"He and I represented order in a group doomed to disorder; we were the bourgeois of Bohemia, as much by our ambitions as our manner of living. The details of one day of our life, which continued in the same way for ten years, will show the succession of our studies and our labours. Rising very early, dashing from my bed to my table, I used to write till nine o'clock. An hour sufficed me for breakfast and a walk to the library, where I worked till twelve; there I used to meet Barbara, whom I took to the public lectures at the Collège de France, the Sorbonne, or the Jardin des Plantes. Two lectures, an hour each, exhausted our attention, and, resuming our walk, we arrived at Schann's temple of music, exclusively consecrated to quartets. Two hours of music every day, without counting piano trios three times a week at another house, made us able to read all the chamber music of the German masters.... Barbara was the finest instrumentalist in our band; son and brother of distinguished musicians, he had received in early youth excellent violin lessons, the fruit of which was not lost later, and he brought to the leading of a quartet a restrained emotion which is to be found in some pages of his writings."
It is an unexpectedly pretty glimpse into a part of Bohemia where Murger was not at home. When the quartets took place in a little square of the Quartier Latin, students and grisettes came to listen before the open window, and workpeople on every story put out their heads to watch for the arrival of the musicians. Murger's disreputable Schaunard, with his symphony on L'influence du bleu dans la musique, was always, I must confess, my favourite; but to discover that he played the quartets of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and Mendelssohn for two hours a day with Barbemuche and Marcel—well, it was an intoxicating vision. Schaunard, who had a passion for lobsters, the composer (in his fleshly form of Schann) of a famous drinking song, as second violin in a Beethoven quartet—oh pleasant, pleasant fellow, who truly deserved to come into the comfortable harbour of a toy-shop!
Marcel, so far as he was Champfleury, found a haven too, and lived till 1889. Colline retired to found a new religion in Switzerland, and Rodolphe-Murger, though he lingered for some years in the band of artists and writers who haunted the brasserie where Courbet raised the temple of realism, finally turned his back on dissipation and settled at Marlotte, even now a charming village near Fontainebleau. His chief recreation there was hunting, an occupation quite innocuous to the game, if it be true that a certain hare survived his attentions for a whole season, and when an unwary keeper shot it one misty afternoon, he exclaimed with genuine compunction, "Tiens, c'est le lièvre de M. Murger!" In 1861 he came to die in Paris of arteritis, and all the literary world visited his bedside. He died two days after his admission to the hospital, exclaiming, "Pas de musique! Pas de bruit! Pas de Bohème!" Bohemia, indeed, had long been dead, and in his last moments he may have recognized that it was well. There was no longer room for it in a busier, a better-swept world. In its golden age Bohemia did no more than share the imperfections of all human institutions. It had virtues, a liberty, a pride, and an ideal of its own. Murger had seen the beauty become a slattern, pretty no doubt beneath her smuts, gay in the midst of her sorrows, but free by tolerance, not by protest, her pride almost in the dust and her ideals in the possession of others. In the words which Théodore Pelloquet spoke over his grave, Murger belonged to an evil generation:
"Il appartenait à une mauvaise génération, à une génération vieillie avant l'heure, et, malgré sa vieillesse prématurée, sans expérience, sans enthousiasme et sans colère, ayant de la vanité et pas du tout d'orgueil, une vanité niaise, puérile, qui se manifeste surtout par l'affectation d'une ironie mesquine, en face de tous les enthousiasmes et de toutes les grandes causes; à une génération, en un mot, qui laissa périr dans ses mains le magnifique héritage que lui avaient légué les hommes de 1830."
XI
AMUSEMENTS OF BOHEMIA
THE pageant of 1830 has passed, and our gaze has been directed to its Bohemian ingredients with the purpose of noting the particular marks and qualities which distinguished Bohemia, and how their particular manifestations were conditioned and varied by the progress of the years. Looking out of the window of the present, we have been unable at any moment to call a halt, lest we should lose a comprehensive view of the main development. Now that this view has been gained it will do no harm to send the procession once more before the mind's eye, that we may fix at leisure any less important details which may seem in themselves attractive. One of the most happy qualities of the Bohemian nature is its capacity for amusing itself. Real boredom and lackadaisical idleness do not come into the list of its shortcomings. The passionate Romantics, indeed, fashionably suffered from "spleen" and "ennui," they proclaimed a "cœur usé comme l'escalier d'une fille de joie," but the Bohemian, so far as he indulged in these peculiarities, was amusing himself. To him "spleen" and "ennui" were part of the game which he embraced with enthusiasm and in which he desired to excel; yet they were parts to which, as a general rule, he did not pay too much attention, preferring the more positive and assertive sides of Romanticism. Neither Gautier nor Gérard de Nerval nor Rodolphe nor Schaunard presents himself to the imagination as suffering from boredom. An unfailing capacity for amusing oneself and finding amusement in one's fellow-men is an essential Bohemian trait. The preceding chapters have not been wholly devoid of indications as to the way in which these talents were exercised by the Bohemian clans, but it was necessary to insist rather on the diversions which characterized the particular spirit of each brotherhood than on the general opportunities which they all enjoyed with slight variation. The field is now open without restriction, and it will not be amiss to take a glimpse here and there at the Bohemian enjoying his leisure, if only to add a few vivid touches that will enliven the background of the picture. The work of Bohemia can always be taken for granted; artistic endeavour, whether actively or indolently pursued, varies but little in external feature; the change, the colour, the tragedy and comedy are only to be found within the artist's mind; but the amusement of Bohemia, so far from being hidden, courts publicity. It takes its colour, too, so largely from the changing world around that there is great pictorial value in its easily observable vicissitudes. For that reason I devote this chapter to the subject of its title without further apology, but only with the caution that here the accidents rather than the essentials of Bohemia are regarded. The privilege of amusement is open to everybody, but to see what Bohemia made of its privileges in that respect is, perhaps, to quicken it for the imagination by an extra spark.
Precisians might say that dress hardly comes under the head of amusements and that on certain views it is more properly included in the category of necessities or of nuisances. Yet there is no doubt that for all women—and for more men than would admit it—to be well dressed is an enjoyment, a term only differing from amusement by a smaller suggestion of possible frivolity. It is quite a sufficient warrant, at all events, for giving dress a small part in this chapter; besides, the costume of any individual or society is both a sure indicator of qualities and an apt focus for judgment. In England, the very home of illustrated books and papers, it is not necessary to say much in evoking the costume of a past age, so that the subject may be treated quite shortly, especially as regards the men of Bohemia, whose dress was too often a deplorable tragedy. When Marcel went to Musette's party with "Mathusalem" buttoned up to the neck over a blue shirt dotted with the figures of a boar-hunt he was, as Murger says, "dressed in the worst taste possible." In such a case there is no more to be said; his appearance would vary little from age to age. To the Bohemian in his lean days, certainly, it would be an insult to impute enjoyment of his tattered wardrobe. Those who most enjoyed dressing, without a doubt, were the Bohemian generation who cheered "Hernani" with such frenzy, for they made their pourpoints, felt sombreros, Robespierre waistcoats, and Phrygian caps effective details in the general Romantic demonstration and, as such, matters of intense pleasure. But these extravagances have already caught our attention; they were part of that frantic desire for novelty and colour which was a symptom of le mal romantique; their proper complement was that rage for fancy-dress balls which broke out shortly after 1830 and laid every nationality and period under contribution for picturesque costumes. So far as the men are concerned, it need only be pointed out that the general dress of the time—against which Bohemia stood out at first and into which it gradually faded—was that of tight pantaloons with straps, long coats with full skirts and accentuated waists, full cravats, lavish jewellery, and high hats in a bewildering variety of shapes, cylindrical, conical, inverted conical, curly, straight, with broad brims and with scarce a brim at all—the civilian uniform, in fact, of our own late Georgian and early Victorian era. It was a dress that only a few could wear with distinction; on the rest it wrinkled and puffed in inevitable ugliness. A Roger de Beauvoir could look immaculately moulded, but one has only to glance at the caricatures of Traviés, Monnier, Daumier, and Gavarni to see how unequivocally hideous were the clothes of an average man. To be out at elbows in this exacting fashion was indeed to be a sorry sight, and one can well imagine poor Lucien de Rubempré to have been in his provincial attire fair game for the sneers of Rastignac and de Marsay. Still, even the Bohemian had a new suit at times, and it lights the memory of Arsène Houssaye, Camille Rogier, Murger, Champfleury, and the rest to recall that it was not for comfortable lounge suits and flannels that they got into debt, but for correct suits of "tails," flowery waistcoats, top-hats, and patent leather boots. It gives a quaint touch of decorum to the picture of their wildest excesses.
Women entered Bohemia as guests rather than as inhabitants, and to the fair visitors conformity to fashion was anything but a trifle. To deck themselves fittingly was their constant amusement, and one in which they took good care that their swains should be sharers. The female dress of the time is well known to us from early pictures of Queen Victoria and the paintings of Winterhalter; there are few, too, who at one time or another have not seen some of Gavarni's beautiful fashion plates. The Empire style had entirely disappeared, and the accent was in 1830 laid chiefly on the waist. The shoulders were sloping and wide, the sleeves so voluminous that by 1836 they were like miniature balloons, the skirt very wide and full, ending above the ankles. The waist and head were made to seem very small in proportion, so that two loaves placed one on top of the other would have made a very good caricature of a woman's figure at any time during the golden age of Bohemia. The hair was elaborately done to frame a pretty face daintily under a large poke-bonnet. It was pre-eminently the day of "fragile" women: nothing in their costume seemed made for hard wear. Cydalise or Victorine, as she swung in the hammock among the gallants of the Impasse du Doyenné, would have kicked a little cross-laced foot out from ethereal folds of flowered muslin, and gathered a gauzy scarf enticingly round bare shoulders. Fashions were indeed expensive for a fond lover's pocket, but at least he was never at a loss what to buy for his mistress, so many were the little accessories to the Graces' toilet. He was never wrong, for instance, in offering a piece of gay ribbon, for there were bows everywhere, on the bosom, on the sleeves, and, with long dazzling streamers, round the waist. There was no end to their variety and combination of colours, brilliant and pale; even the crudest Scottish tartans were not considered amiss, as a certain dress in the London Museum will show the incredulous. If ribbon was too paltry, a man in a really generous mood would present a cashmere shawl, an expensive and much appreciated luxury. The manipulation of shawls on frail, rounded little persons, who, in England at least, still fainted at will and indulged in the vapours, was a matter of some art. Balzac, in one of his short stories, asserts that a femme du monde could be distinguished from the actress or the grisette by the handling of her cachemire alone. There was only one great change in woman's dress between the earlier and later days of Bohemia, and that was in the sleeves, which dwindled suddenly as if the balloons had been pricked, and became either closely fitting or almost disappeared into two little frilly bands. In fact, during the forties, before skirts began to be exaggerated on horse-hair paddings and verge upon the crinoline, female costume was as nearly natural as it can be if corsets be granted. Nothing can be more charming than the appearance of the Queen of the Belgians in her portrait by Winterhalter which hangs in the gallery at Versailles. She wears a red velvet dress, cut simply as to the corsage, with the skirt reaching the ground in full, stately folds: there is no extravagance of bows and frills, only a little lace at the bosom and sleeves. So, if we would picture Mimi or Musette, as they were dressed for that memorable day at Fontenay-aux-Roses, in the new muslin frocks made by their own hands, we must imagine dainty little women, looking as if a breath would blow them away, their pretty cheeks showing between two bewitching clusters of ringlets, straw bonnets with not too large brims upon their heads, tied with a coquettish ribbon, gowns of flowered muslin, light, simple, and flowing, and scarfs pinned round their sloping shoulders or held in place by mittened hands. Gavarin drew them to the life time and time again, and they were considerably more attractive than any would-be Bohémiennes of our time in their rough, untidy tweeds or amorphous "rational" dress.
From the amusement of clothing the body it is an easy transition to that of refreshing it. Eating and drinking, like dress, may from a certain point of view come under the head of necessities, but indulgence in good cheer when possible is a habit of young people of which a Bohemian was by no means contemptuous. A word, therefore, about his particular haunts among the thousand cafés and restaurants of Paris will not be out of season. After 1830 the great houses in the Palais Royal had fallen out of fashion, and the four leading restaurants of Paris were on the boulevard. Bohemians, it is true, were not often to be found within them, but in the golden age, when Bohemia was nearer to the dandies and viveurs, it would at least have been possible that in a moment of extravagance some Bohemian friend should have accompanied Roger de Beauvoir into the Café de Paris, the Café Riche, the Café Hardy, or the Café Anglais. The Café de Paris was opposite Tortoni's, which stood at the end of the Rue Taitbout. Besides being the home of the aristocratic petit cercle, it was renowned for its witty conversation and its general air of luxury. Since it was favoured by the aspirants to smartness, as well as the perfect examples, its society was less select than that of the Café Riche, at the corner of the Rue Lepeletier, or the Café Anglais, which still remains in its old position. There was a quiet solidity about the Café Anglais, in particular, which gave it a peculiar air of distinction, though its company was gay enough at supper-time. It was especially famous for its roast meat and its grills, though in these matters the Café Hardy, at the corner of the Rue Laffitte, ran it close. Hardy was an English cook who invented the déjeuner à la fourchette, and popularized it by setting up the first silver grill in Paris. Customers chose their own cutlet or steak and saw it cooked before their eyes. At all these four the prices were very high, and with regard to two of them it was said: "On doit être riche pour dîner au Café Hardy, et hardi pour dîner au Café Riche." However, the chief haunt for Bohemians with money to spend was the Rocher de Cancale, where it was easier to be uproarious without offending the proprieties. This famous restaurant still stands in the dirty, provincial Rue Montorgueil, in the midst of small shops whose wares overflow on to the pavement. The stately ornamentation of dark painted wood is still visible on its upper stories, but the specimens of edibles in its ground-floor windows tell too plainly to what depths it has sunk. It is no longer a possible home for Rastignac and his boon companions, nor would it tempt Arsène Houssaye to entertain there the brethren of la Bohème galante, for it merely plies the trade of the convenient marchand de vin in a rather squalid quarter. The Rocher de Cancale had declined already during the later days of Bohemia, and in Murger's day they repaired on jours de liesse to the Café de l'Odéon, Hill's Tavern in the Boulevard des Capucines, or the Cabaret Dinochan at the corner of the Rue de Navarin. The first of these was, in particular, the haunt of Baudelaire and his friends, where the unfortunate Hégésippe Moreau made his brief acquaintance with the main stream of Bohemia towards the end of his days, which had been mainly passed in a backwater. Hill's Tavern was one of the many chop-houses in the English style that flourished in Louis Philippe's Paris—only the Petit Lucas, a charming place for a quiet dinner, remains to-day—to cater for the down-at-elbows Englishmen, jockeys, and trainers, of whom there was always a certain number. At supper-time, however, it was invaded by Bohemia, and was often so full that its doors had to be closed. One of its peculiarities was that its private rooms were named after Shakespeare, Byron, and other great poets. The Café Dinochan, according to Delvau,[30] was the ground on which a great many small papers of the day were started. Monselet, Nadar, Fauchéry, and Champfleury were among its customers, and Murger died in debt to its proprietor for twelve hundred francs, for it was said of this worthy creditor: "On dîne très-bien chez lui quand on a quarante sous dans une poche—et dix francs dans l'autre." Yet the full apparatus of a restaurant was not necessary to the gaiety of Bohemian suppers, for in scanty days they made just as merry in the shops of one or two bakeries on rolls and warm milk. The Boulangerie Cretaine in the Quartier Latin was famous for its milk rolls and for the brilliant conversation of Privat d'Anglemont, who, though it was against his principle to get into debt, ran up a bill there for halfpenny rolls of six hundred francs. The other famous baker was the pâtissier Pitou, by the Porte Montmartre, where a crowd of Bohemians used to congregate after the midnight closing of the cafés. In the back shop was a table running round three sides of the square, and at this "piano," as it was called, the quaint figure of Guichardet presided. Guichardet, whose "nez vermeil et digne" was celebrated in one of Banville's triolets, was a Bohemian of the type of Balzac's Comte de la Palférine, one who had voluntarily dropped out of the race of life while preserving all his dignity and pride. He passed his days in amiable vagabondage, but preserved "a perfume of exquisite politeness and witty impertinence which made him the most delightful companion in the world." So says Delvau, according to whom he was the only man left in France who really knew how to say "Femme charmante!"