Part 5 (1/2)

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 BOHeME GALANTE

_O le beau temps pa.s.se! Nous avions la science,_ _La science de vivre avec insouciance;_ _La gaiete rayonnait en nos esprits moqueurs,_ _Et l'Amour ecrivait des livres dans nos curs!_

a.r.s.eNE HOUSSAYE

The _cenacle_ 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 ”Hugolatry.” 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 wors.h.i.+p. Bohemia had originated in a literary creed, but in its consummation it was to pa.s.s 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 _cenacle_, 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 pa.s.sions; but, unlike the _cenacle_, 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 _cenacle_ was dead, but _la vie de Boheme_ was born, and its golden age came first. The brotherhood of the Impa.s.se du Doyenne was, in A.

Delvau's words, ”une Boheme doree, avec laquelle celle de Schaunard n'a que des rapports tres eloignes.”[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 Gerard de Nerval named _la Boheme galante_ that they could look back to it as the Romans to the reign of Saturn. It was const.i.tuted informally, even fortuitously; it existed without self-advertis.e.m.e.nt, but it remained, in the phrase of another French writer, ”la patrie de toutes les Bohemes litteraires.”

In 1832 another Bohemian of the golden age had come to Paris, a brave and merry soul called a.r.s.ene 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 Boheme_, 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 h.e.l.l in a _hotel 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 n.o.body 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. a.r.s.ene Houssaye, careless wretch, nearly missed the glory of Bohemia entirely by mixing himself up in the insurrection of the Cloitre 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 a.r.s.ene was left to his own resources, which, if they were meagre in early days, kept him alive for another sixty-three years.

Bohemia was not to be baulked a second time. The elements were present, and all that remained to do was for somebody to give them a slight push, such as Lucretius gave to his atoms. The push occurred at the Salon of 1833, if Houssaye is to be believed--a condition not inevitably fulfilled. There, one fine day, he met Theophile Gautier and Nestor Roqueplan, the former of whom was certainly a stranger to him. A genial conversation on the merits of the pictures ensued, in which a.r.s.ene Houssaye made, as he was destined to do, a very good impression upon his senior. Gautier was not a man to leave hazard any further part after such a promising beginning, and he accordingly proffered an invitation to _dejeuner_ next day in the words: ”Je te surinvite a venir dejeuner invraisemblablement demain chez les auteurs de mes jours.” Houssaye turned up next day at No. 8 Place Royale, where the irrepressible Theo introduced his father as ”le respectable bonhomme qui me donna l'etre.”

The other guest at this _dejeuner_ was Gerard de Nerval, whom with true instinct Gautier had brought to test and to embrace the newly found brother. The wit and gaiety, the range and the emphasis of their postprandial conversation can be imagined. At last Theo blurted out frankly: ”Tu sais que je ne te connais pas: dis-moi huit vers de toi, je le dirai qui tu es.” It was not a test which the future author of ”Vingt Ans” feared. Gautier found himself able to give an enthusiastic account of the new brother; the two truest Bohemians in Paris were at once bosom friends, and the most wayward of geniuses was a friend of both.

So far the credit had been with Gautier, but Bohemia was still without a dwelling-place, and in this matter Gerard de Nerval deserved pious mention in the Bohemian bidding prayer, for it was owing to him that _la Boheme galante_ found a home suitable to the golden age, a unique setting which posterity could remember but never reproduce. It was a rare opportunity, and it might almost be supposed that fortune, approving of Theo's first amiable push, advanced willingly another step, making peripatetic Gerard her tool. In the course of his wanderings he had become acquainted with one of the most singular regions in all Paris, no sign of which remains to-day. Hardly a visitor to Paris omits a look into the Louvre, but very few know that as they walk from the statue of Gambetta to the entrance of the galleries they are crossing the site that Bohemia in its florescence made memorable. On that spot there stood in 1833 part of an older Paris, which in intention had long been cleared away, but in fact remained another twenty years. Those who have read Balzac's ”Cousine Bette” have made its acquaintance, though I should wager that the majority of them have taken it for granted with other of Balzac's topographical details. Let me recall to them the sinister quarter where Cousine Bette, at the opening of the story, cherishes the young sculptor Steinbock and makes the acquaintance of the infamous Monsieur and Madame Marneffe. With his practised touch for tragic effect Balzac describes it thus:

”The existence of the block of houses which runs alongside of the old Louvre is one of those protests which the French people like to make against good sense, so that Europe may be rea.s.sured as to the grain of intelligence accorded them and may fear them no more....

Anybody who comes towards the Rue de la Musee from the wicket leading to the Pont du Carrousel ... may notice some half-score of houses with ruined facades, which the discouraged owners never repair, and which are the residue of an ancient quarter in course of demolition ever since Napoleon resolved to complete the Louvre.

The Rue and Impa.s.se de Doyenne are the only streets within this sombre, deserted block, the inhabitants of which are probably phantoms, for one never sees a soul there.... These houses, buried already by the raising of the Place [du Carrousel], are enveloped in the eternal shadow projected by the high galleries of the Louvre, which are blackened on this side by the north wind. The darkness, the silence, the chilly air, the cavernous depth of the ground combine to make these houses kinds of crypts, living tombs.

When one pa.s.ses in a cabriolet along this dead half-quarter, and one's look penetrates the little alley de Doyenne, a chill strikes one's soul, and one wonders who can live there and what must happen there in the evening when that alley changes into a den of cut-throats, and the vices of Paris, wrapped in the mantle of night, flourish at their height.”

This can hardly be called an engaging description, and even Bohemians, it might be supposed, would shrink from such a dreadful slum. But Balzac was writing in 1847, more than ten years after Bohemia had left it, and he was making a protest against the continued existence of this quarter, which had probably deteriorated since the days when he sent there himself to offer Gautier work on the _Chronique de Paris_. However, whether Balzac was right in making the Rue du Doyenne an inferno or was only touching it up with livid tones appropriate to Cousine Bette and the Marneffes, it was certainly a more smiling spot in 1833. True, it was tumbling down, and lay below the level of the Place du Carrousel, in the midst of mournful debris, between the Louvre and the Tuileries, which Napoleon had meant to join after sweeping it away; the houses, as Gautier says,[21] were old and dark, repairs to them were forbidden, and they had the air of regretting the days when respectable canons and advocates were their inhabitants. Yet it was not a den of thieves by any means. Gerard[22] records that many _attaches_ and Government officials lived in the quarter, and that by the Place du Carrousel there was a collection of temporary wooden shops let out to curiosity dealers and print-sellers. It was enlivened, too, by the presence of a little Dutch beer-house served by a Flemish maid of considerable attractions. The view from the upper windows included, naturally, the heaps of stones, the rubbish, with the nettles and the dock-leaves by which Nature tries to cover such deformities at once; but it also included a good many trees, and the ruins of a delightful old priory, with one arch, two or three pillars, and the end of a colonnade still standing. This was the Priory of Doyenne, the dome of which, according to Gerard, fell one day in the seventeenth century upon eleven luckless canons who were celebrating the office. Its ruins stood out gracefully against the trees, and of a summer morning or evening, when, amid the peaceful silence of this forgotten corner, the bright rays of the Parisian sun lit up the lichen on its stones and a fresh breeze from the neighbouring Seine gently swayed the branches of its framing trees, it must have been well to be a-leaning out of a window.

However, Gerard de Nerval did more than find a quiet, romantic corner hidden away in the busy heart of Paris with a ruined priory to give distinction to its prospect; he also found an appropriate dwelling. In one of the old houses of the Impa.s.se du Doyenne there was a set of rooms remarkable for its _salon_. It was a huge room, decorated in the old-fas.h.i.+oned Pompadour style with grooved panellings, pier-gla.s.ses, and a fantastically moulded ceiling. This decoration had for a long time been the despair of its owner and had driven away all prospective tenants, the taste for curiosities being at that time undeveloped. In vain had the landlord parcelled it out with party walls; it was still mouldering on his hands when Gerard came thither on one of his swallow-flights. He at once persuaded the good-natured Camille Rogier to transfer his household G.o.ds from the Rue des Beaux-Arts, the party walls were knocked down, and Bohemia entered on its ideal home. Gerard had still some of his patrimony left, and chose to expend it upon his one hobby, the collection of pictures and furniture. It was a golden time for the collector. Society had as yet not learned to appreciate old works of art, dealers were not too well informed, and the depredations of the Bande Noire, that, under the Restoration, had sacked so many ancient ecclesiastical foundations, had brought a large quant.i.ty of precious old furniture, tapestries, and fabrics into the curiosity shops of Paris. Gerard had acquired a wonderful canopied Renaissance bed ornamented with salamanders, a Medicis console, a sideboard decorated with nymphs and satyrs, three of each, and oval paintings on its doors, a tapestry delineating the four seasons, some medieval chairs and Gothic stools, a Ribeira--a death of Saint Joseph--and two superb panels by Fragonard, ”L'Escarpolette” and ”Colin Maillard,” which last he had bought for fifty francs the pair. It was a magnificent studio, worthy of _la Boheme galante_. There was no question of bare attics on a sixth story, their tiny windows looking on a dreary sea of roofs, of rickety chairs and peeling wall-paper. In spite of its bare floors, its faded colours, its chipped corners, and the incongruous presence of plain easels among its ancient splendours, its riches were princely. Bohemian disorder might reign among paints and palette-knives, ends of paper inscribed with sc.r.a.ps of verse might dot its unswept floor, the _debris_ of eating and drinking might litter the seats on which fastidious cavaliers once delicately sat, but no realities of a careless existence could spoil its romantic atmosphere. Without its merry clan of inhabitants, no doubt, it would have seemed odd and ghostly; yet if they brought back to it the necessary colour of youth, it tinged, in turn, their life with a patina of old gold that never faded from their reminiscences.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A Festivity in the Impa.s.se du Doyenne]

Camille Rogier was the real lessee, and Gerard his sub-tenant. Gautier had a couple of rooms in the Rue du Doyenne, which cut the Impa.s.se crosswise. These at first were the only permanent inhabitants of the new colony, but the great _salon_ where Rogier and Gautier worked soon became a meeting-place for a number of friends. Work was stopped at five o'clock, when a.r.s.ene Houssaye was certain to appear, Roger de Beauvoir, then in his most brilliant day, half Bohemian, half _viveur_, and Edmond Ourliac, the future dramatist. One evening Houssaye, Roger de Beauvoir, and Ourliac stayed talking till dawn; Roger departed then to his more sumptuous apartments, Ourliac to his parents' house in the Rue Saint Roch, but a.r.s.ene Houssaye stayed, on Rogier's invitation, to complete the inner conclave of Bohemia. His camp-bed was sent for next day, and he became Rogier's second tenant, paying him indeed no money, but spending, in revenge, chance gifts from home on luxurious feasts at the Freres Provencaux.

Such a society in such a setting could not long remain unknown. With its circle of guests widening it grew in importance, for in this golden age Bohemia could be important without losing its quality. Gavarni, the inimitable portrayer of Parisian types, Nanteuil, Chatillon, Marilhat, even Delacroix, were among the artists who found the gaiety of the Impa.s.se du Doyenne to their taste; Petrus Borel looked haggardly in occasionally; the great Dumas would rush in and out like a storm; the Roqueplans, Camille and Nestor, showed there in moments spared from their more elegant wanderings; and the effervescent Roger de Beauvoir as gaily composed there his witty rhymes as at a supper in the Cafe de Paris. It was no hole-and-corner Bohemia at which the superior person could affect to turn up his nose; it was a truly artistic centre in Paris and, at the same time, a _coterie_ admission to which was jealously enough guarded to exclude the half-baked dilettante who is the ruin of most artistic sets and the very negation of Bohemia. For a reason which will be obvious in the sequel, ladies with leanings to artistic society--another impossibility in Bohemia--were equally debarred from appearing. It was a more or less closely knit society of young and gifted men, lovers of the beautiful, despisers of convention without _gasconnade_, neither rich nor desperately poor, avid of pleasure, and fas.h.i.+oning their conduct easily upon the standards of the day, yet crowning all their hours, even the most wanton, with a graceful and light-hearted idealism that s.h.i.+elds these pagan heroes of a golden age from any but an aesthetic judgment, a judgment which, in the case of their own countrymen, they confronted with serene self-confidence.

In all, the group was fairly large: its members.h.i.+p radiated dimly as far as the ”dandies” on the boulevard and into the obscurer depths of the Quartier Latin. But radiation was from a central nucleus--the original Bohemian brethren whose home was in the Impa.s.se du Doyenne: Camille Rogier, Gerard de Nerval, Theophile Gautier, a.r.s.ene Houssaye, and Edmond Ourliac. The rest were visitors, but they alone were the true dwellers in _la Boheme galante_. Of their brotherhood and its life Gautier, Gerard, and Houssaye have all given glimpses, which compose a picture apt for pleasing and, occasionally, envious contemplation. a.r.s.ene Houssaye in his ”Confessions” is the fullest source of reminiscence, and his words are delightfully ill.u.s.trated by the poem, originally ent.i.tled ”Vingt Ans,” but in his complete works ”La Boheme de Doyenne.” The poem, addressed to Gautier, begins:

_Theo, te souviens-tu de ces vertes saisons_ _Qui s'effeuillaient si vite en ces vieilles maisons_ _Dont le front s'abritait sous une aile du Louvre?_ _Levons avec Rogier le voile qui les couvre,_ _Reprenons dans nos curs les tresors enfouis,_ _Plongeons dans le pa.s.se nos regards eblouis._

_Chimeres aux cils noirs, Esperances fanees,_ _Amis toujours chantants, Amantes profanees,_ _Songes venus du ciel, flottantes Visions,_ _Sortez de vos tombeaux, jeunes Illusions!_ _Et nous rebatirons ce chateau perissable_ _Que les destins changeants ont jete sur le sable:_

_Replacons le sofa sous les tableaux flamands;_ _Dispersons a nos pieds gazettes et romans;_ _Ornons le vieux bahut de vieilles porcelaines,_ _Et faisons refleurir roses et marjolaines;_ _Qu'un rideau de damas...o...b..age encore ces lits_ _Ou nos jeunes amours se sont ensevelis._

Gautier, Gerard, and Houssaye have already been introduced, but a word must be said of the other two. Camille Rogier, who was as old as Gerard, was in Houssaye's opinion the most charming man in the world.

Already an artist of some repute, he alone of the brotherhood was earning a living by his art--even more than a living, for was he not rich enough to buy riding-boots and wear coats of pink velvet? It was his departure for Constantinople in 1836, where he remained eight years painting the Eastern scenes which won him his chief fame, that caused the disruption of this Bohemian colony. Besides his mastery of the brush he was a very agreeable singer of _chansons_ and ballads. Ourliac did not live in the Impa.s.se du Doyenne, but with his parents in the Rue Saint Roch, and filled a small post in the office of the ”Enfants Trouves” which brought him 48 a year. But he never failed to call on his way to work in the morning, to recount a merry story, and on his way home he stayed with them many an hour. He, who in Houssaye's lines,

_gai convive, arrivait en chantant_ _Ces chansons de Bagdad que Beauvoir aimait tant,_

was the merriest of all the band, its Moliere, says Houssaye elsewhere, ever sparkling with wit, an inexhaustible _raconteur_ of inimitable dramatic power. He was a poet, too, a great student of German philosophy, and was at the time working upon ”Suzanne,” the first work which made his name heard in the world of literature.