Part 1 (1/2)
Bohemian Days.
by Geo. Alfred Townsend.
PREFACE.
So far from the first tale in this book being of political motive, it was written among the subjects of it, and read to several of them in 1864. Perhaps the only _souvenir_ of refugee and ”skedaddler” life abroad during the war ever published, its preservation may one day be useful in the socialistic archives of the South, to whose posterity slavery will seem almost a mythical thing. With as little bias in the second tale, I have etched the young Northern truant abroad during the secession. The closing tale, more recently written, in the midst of constant toil and travel, is an attempt to recall an old suburb, now nearly erased and illegible by the extension of a great city, and may be considered a home American picture about contemporary with the European tales.
BOHEMIA.
The farther I do grow from _La Boheme_, The more I do regret that foolish shame Which made me hold it something to conceal, And so I did myself expatriate; For in my pulses and my feet I feel That wayward realm was still my own estate; Wise wagged our tongues when the dear nights grew late, And quainter, clearer, rose our quick conceits, And pure and mutual were our social sweets.
Oh! ever thus convivial round the gate Of Letters have the masters and the young Loitered away their enterprises great, Since Spenser revelled in the halls of state, And at his tavern rarest Jonson sung.
THE REBEL COLONY IN PARIS.
I.
THE EXILES.
In the latter part of October, 1863, seven very anxious and dilapidated personages were a.s.sembled under the roof of an old, eight-storied tenement, near the church of St. Sulpice, in the city of Paris.
The seven under consideration had reached the catastrophe of their decline--and rise. They had met in solemn deliberation to pa.s.s resolutions to that effect, and take the only congenial means for replenishment and reform. This means lay in miniature before a caged window, revealed by a superfluity of light--a roulette-table, whereon the ball was spinning industriously from the practised fingers of Mr.
Auburn Risque, of Mississippi.
Mr. Auburn Risque had a spotted eye and a bluishly cold face; his fingers were the only movable part of him, for he performed respiration and articulation with the same organ--his nose; and the sole words vouchsafed by this at present were: ”Black--black--black--white--black--white--white--black”--etc.
The five surrounding parties were carefully noting upon fragments of paper the results of the experiment, and likewise Master Lees, the lessee of the chamber--a pale, emaciated youth, sitting up in bed, and ciphering tremulously, with bony fingers; even he, upon whom disease had made auguries of death, looked forward to gold, as the remedy which science had not brought, for a wasted youth of dissipation and incontinence.
They were all representatives of the recently inst.i.tuted Confederacy.
Most of them had dwelt in Paris anterior to the war, and, habituated to its luxuries, scarcely recognized themselves, now that they were forlorn and needy. Note Mr. Pisgah, for example--a Georgian, tall, shapely and handsome, with the gray hairs of his thirtieth year shading his working temples; he had been the most envied man in Paris; no woman could resist the magnetism of his eye; he was almost a match for the great Berger at billiards; he rode like a centaur on the Boulevards, and counterfeited Apollo at the opera and the masque. His credit was good for fifty thousand francs any day in the year. He had travelled in far and contiguous regions, conducted intrigues at Athens and Damascus, and smoked his pipe upon the Nile and among the ruins of Sebastopol. Without principle, he was yet amiable, and with his das.h.i.+ng style and address, one forgot his worthlessness.
How keenly he is reminded of it now! He cannot work, he has no craft nor profession; he knew enough to pa.s.s for an educated gentleman; not enough to earn a franc a day. He is the _protege_ at present of his washerwoman, and can say, with some governments, that his debts are impartially distributed. He has only two fears--those of starvation in France, and a soldier's death in America.
The prospect of a debtor's prison at Clichy has long since ceased to be a terror. There, he would be secure of sustenance and shelter, and of these, at liberty, he is doubtful every day.
Still, with his threadbare coat, he haunts the Casino and the Valentino of evenings; for some mistresses of a former day send him billets.
He lies in bed till long after noon, that he may not have pangs of hunger; and has yet credit for a dinner at an obscure _cremery_. When this last confidence shall have been forfeited, what must result to Pisgah?
He is striving to antic.i.p.ate the answer with this experiment at roulette; for he has a ”system” whereby it is possible to break any gambling bank--Spa, Baden, Wisbaden or Homburg. The others have systems also, from Auburn Risque to Simp, the only son of the richest widow in Louisiana, who disbursed of old in Paris ten thousand dollars annually.
His house at Pa.s.sy was a palace in miniature, and his favorite a tragedy queen. She played at the Folies Dramatiques, and drove three horses of afternoons upon the Champs Elysees. She had other engagements, of course, when Mr. Lincoln's ”paper blockade” stopped Master Simp's remittances, and he pa.s.sed her yesterday upon the Rue Rivoli, with the Russian amba.s.sador's footman at her back, but she only touched him with her silks.
Simp studied a profession, and was a volunteer counsel in the memorable case of Jeems Pinckney against Jeems Rutledge. His speech, on that occasion, occupied in delivery just three minutes, and set the court-room in a roar. He paid the village editor ten dollars to compose it, and the same sum to publish it.