Gérard's adventure is in the nature of digression. So, indeed, was his whole life; but the others were not more discursive than befitted Bohemians. They slept in their beds and took their meals regularly. Luncheon, after the morning's work, was a frugal meal except for Gautier, who had developed from a weedy youth into a giant with a Gargantuan appetite. They did not entirely fail to earn a penny, but when literary labour was so poorly paid Gautier, who was doing art criticism in a small paper for nothing, was glad enough to see his mother arrive in the morning with two raw cutlets and a bottle of bouillon for his déjeuner. Nevertheless, when the afternoon was over and the visitors gone—Roger de Beauvoir to dress for an evening at the Opéra, Borel to rage at society in some poor garret—Rogier, Gautier, and Houssaye, now and then capturing Gérard, set out to roam in the busy city whose festive lamps were glittering on the boulevards and twinkling along the Seine. They dined—they were not too poor for that—in the Palais Royal more often than not, and wandered for the rest of the night where their fancy took them. Now the theatre would entice them with some romantic play by Hugo or Dumas, after which a supper with much punch would be indispensable; now they would invade the Chaumière or some other place of dancing. At that time everybody danced deliriously,[25] the quadrille being in great vogue since it lent itself readily to choreographic invention on the part of the individual. Ourliac and Houssaye, for instance, attracted great attention by dancing a quadrille which represented Napoleon at all the critical periods of his life—the siege of Toulon, the Pyramids, Waterloo, and St. Helena. Another evening, Gautier having gone to visit his parents and Gérard absent, Houssaye might return quietly to the white and gold salon with Rogier, who would talk with him or sing him songs while the cats purred on their knees; or, yet again, they might carouse in the Flemish cabaret hard by, served by the young tavernière
Qui tout en souriant nous versait de la bière.
Quelle gorge orgueilleuse et quel œil attrayant!
Que Préault a sculpté de mots en la voyant.
Cette fille aux yeux bleus follement réjouie,
Les blonds cheveux épars, la bouche épanouie,
Jetant à tout venant son cœur et sa vertu,
Et faisant de l'amour un joyeux impromptu,
Fut de notre jeunesse une image fidèle;
Ami, longtemps encor nous reparlerons d'elle.
So sang of her Houssaye, whose souvenirs of Bohemia at the magic age of vingt ans are deeply tinged with amorous memories. In fact, la Bohème galante, as its name implies, was not a monastery, and its life was not shared, but illuminated by a number of divinities whose aureoles had been over more than one windmill. The chief of these was "la Cydalise,"
Respirant un lilas qui jouait dans sa main
Et pressentant déjà le triste lendemain.
She was treasure-trove of Camille Rogier's, a beautiful woman, and titular mistress of the Bohemian encampment. They were all jealous of Rogier's good fortune, for, since he was twenty-five, they considered him a patriarch, and Théo could not understand how Cydalise could put up with such an old man. She lived quite happily in the Impasse, making the afternoon tea, sitting as a model, and inflaming all their hearts. Théo's passion was of a frantic heat. He besieged Cydalise with long and violent apostrophes, swearing to kill the senile tyrant who kept her in his power, threats for which Rogier, ever smiling, did not care a button. Poor Cydalise, she was a butterfly whose day was short. To Rogier's great grief consumption seized her. For some weeks he enlivened her sick-bed by singing her songs and drawing pictures for her amusement; but the day came when her ears no longer heard and her lovely eyes were closed. Gérard, Gautier, Roger de Beauvoir, and Ourliac went to her funeral, and Bohemia lost its official mistress. Yet there were others. Gérard draws a picture of Gautier, on a Gothic stool, reading his verses while Cydalise or Lorry or Victorine swung herself carelessly in the hammock of Sarah la blonde, and Arsène Houssaye at the end of "Vingt Ans" recalls them in the lines:
Judith oublie Arthur, Franz, Rogier et le reste,
En donnant à son cœur la solitude agreste;
Rosine à Chantilly caresse un jeune enfant
Plus joli qu'un Amour et plus joueur qu'un faon.
. . . . .
Ninon au Jockey Club vend chacun de ses jours;
Charlotte danse encore—et dansera toujours.
Alice?—il faut la plaindre et prier Dieu pour elle,
Elle est dans les chiffons, la pauvre Chanterelle;
Armande?—Un prince russe épris de sa beauté
Travaille à lui refaire une virginité.
Olympe?—un mauvais livre ouvert à chaque page—
Ce matin je l'ai vue en galant équipage....
The loves of Doyenné were true enfants de Bohème, neither great passions nor elective affinities, but pastimes leaving regrets for inspiration; not devouring flames, but pleasantly crackling experimental fires, drawn chiefly from those great hearths, the stage and the corps de ballet. How much fantasy went to their burning is illustrated in a story told by Houssaye of Gérard, who, on one occasion, to the despair of his friends, became obsessed with a mad desire to set out that instant for Cythera and revive the gods of Greece. Prompt measures were necessary, and Houssaye devoted himself to the rescue by professing to enter into the scheme with joy, only remarking that it would be well to have lunch first. This seemed to Gérard a reasonable preliminary, so they adjourned to the Café d'Orsay, where over the first bottle Gérard developed his scheme with growing eloquence. But the first stage on the way to Cythera lasted for several bottles, and at the commencement of the next Gérard met a provisional goddess in the shape of an attractive grisette. Houssaye, convinced that his companionship was now no longer necessary, abandoned the voyage, and left Gérard to continue it up several flights of stairs. The end of this ascent marked his farthest point; after a halt of two days he descended and turned his footsteps back to Bohemia. The loves of Bohemia which gambol so trippingly in the tongue of France are ill at ease in our austerer medium, for our Northern spirit has ever refused to admit, as the French do with engaging candour, that man, particularly the artist-man, is naturally polygamous. Lorry, Victorine, Armande, and the rest were the only appropriate feminine attachments of Bohemia, even of the golden age, the pagan loves of pagan heroes, who were greedy of their caresses without hungering for their souls, grew jealous at their eyes' wayward glances, but took no umbrage at the inward abstraction of their minds, and were content with the homage of their play-hours without seeking to rival the ideals of their artistic contemplations. But the mark of the golden age was that they played for love and not for money: they would dance the heels off their slippers in the barren land of Doyenné when all the millions of a dull prince would have moved their agile toes only to the most significant of kicks. It was a mad little world, but good because Mammon had not corrupted its natural spontaneity. True, it was deficient in some virtues, but some virtues are frankly middle-aged, to be put on with a less tricksy cut of the clothes. Bohemia was young; it loved and feasted and, being poor, made debts. There is not much to be said for getting into debt, in spite of Panurge's ingenious discourse, except that it is an unavoidable corollary of certain conjunctions of temperament and circumstance. It is difficult, anyhow, not to pardon Gérard for dissipating his capital and running up bills on account of his delightful inspiration of receiving a pressing creditor, a furniture dealer, with the recitation of a touching poem, "Meublez-vous les uns les autres," which affected the dun to tears.
"We had no money, but we lived en grands seigneurs," wrote Arsène Houssaye, looking back. Indeed they did, if it be princely to have pretty actresses to perform impromptu comedies and dancers of the Opéra for one's partners in a quadrille. I suspect that these occasions were not so frequent as the exuberant narrator would have us suppose. Gérard more frankly says they spent much valuable time making eyes at the landlord's wife, who lived on the ground floor, which argues an occasional dearth of desirable objects for idle glances. Nevertheless, dances and comedies they did have, and towards the end of its epoch la Bohème galante had one supreme festival. It was a combined dramatic entertainment and fancy-dress ball, which took place in November 1835. The idea, says Gautier, was Gérard's own, who thus made amends for his frequent absences by being responsible for the crowning glory of the first Bohemia. His suggestion rested on the artistic ground that it was a pity to inhabit a room and never to receive there a company worthy of it: a bal costumé alone could produce a gathering that would not clash with the decorations. That was all very well, but the general finances were in a melancholy condition, and a reception, even in Bohemia, required capital. Gérard brushed the objection lightly aside. People who are without the necessaries of life, he pointed out, must have the superfluities, or they would have nothing at all, which would be too little, even for poets. As for refreshments, they would do better than give their guests cups of weak tea or rum punch; they would feast the eye instead by having the room specially decorated with mural paintings by their friends, the artists. Only princes and farmers-general could indulge in such magnificence, and the fame of the Impasse would be undying.
The idea was not entirely new, for Dumas at his great ball in 1832 had done very much the same. For him all the leading artists of the day, including Delacroix, had painted the walls of the ballroom, as he narrates in a spirited passage of his "Memoirs." But Dumas had not dared to make art take the place of bodily refreshment, for he declares that his guests consumed the bag of several days' shooting and some thousand bottles of wine. La Bohème galante, though younger and less known artists were at its command, placed art upon her proper pedestal. Ladders were quickly erected, panels and piers were parcelled out, and the work began. It is a scene on which to dwell in envious imagination. 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 Gérard's, who, contenting himself with a general survey of operations, recommended a return to the classic 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, Châtillon, and Rousseau; Chassériau 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 space some palm-trees over a minaret in white chalk. It is to this acquaintance that we owe Théo'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 Doyenné, 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.