The present century has produced two generations of Paris Bohemians who have left their mark upon the history of arts and letters. The first had its cradle in a now demolished house of the Rue du Doyenné. Nothing could have been more sombre or depressing than this street, which was one of the ugliest in Paris. Yet the indomitable spirits who made it their haunt lived within sight of all that the most artistic and delicate imagination could desire. There were the remains of the Hôtel Rambouillet, in which French literature had, in its infancy, been nursed; the façade of the Musée, resplendent with sculptures of the Renaissance; a cluster of trees, which might almost have been called a wood, in the branches of which feathered Bohemians trilled their songs of love and liberty. The walls of the house were old and bare; but the inhabitants soon covered them with decorations of a magnificence scarcely to be found in palaces. There Corot painted his Provence landscapes and Chausserian his bacchants; and there the earliest novels of Arsène Houssaye and the earliest poems of Théophile Gautier were penned. No troop of gipsies, encamped beneath foliage in the midst of a perfumed wood, ever led a more buoyant life. Comedy was played within those artistic walls; masked balls were given; the landlord and the scandalised citizens were defied. Years went by, and at last the Bohemians of the Rue du Doyenné had constrained the public to accept their ideals of art and literature. And now they were petted, fèted, adored by those who had previously taken them for fools. Yet even whilst Fortune was thus smiling, one famous member of the order—one who, in the eyes of posterity, personifies the Bohemians of this period—threw his fellows into mourning. The unhappy Gérard de Nerval—translator of Faust, friend and collaborator of Heine—was found one morning suspended from a street-lamp.
So much for the first generation of Paris Bohemians. The second comprised, among others, Privat d’Anglemont, Auguste Vitu, Schanne, Alfred Delvan, Champfleury, and, above all, Henri Mürger. Their haunt was the Café Momus, in the Rue Prêtres-Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois. This café has, within the last few years, disappeared, and its site is now occupied by a colour-merchant’s warehouse and a pawnbroking establishment. The place no longer resounds with the laughter, the reckless gaiety, the folly of Bohemians such as those just named. At {367} the door of the little temple Death or Glory sometimes came and knocked, to summon one or other of its inhabitants away. Privat d’Anglemont entered the Municipal Maison-de-Santé and died there; Mürger, a few months afterwards, breathed his last in the same retreat. He left behind him a literary monument in the pictures, at once charming and grotesque, of that strange life in which he played so important a part. Every writer of distinction in Paris followed his bier to the grave; and the tomb erected to his memory is worthy of the man who slumbers beneath it. His companion, Privat d’Anglemont, lies near him; but without even a stone to tell his admirers where to cast their wreaths. Of the survivors, one—Schanne—became a toy-merchant in the Rue Saint-Denis and is suspected of having, to the delight of children, invented certain mechanical rabbits which beat a drum at every movement of the car to which they were harnessed.
The first Bohemians of France must be looked for among her earliest poets. François Villon, for instance, who was publicly whipped, and the vagabond minstrels, one of whom in Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame so narrowly escapes hanging. But these lively, luckless bards were in the position of the warriors who lived before the time of Homer, and whose deeds were destined to remain unsung. The great student and chronicler of Bohemian life (whose “Vie de Bohême,” as translated into German, was classed by a Leipzic bookseller under the head of ethnography) was Henri Mürger, with his four literary and artistic personages and their servant, himself a Bohemian, who lends small sums of money to his masters out of the wages he does not receive, and who, in his love of the picturesque, finds himself unable to interfere with the beau désordre in which they leave their rooms. Highly ingenious are these four typical Bohemians in getting rid of their money when there are funds in hand, and in making both ends meet when their purses are nearly empty. Thus, one of them having obtained a certain sum from a confiding relative, purchases for a young woman to whom he is attached a monkey and a parrot; only to find, a few days afterwards, that the monkey has eaten the parrot and died of indigestion. They have not even a suit of dress-clothes among them; and on one occasion, when the musician wishes to go to a ball, the painter induces a gentleman whose portrait he is taking to divest himself of his evening coat that he may secretly lend it to his pleasure-seeking friend. Varied and original are the devices by which the attention of the puzzled sitter is diverted from his missing garment. The Bohemian who has gone to the ball, and who puts on a pair of white gloves with the view of disguising himself from possible creditors, passes most of his time in the refreshment room; returning to it, when for a moment he has been taken out by one of the dancers, on the plea that if he were to stop away too long his absence would be “remarked.”
There are some Bohemians who seem to have a particular fancy for white kids. In M. Ponsard’s drama of Honneur et Argent the romantic but impecunious hero rushes forward at one critical moment to the front of the stage, exclaiming: Je porte des gants blancs, et je n’ai pas dîné! Hégésippe Moreau, Bohemian and true poet, who for want of a bed slept at times in one of the trees of the Champs Elysées, went one evening to a ministerial party, where, expecting to get something to eat, he was driven to despair at finding nothing to relieve his hunger except jellies and ices. It was probably in view of famished Bohemians that an old French book on etiquette warned persons invited out to dinner not, if the meal was long delayed, to exclaim: On ne aîne jamais dans cette maison. A well-known Bohemian, on being asked by a wealthy friend to take pot-luck with him at a certain hour, is said to have replied: “With pleasure; and you will excuse me if I am rather punctual.”
The Bohemian consoles himself by the thought that the greatest writers have often in their youth been in almost as dire straits as himself. How indeed, without such a reflection, could he from day to day exist? He remembers that when, during the first performance of Hernani, Victor Hugo was called out of the theatre by a bookseller and requested to accept 6,000 francs for the right of publishing the play, he had not more than forty francs in his actual possession. He may even, if he has studied the literary history of a neighbouring country, recall the case of Samuel Johnson, who for years had to live on fourpence a day.
Even in the depths of poverty Bohemians, if there is anything in them, are sure (so Henri Mürger testifies) to make from time to time an impression upon some rich man, who will invite them to dinner, partly from sympathy and admiration, partly in order to have the opportunity of reading to them some poem or drama that vanity has impelled him to compose. On these occasions the Bohemian is said to revenge himself {368} for having been condemned to play the part of listener only—auditor tantùm—by staying late and drinking profusely. Macaulay had such a Bohemian in view when he described a member of this interesting class—a guest at the time in the house of his patron—as “roaring for fresh punch” at four in the morning.
To be suspected, however, of a Bohemianism of which they are innocent is sometimes the fate of eminent and well-conducted authors; and Macaulay’s roarer for punch reminds one of a certain fashionable Parisian novelist who, as Grenville Murray relates, went once to stay at a country house where the host and hostess had very romantic notions of the life usually led by the knights of the pen. Towards twelve o’clock the eminent littérateur, slightly fatigued by his journey, retired to his room, and before long was in bed and fast asleep. In about a quarter of an hour he was awakened by a continued tapping at the door, and, raising his head, wondered for a moment whether the house could be on fire. Then, recovering his presence of mind, he called out “Entrez”; on which two sturdy footmen appeared, bearing between them an ice-pail with a bottle of champagne in it. The novelist had some difficulty in prevailing upon the wine bearers to retire with their well-intended burden. His host and hostess had been under the impression that authors wrote habitually at night, and were unable to get through their work unless well primed with alcoholic liqueur.{369}
CHAPTER XXXVI.
THE PARIS WAITER.
The Garçon—The Development of the Type—The Garçon’s Daily Routine—His Ambitions and Reverses.