Part 6 (1/2)

They were perched on ladders, the merry band, smoking cigarettes, singing Musset's songs or declaiming Victor Hugo, with roses behind their ears--a counsel of Gerard's, who, contenting himself with a general survey of operations, recommended a return to the cla.s.sic festal usage of garlanding the head with flowers. Camille Rogier, smiling through his beard, was painting Oriental or fantastically Hoffmannesque scenes; the burly Gautier executed a picnic in the style of Watteau, a tantalizing subject for thirsty dancers; Nanteuil, with his long golden hair, limned a Naiad; and Adolphe Leleux produced topers crowned with ivy in the manner of Velasquez. Other friends were pressed into service, Wattier, Chatillon, and Rousseau; Cha.s.seriau contributed a bathing Diana, Lorentz some revellers in Turkish costume, and Corot on two narrow panels placed two exquisite Italian landscapes. Any comrade might lend a hand, and it was on this occasion that Gautier first made the acquaintance of Marilhat, the Oriental painter, whom a friend brought in and who drew on a vacant s.p.a.ce some palm-trees over a minaret in white chalk. It is to this acquaintance that we owe Theo's recollections of this remarkable day. If that room, decorated thus because a few _louis d'or_ for refreshments were not forthcoming, were now existing, only a millionaire could buy, and only a great gallery worthily house, it. Yet regrets are misplaced, for it served its day, and it is well that the _salon_ of Doyenne, with its furniture and its painted panels, in which the happy, money-scorning Bohemians danced at their culminating festival, should vanish before mercenary dealings could soil its freshness.

The _fete_ was gorgeous. True, the landlord's wife had refused their invitation--a severe blow. But the hosts with some consideration, knowing that their revels would make sleep impossible in the quarter, invited all their bachelor neighbours on the condition that they brought with them _femmes du monde_ protected, if they pleased, by masks and dominoes. The wonderful evening began with the pantomime of ”Le Diable Boiteux,” in which many actresses from the boulevard took part. Then there were two little farces in which Ourliac covered himself with glory as the _buffo_. The first was ”Le Courrier de Naples,” and the second, written by Ourliac himself, ”La Jeunesse du Temps et le Temps de la Jeunesse,” was introduced by a prologue by Gautier, read from behind the curtain. Ourliac was buried in bouquets, and the noisy orchestra brought in from a _guingette_ struck up. The ruined quarter woke to life again, as in some ghost story; the desert streets resounded with songs and laughter; Turks and _debardeurs_ affronted the frown of the staid old Louvre, and only the landlords and _concierges_, tossing sleeplessly, consigned Bohemians to everlasting flames. The dance, sustained only by good spirits, never flagged, till in the final galop every mask with his partner rushed pell-mell from the room, leaped wildly down the rickety stairs, dashed up the Impa.s.se, and came to rest under the moonlit ruins of the old priory, where a little _cabaret_ had opened, and only the late dawn of winter drove Bohemia to its bed, to dream of the Pompadour salon, of Ourliac's satirical buffoonery, and of Roger de Beauvoir's magnificent Venetian costume of apple-green velvet with silver embroidery, and his inexhaustible wit, for once born of no champagne.

It is melancholy to go back to a deserted ballroom, and we may spare ourselves the pain. That joyous evening, little as it may have seemed to do so, marked the pa.s.sing of the golden age. Bohemia's sun henceforth descended the skies. The next year saw marked changes. The landlord of the old house in the Impa.s.se du Doyenne saw with relief--Gerard says he gave them notice to quit--the departure of his turbulent tenants. If Rogier had not gone to Constantinople it is possible that, even if the band had been compelled to change its quarters, some reconstruction of _la Boheme galante_ might have been possible. With him, the stable, the earner of money, absent, there was no hope. The heroes of Bohemia had to leave their enchanted garden for the ordinarily circ.u.mscribed dwelling of impecunious mortals, and, like the heroes of Valhalla when Freia is s.n.a.t.c.hed from them, a certain wanness came over the complexion of their lives. Joy and beauty and work and love were left, but the magic bloom had just faded. With smaller resources and in a colder light the resettlement of Bohemia was a work of compromise, not spontaneous achievement. Rogier was gone; Ourliac, who produced ”Suzanne” with success, married before long, grew serious, and ended his days in the fullest odour of piety; Roger de Beauvoir found the boulevard more to his taste than any less brilliant Bohemia. Gautier, Gerard, and Houssaye were left, a trio of markedly divergent tastes. They made one attempt at a common life in the Rue Saint-Germain-des-Pres, which seems to have lasted a year or two. The details of it given by Gautier[26] and Houssaye[27] differ considerably. According to Gautier they did their own cooking: a.r.s.ene Houssaye was perfect in the _panade_, Gautier prepared the macaroni, no doubt remembering Graziano, while Gerard ”went, with perfect self-possession, to buy galantines, sausages, or fresh pork cutlets with gherkins at the neighbouring cook-shop.”

Houssaye, on the other hand, says that they had a rascally valet and a cook called Margot, and that they broke up because they were at variance on the degree of luxury to be maintained, Gerard, whom anything satisfied, departing to a bare _hotel garni_, Gautier to a sumptuous apartment in the Rue de Navarin, and Houssaye sharing rooms in the Rue du Bac, on the left bank, with Jules Sandeau. I do not trouble to reconcile these two accounts, for the memories of Bohemia are invariably picturesque. The fact remains that the old days could not come back. The first Bohemians were growing older, and the world was beginning to claim its once youthful defiers as servitors. Though Gerard's bed remained with Gautier as a memory of freer days, he knew too well that the gates of the prison were closing upon him. For a year or so he might pretend to mock destiny by producing another book of verses and a novel, or by making a voyage in Belgium accompanied by Gerard: but he was a doomed man. About 1838 he became the dramatic critic of _La Presse_, entering the mill in which he was to grind for over thirty years. Well might he say in 1867, in an autobiographical notice: ”La finit ma vie heureuse, independante et prime-sautiere.” Houssaye kept up the pretence a little longer. Life in the Rue du Bac was gay; there were suppers with Jules Janin and Sandeau at which Gautier and Ourliac sometimes appeared; there was dancing; there were the bright eyes of a certain Ninon, who inspired some pretty stanzas. But these were the last echoes of _la premiere Boheme_, as he had to admit. When they died away he completed the chapter of his youth, as Gautier had done, by travelling.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Gerard de Nerval]

Gerard alone escaped the inevitable superannuation of Bohemia, because he was too ethereal to become amenable to the ordinary dynamic laws of society. An attempt was made to catch him in the machinery by making him Gautier's a.s.sistant as dramatic critic of _La Presse_. The sprite within him would not submit to the drudgery, and in a little while he gave it up. He preferred, as ever, to wander at his will and at his own hours, or to sit reading at the dead of night by the light of a bra.s.s chandelier balanced on his head. It is not part of this book's plan to give complete biographies of those who appear in its pages, but an exception shall be made in the case of Gerard de Nerval. Between 1837 and 1839 he stayed in Paris, writing a comic opera, ”Piquillo,” with Dumas, in which Jenny Colon appeared, several plays, with a certain number of articles and reviews. His way of life was always eccentric, but he had his first definite attack of madness in 1839 or 1840, and was placed in the famous establishment of Doctor Blanche. He came out in 1841 and resumed a career of wider vagabondage than ever, now with money, now without, but caring little in any case and ready to go to the ends of the earth with a whim and without a coin. In 1841 he joined Camille Rogier in Constantinople, and wandered subsequently in other parts of the East--an experience which gave rise to some of his best descriptive work. He returned to Paris again, where his spirit dwelt in the clouds and his body anywhere, though he often allowed it to rest with one of his many friends, with whom he would leave a s.h.i.+rt to be washed against his next coming. He continued to write not very successful plays between 1846 and 1850, when he again went completely mad and retired to Dr. Blanche's house. His second stay here was longer, but as he soon became perfectly reasonable his friends were allowed to take him out for the day occasionally. Once more apparently cured he came out, but though he made one or two voyages his faculties remained permanently clouded. Of this he himself was perfectly conscious, but he bore his afflictions with perfect cheerfulness. His money was all gone, and the flashes of sanity too rare for him to earn much; he was homeless, but not friendless, for he never appealed to his friends in vain. He came for crumbs like a bird in winter, but like a bird he would not stay. He would have been an appropriate guest at some strange _Nachtasil_ such as Maxim Gorki describes so powerfully. Who knows, too, in what haunts he was not a familiar? His comrades of older days could do no more than greet him and tend him when they saw him, and his equanimity was too great to drive them to forcible detention. As Paul de Saint-Victor wrote after his death:

”In vain his friends tried to follow him with their hearts and eyes; he was lost to sight for weeks, months, years. Then, one fine day, one found him by chance in a foreign city, a provincial town, or more often still in the country, thinking aloud, dreaming with open eyes, his attention fixed on the fall of a leaf, the flight of an insect or a bird, the form of a cloud, the dart of a ray, on all those vague and ravis.h.i.+ng beauties that pa.s.s in the air. Never man saw a gentler madness, a tenderer folly, a more inoffensive and more friendly eccentricity. If he woke from his slumber, it was to recognize his friends, to love them and serve them, to double the warmth of his devotion and welcome as if he wished to make up to them for his long absences by an extra amount of tenderness.”

It was with a profound shock, therefore, that Paris heard, one morning in 1857, that Gerard had been found in the small hours, hanged to an iron railing by a woman's ap.r.o.n-string, in one of the lowest and most ill-famed streets in Paris, the Rue de la Vieille-Lanterne. The mystery of his death has never been cleared up. The inquest brought little light, save that the inmates of a filthy little drink-shop probably knew more than they would tell. What Gerard was doing in that foul haunt will never be known. It is possible that he may have been murdered, but, as he had no money and was the gentlest of men, it is more probable that with some dreadful cloud upon his brain he destroyed himself. Yet his very gentleness had made such an end unexpected, for he seemed to be under the protection of the children's guardian angel. Some sudden impulse brought him a death alien to the character of his whole life.

”II est mort,” said Paul de Saint-Victor, ”de la nostalgie du monde invisible. Paix a cette ame en peine de l'ideal!”

From Gerard's death, which Gustave Dore made more hideous in a ghoulish picture, it is a long cry back to the Impa.s.se du Doyenne and the Pompadour _salon_ of which he was the discoverer. Yet I will end this chapter, as it was begun, with this once festive haunt. Not long did it outlive its Bohemian colony. The landlord, explosively wrathful at the sight of the wall paintings, at once covered the mess, as he no doubt called it, with a coating of distemper. The treasures might, even then, have been saved in part, had anyone but Gerard de Nerval bought from the demolishers Corot's panels, the pictures by Wattier, Cha.s.seriau, and Chatillon, and Rogier's portraits of Cydalise and Theophile Gautier. His hand was one to baulk destiny only for a little. This moonstruck captain of a rickety craft let his cargo fall needlessly into the seas while he contemplated the stars and allowed the waves to swing the rudder. So pa.s.sed _la Boheme galante_, leaving only a gilded legend.

IX

SCHAUNARD AND COMPANY

_La Boheme carottiere et geignarde d'Henry Murger_ ...

LEPELLETIER: ”Verlaine”

To follow the heroes into exile would be depressing as well as unprofitable. It is better to stand respectfully aside from the _Gotterdammerung_ and wait till Bohemia emerges again from the mists, when a lapse of years has wrought some patent changes, for it is easier to contemplate a result than to trace a process. By leaping forward some ten years from the dispersal of the brotherhood that sanctified by its presence the Impa.s.se du Doyenne it is possible to steal a march on Time and antic.i.p.ate with a rapid glance his changing hand. Yet to catch this later view it is necessary for the nonce to abandon the world of flesh and blood and to turn from the acts and reminiscences of actual mortals to the imaginary scenes and fict.i.tious characters of a book of stories.

The tide of life was too strong upon Theophile Gautier and a.r.s.ene Houssaye for them to pause and stamp out firmly the features of those precious days in _la Boheme galante_; they only caught fugitive impressions in retrospect. Henry Murger, less prodigal because less endowed, crystallized as it pa.s.sed a moment of Bohemia, the Bohemia of common mortality, in ”Scenes de la Vie de Boheme.” As a confectioner encloses a fresh grape in a transparent coat of candied sugar, so he, even while he tasted, sour and sweet, the fruit of his days, caught stray berries in a light film of art and presented them as dessert to the readers of the _Corsaire_, a small but amusing journal. Sharp and savoury as they were, Time would have destroyed them, as he destroyed the ambrosial lusciousness of the Doyenne feasts, but for that light film. n.o.body remembers reminiscences, but a well-told story preserves even the most trivial events.

Murger's ”Scenes de la Vie de Boheme” is a book which has now lived for nearly seventy years and does not seem likely as yet to pa.s.s into the lumber-room. At the same time, it is to be wished that more people in England knew it, if only because the presupposition of such knowledge would make this chapter easier to write. It is not, of course, difficult to criticize the ”Scenes de la Vie de Boheme”; many of Murger's countrymen, indeed, have done so. Its ethics, its humour, and its style have been attacked. M. Boucher, an estimable civil servant interested in literature, in his ”Souvenirs d'un Parisien” calls it an effort to depict the life of low-cla.s.s students, accuses Murger of insipidity and repet.i.tion, and denies any wit to his ”etudiants demi-escrocs, demi-canailles.” M. Pelloquet, who was good enough to p.r.o.nounce a discourse over Murger's grave, said: ”It is an unhealthy book, in which vice grimaces, youth paints its cheeks like a superannuated coquette, and a fict.i.tious _insouciance_ conceals, not a laziness that is sometimes poetic, but the cowardly indolence of men without courage and without talent.” He was also rash enough to predict that it would not live. Jules Janin, the critic, in a wiser appreciation, a.s.serted that with a little more art and a little more poetry Murger might have created more pardonable heroes and no less charming heroines. Gautier's dictum about the invertebrate verses of ”that feeble appendage to Alfred de Musset” has already been quoted, and the opinion of Verlaine's biographer appears at the head of this chapter. Murger's gravest fault, however, in the eyes of French people is that he wrote bad French. To them the mishandling of that difficult, elusive, and withal limited tongue is a crime of which we can hardly comprehend the enormity. It is perfectly true that Murger was culpable in this respect; he was deficient in scholars.h.i.+p and in rhythmic sense, so that his poems are weak and his prose, even where he tried to give it an air of respectability, betrays its imperfections no less manifestly than M.

Jourdain betrayed his birth. We in England, fastidious as our critics are in the matter of language, have not our ears tuned to this painful degree of precision. So long as a style effectively harmonizes with its environment we are content to let it stand: the Gothic grandeur of English can suffer without disfigurement the intrusion of the quaint. To sympathies so trained Murger's style in ”Scenes de la Vie de Boheme”

should make a particular appeal, since in that book, for the most part, he makes no attempt to ape the academician, but writes in the extravagant jargon of the very Bohemians he is describing--a language full of comic inversions, extravagances, and lapses from grammar, which are an essential part of the book's gaiety and charm. Though his matter is unmistakably Parisian, his humour is, in some respects, remarkably English, delighting in broad and bustling effects rather than subtle strokes and sudden flashes. As for the life and the characters that he depicts, criticism of them will be implicit in the remainder of this chapter; of the book as a whole no more need be said than that it has survived when all the rest of Murger's work has been forgotten. It is not a book to be placed unwarily in the hands of the young and tender; parts of it are exaggerated, parts may be wished away, but, when all has been said, it remains, not the picture of _la vie de Boheme_ at its best and brightest, but the cla.s.sic expression of the Bohemian spirit--a frank confession, not the pseudo-pathetic souvenir of a prosperous greybeard. Its pages are among those rare ones in the world's library that have caught and held for a moment the intangible freshness, the poetry, and the gaiety of youth. For this alone it deserves never to grow old.

Murger's Bohemia is described in a series of scenes taken from the life of four young men, a quartet as fascinating to read of as Dumas'

Musketeers, though possibly less comfortable companions. They were Rodolphe, the sentimental poet; Marcel, the painter; Colline, the peripatetic philosopher and bookworm; and Schaunard, painter and musician, incomparable rogue whose masterpiece was a symphony ”Sur l'influence du bleu dans la musique”--a sly hit at debased Romanticism.

Chance brought them together. Schaunard, unable to pay his arrears of rent, was forced to leave his lodging with his furniture in p.a.w.n. A day's peregrination in search of a loan brought him three francs in cash, which he spent in dinner, together with the less tangible benefit of Colline's and Rodolphe's acquaintance. He swore brotherhood with Colline over a dish of stewed rabbit in a little eating-house, and the pair collected Rodolphe in the Cafe Momus, where, at Colline's expense, they pa.s.sed the rest of a not too abstemious evening. Meanwhile Marcel, the painter, who had taken Schaunard's room unfurnished in advance, though having no furniture of his own but a second-hand scenic interior from the stock of a bankrupt theatre, had been persuaded to take the lodging furnished with Schaunard's furniture, and had duly moved in.

Late in the evening, when a sharp shower of rain was falling, Schaunard, in bacchic absence of mind, offered asylum to his two new comrades. Hastily buying the elements of a supper, they gaily invaded the apartment of Marcel. Explanations were difficult, but were accomplished during supper, and next day Marcel and Schaunard agreed to live together. A dinner and a magnificent supper inaugurated the foundation of the new clan, which was united, so long as their Bohemian days continued, by an unbroken bond of friends.h.i.+p. It is these young men whom Murger's readers follow through their straits and s.h.i.+fts, their love affairs, their extravagances, their boisterous jokes, and their nave pleasures--the poet, the artist, the savant, and the musician, characters drawn from Murger himself and his living friends, whose coats were ragged and whose pockets almost always empty, who were the bane of respectable _concierges_ and proprietors of _cafes_, who bore short commons with cheerful bravado and succ.u.mbed to innocent gluttony in times of unexpected prosperity, who were really funny even if they were sometimes vulgar, whose expedients for catching the elusive _piece de cent sous_ were as amazing as their puns, who made life, even in a garret, a sentimental poem and a rollicking ballad, and who had the sense to become prosaic before the sentiment grew threadbare or the ballad grew stale. It is a great temptation to follow some of their adventures in greater detail from the day when Marcel went out to dine in the sugar-merchant's coat while Schaunard painted the latter's portrait in his own colour-stained dressing-gown, to the day when Rodolphe by composing a didactic poem at fifteen sous a dozen lines for a celebrated dentist, Marcel by painting the portraits of eighteen grenadiers at six francs a head, and Schaunard by playing the same scale all day and every day for a month to revenge a rich Englishman on an actress's parrot, earned enough to give their mistresses new dresses and take them for a holiday in the fields of Fontenay-aux-Roses. Yet the impulse to discursive commentary must be checked, for plucking flowers is a distraction from comparative botany. Murger, after all, tells his own story infinitely better than any translator could do, and the purpose which is proper to the present book is to inquire what kind of a Bohemia appears in Murger's light-hearted pages.

So far as Bohemia was concerned, the generation of 1830 had entirely pa.s.sed away by 1846, when Murger's sketches actually appeared, and the young men of whom Bohemia was composed were formed under less violent influences. The last flashes of Napoleon's glory had not illuminated their early days, they knew little of the stifling reign of Charles X, and the Revolution of 1830 took place when they had only a little while outgrown the nursery. By the time they grew up the complexion of affairs in Paris wore a more even tone. a.s.sisted by Guizot, Louis Philippe had found the _juste-milieu_ to his people's satisfaction, revolutionary tendencies had been checked or diverted into harmless channels of humanitarian reform, the _bourgeois_ had firmly grasped his power and built up an already solid bulwark of commercial interest. In the artistic world, too, things were quieter. ”Hernani,” once a scandal, had become a cla.s.sic, and there was no further need of red waistcoats and furious _claques_. Romanticism, indeed, had become so workaday that a successful little excitement was aroused by a reaction against it in what was called ”l'ecole de bon sens,” whose chief poet, Ponsard, gained quite a celebrity for a short time with his cla.s.sic drama ”Lucrece.”

Beyond the gadfly of artistic impulse and the natural fermentation of the adolescent mind, there was little to rouse a young man's pa.s.sions or send his blood coursing faster through his veins; there was no particular idol to wors.h.i.+p, no hobby-horse to ride, as a Gautier or a Borel had wors.h.i.+pped Hugo and mounted the gallant steed called Middle Ages. The creed of Romanticism was so thoroughly established that there was nothing left to make any fuss about, with the natural consequence that its early extravagances had fallen out of fas.h.i.+on and there was no further need to be satanic or profess excessive sensibility. Literature was feeling its way to the austerer Romanticism of Flaubert and the Goncourts, as painting towards the ”realism” of Courbet, but the growth was still below ground and the surface as yet seemed undisturbed. The generation of Rodolphe and Schaunard found, therefore, in Paris no eager band to whom they could ally themselves and to whose educative influence they could submit. Driven by their impulses towards the arts, with souls naturally romantic, as most young men's souls are, they found no cause which they could immediately embrace in the manner of the second _cenacle_. They missed that valuable education which is the idolization of a great man, and were confined instead to fighting their own battle, a very much less distinguished affair, which allowed many little dishonourable compromises with indolence and in which victory meant no more than individual success. This explains, to some extent, the absence of intellectual fecundity in Murger's heroes, which even their most devoted admirers cannot deny. Rodolphe's poems are indeed only pale imitations of Alfred de Musset, who was an almost inevitable model for any lyric youngster of the day; his more serious effort, a drama called ”Le Vengeur,” good enough to burn for warmth in a draughty garret, is not vouchsafed to us in quotation by Rodolphe's creator. Marcel was obviously not a very gifted painter, in spite of his famous _Pa.s.sage de la Mer Rouge_, which was sent up in a different guise to each Salon and inevitably rejected, and when this great work was sold to become a shop-sign the artist's pride was not in the least revolted. Schaunard never gives any signs of musical inspiration till at the close he publishes a successful alb.u.m of songs, and Colline, polyglot philosopher as he is dubbed, abandoned his career before anything tangible had been achieved to make an advantageous marriage and give musical evenings. It would, of course, be pedantic to insist upon these considerations in the case of a book of short stories which aims chiefly at amusing, but it is impossible not to be struck in reading the ”Scenes de la Vie de Boheme”

by the absence from the conversation of the characters of any indication of their artistic ideals. Save when Schaunard tells the sugar-merchant that he was a pupil of Horace Vernet, murmuring to himself, ”Horreur, je renie mes dieux,” and Marcel makes a scornful allusion to the ”ecole de bon sens,” the only proof that they are true artists lies in their creator's own a.s.sertion, of which he is not entirely mindful in the _denouement_. The worst sinner of all is Colline, for this mine of knowledge, throughout the book, is made chiefly remarkable for the composition of dreadful puns. This may be partly due to that want of ”a little more art and a little more poetry” of which Janin accused Murger, but the fault was not only personal. The second _cenacle_ and the brotherhood of the Impa.s.se du Doyenne were, without doubt, just as commonplace in their ordinary conversation, but what lifted them off the ground was the enthusiasm of a hotly waged artistic struggle, which by Murger's day had died down. His four heroes are Romantics in general, but in no sense champions of any cause.

Another unmistakable fact about Rodolphe and his friends is that they were inconspicuous. True, they made the Cafe Momus unbearable to its more peaceful customers, and were not unknown at the Chaumiere, but the Cafe Momus was in a back street, and the Chaumiere was certainly not the Bal de l'Opera. They were miles away from the _viveurs_ upon the boulevard, and their connexion with the prominent writers and artists of the day was extremely remote. They made no public appearance, they were not a force to be reckoned with. They kept up the form of defying convention, but it was now no more than a convenient form for the impecunious. Art and the _bourgeoisie_ were beginning to play into one another's hands; the former had gained its liberty to a great degree, while the latter by the gilded pill of commercial success had purged artistic demonstration of its crudities. The time when eccentricity was a symbol had pa.s.sed; now it was only a skin to be sloughed, as Marcel saw when in a very sensible lecture delivered to Rodolphe he said:

”Poetry does not exist only in a disordered life, in improvised happiness, in love affairs that only last as long as a candle, in more or less eccentric rebellions against the prejudices which will for ever be the sovereigns of the world: a dynasty is more easily overturned than a custom, even a ridiculous one. To have talent it is not sufficient to put on a summer overcoat in May; one can be a true poet or artist and yet keep one's feet warm and have one's three meals a day.”

Their Bohemia, in fact, was a kind of undergraduate existence, in which all sorts of disorder and youthful folly might be excused on the plea that youth must be served, but which could in no sense be regarded as a part of civic life, much less as the best part, the most truly disinterested and artistic. This is a significant change of att.i.tude from the days of _la Boheme galante_, which was one of the centres of Paris. That, indeed, was transitory and presupposed youth, but it was not obscure and its inhabitants had no misgivings. It was not they who gave it up as the writer of Ecclesiastes put away childish things, for they gloried in it all their days as the best part of their life; it was that the world claimed them for its business in spite of themselves. In their disinterested love of art they had made themselves valuable, and when the command went forth ”Come and be paid” they were forced to go.

To guard against any accusation of misunderstanding Murger, it may be admitted that he calls his heroes only a small section of Bohemia--they moved, to use his phrase, in the _troisiemes dessous_ of literature and art--but there is no indication that Murger conceived a Bohemia which had its part in any higher sphere. When Rodolphe gets a lucky present of five hundred francs the determination he avows is not to suffuse his little corner of Bohemia with a more worthy splendour, but to become, like every other successful man, a _bourgeois_. ”These are my projects,”