Here are a few stanzas (from a poem of this collection) inscribed to Henry Mürger, in which he sings the praises of the Bohemia by which he died:—
Les gais amoureux et les amoureuses Ont depuis des ans, Mürger, déserté La mansarde étroite où leurs voix rieuses Narguaient le bon sens—et la pauvreté! L’amour, aujourd’hui, s’est fait plus morose; Schaunard est rentier, Colline est bourgeois, Les lauriers coupés, et mortes les roses, Ils ont désappris les chemins du bois. Rodolphe et Mimi, Marcel et Musette, Dans leurs lits bien clos sont endormis; Mais, vivante encor, leur chanson coquette Eveille en nos vers des refrains amis; Nos rèves, vois-tu, sont restés les mêmes: Roses du matin, rires du printemps, Châteaux en Espagne ou parcs en Bohème Irréels ou vrais,—comme de ton temps! Nous marchons leur pas, nous aussi, sans trève. Vers quel but lointain? Nous n’en savons rien; [235] Baste! Il faut toujours que route s’achève.— Quand nous y serons, nous le verrons bien. Peu d’argent en poche, et point de bagages, Nul regret d’antan pour nous chagriner, Nous sommes parés pour les longs voyages, Libres: rien à perdre, et tout à gagner!
And here is a portion of a poem, “Le Sabot de Noël,” that is a sort of playful prayer:—
Mets dans mon sabot de Noël Le jeune espoir qui nous fait libre, Mets le désir profond de vivre Et la fleur qui fleurit au ciel. Mets le succès dans les efforts, Le travail sans souci ni doute, Et comme étoile sur ma route L’orgueil simple qui fait les forts.
Poor boy! It was this very “orgueil simple” that was his sad undoing.
“If the artist,” says Balzac in a memorable passage of his Cousine Bette, “does not hurl himself into his work, like Curtius into the gulf, without reflecting, and if, in this crater, he does not dig like a miner buried under a land-slide, ... his work perishes in the atelier, where production becomes impossible; and he assists at the suicide of his talent.”
René Leclerc, though no mere dawdler, as the twelve sizable manuscripts he left behind him prove, was not endowed with either the mental or the physical endurance to perform the Herculean labour which Balzac both preached and practised. No more was Louis M—— nor D——; no more was the brilliant Gérard de Nerval, who was found one winter morning in the rue de la Vieille Lanterne hanging from a window-bar, nor the precocious Escousse and Lebras, who at nineteen and sixteen respectively killed themselves because a first phenomenal success with a drama was followed by failures; no more was Chatterton in England. Few artists are. With most of them ample time for revery is a prerequisite condition of production. And yet the record seems to show that suicides are relatively rare among poets and artists.
Perhaps this is because the record does not occupy itself with the poets and artists, the Louis M——s and the D——s, who are not known as such to the world at large. Or, perhaps, it is because so many die in the hospital, like Gilbert, Malfilâtre, Hégésippe Moreau, and the Joseph D—— of Mürger’s tale; and so many others are claimed by Charenton, like Jules Jouy, Toulouse de Lautrec, and André Gill (for bedlam is another Bohemian resort), that suicide has no need to assert its rights. In any event, two cardinal qualities of the artistic temperament are distinctly hostile to self-destruction; namely, faith in the sure emergence and supremacy of genius, and a Hamlet-like irresolution that prefers pouring out woes on paper to ending them by an energetic trigger-pull.
The despair of the victims of the misère en habit noir, who are less able to sustain themselves by faith and who are more capable of decisive action, is, like their dress, much blacker and more austere; and suicides are far commoner among them.