a miserable bed and a rickety table; to the request for payment the count replied with a gesture worthy of Mirabeau: "Go tell your master of the state in which you have found me!" In affairs of love, though he was impetuous as a besieger, he was proud as a conqueror. After having passed a fortnight of unmixed happiness with a certain Antonia, he found that, as Balzac puts it, she was treating him with a want of frankness. He therefore wrote to her the following letter, which made her famous:

"MADAME,--Your conduct astonishes as much as it afflicts me. Not content with rending my heart by your disdain, you have the indelicacy to keep my tooth-brush, which my means do not allow me to replace, my estates being mortgaged beyond their value.

Farewell, too lovely and too ungrateful friend!

May we meet again in a better world!"

Balzac's account is obviously tinged with literary exaggeration, though the stories of La Palférine were no doubt gleaned among the gossips of the boulevard. He shall be balanced by an adverse witness, one M. Challamel, who, after a severe attack of _le mal romantique_ which caused him to run away from his father's shop, settled down to be a staid librarian. In his "Souvenirs d'un Hugolâtre" he says: