The balls of the Opéra declined in attraction and became dull about 1836, but they were revived with still greater splendour two years later, when Musard was made conductor and members of the ballet were drafted in to enliven the company. Such balls, however, became too much public functions to suit the less splendid Bohemia of a later day, which found diversion more suited to its pocket and its manners at the Chaumière or the Closerie des Lilas on the left bank. It was at such places as these that Rodolphe and Marcel disported themselves, and Schaunard was arrested for "chorégraphie trop macabre." The Chaumière was a large garden on the Boulevard Montparnasse, a miniature edition of Cremorne or Vauxhall, with a primitive shooting gallery, a skittle alley, and switchback. It was open all day for students to promenade after lectures and make their addresses to the grisettes working under the trees. Its dances were very simple affairs; a few lamps and Chinese lanterns, a small orchestra, a bar for lemonade and galette were all that the management supplied, the fun, of which they had enough and to spare, being the dancers' contribution.
The Closerie des Lilas, though less generally popular than the Chaumière, was more particularly associated with Bohemia than the latter, for Murger, Vitu, Fauchéry, Théodore de Banville, and one or two others of that set frequented it regularly, as a French writer[32] says, "avec quelques comparses sans importance," among whom, no doubt, were Mimi and Musette. This little dancing-hall began in 1838 as La Chartreuse, being so called because it was on the site of the old Carthusian monastery in the Rue d'Enfer. It was in some sort the trial-ground for those of the fair sex who aspired to become stars of the Prado and the Chaumière. Privat d'Anglemont has described it in a rare pamphlet as it was in its early days under its extraordinary manager, Carnaud. As La Chartreuse it was the most primitive kind of guingette, the dancing-place being a large marquee, into which one descended by a steep flight of steps. On the left were an orchestra and café, and the only ornaments were nine plaster statues representing the Muses, which were handily adapted for supporting petroleum lamps on their arms. "There," says Privat d'Anglemont, "decent dress was not de rigueur; one came as one liked, or rather as one could—the women in bonnets or, in default of other adornments, covered simply by their hair, and the men in blouses. It certainly was the most original bar in Paris. It had a physiognomy of its own, strange, quaint, even a little burlesque, but it existed. Its population was to be seen nowhere else; it seemed to exist only at the Chartreuse and for the Chartreuse. Since this ball disappeared its population has completely vanished."
Everything about the Chartreuse was original, not only the dancers and the dances but the orchestra, the music, and the manager. Every kind of "percussion" was added to the usual instruments, the noise of money-bags, pistol shots, rows of explosive caps, resounding anvils, and sheets of metal struck to represent the roaring of lions and tigers. All the music was composed by Carnaud himself, who was conductor, first violin, restaurateur, composer, and advertisement-writer in one. At every special fête he invented a new quadrille and a new exotic word to describe it, such as "la fête des vendanges, quadrille déchirancochicandard," or "l'hôtel des haricots,[33] avec accompaniments de chaînes et de bruits de clefs, grand quadrille exhilarandéliranchocnosophe."
Carnaud was succeeded by the famous Bullier, who altered the name to the Closerie des Lilas and replaced the simple marquee by an Oriental palace with a garden, Moorish pavilions, billiard tables, swings, and a pistol-shooting gallery. A decent orchestra was installed and four admirable waiters. With these improvements the balls, held every Sunday, Monday, and Thursday, began to attract the beau monde of the Quartier Latin, and several of the dancers gained the coveted honour of a sobriquet. There were Jeanne la Juive, for instance, Maria les Yeux Bleus, Joséphine Pochardinette, and the literary Clémentine Pomponnette, who used to show her admirers a farce she had written "dans les loisirs que lui laissait l'amour." This transformation took place about 1847, and it was then that one of the Moorish pavilions was especially consecrated to Murger's Bohemian set. It is needless to say that the name of Bullier still remains in the Bal Bullier of to-day.
One other popular ball must be mentioned, the Bal Mabille, which for so long was one of the sights of Paris. This public ball was instituted by Mabille, a dancing-master, in the Champs Elysées. The price of entrance at first was fifty centimes, with an extra fee for each quadrille, and in 1843 the whole of the dances were included in an initial sum of two francs. The fame of the Bal Mabille was due first to its polkas, a dance which became the rage at the time, and secondly to the most celebrated of polka-dancers, Elise Sergent, known as La Reine Pomaré. Her dancing was a revelation of fire and passion which won her recognition on the very first evening of her appearance. Crowds came to see her dance, articles were devoted to her by the journalists of the day, and Privat d'Anglemont wrote a sonnet to her. Paris, in fact, went mad about her, and she had many lovers, among whom, it is said, was Alphonse Karr, which brings her into some kind of connexion with Bohemia. But Reine Pomaré and her rival, Céleste Mogador, who also made her début at Mabille, were too much on the plane of grandes cocottes for any real relation with the Bohemia of their day. They might have danced for love at the Impasse du Doyenné, but Schaunard and Marcel had nothing to offer them to compare with the splendour of the viveurs which was laid at their feet. Bohemia found its pleasure at less expense and with less restraint in the company of Mimi and Musette in a Moorish pavilion at the Closerie des Lilas, where Colline's bad puns found appreciative listeners and Schaunard's pas de fascination were greeted with rapturous applause.
XII
THE PARIS OF BOHEMIA
Paris sombre et fumeux,
Où déjà, points brillants au front de maison ternes,
Luisent comme des yeux des milliers de lanternes;
Paris avec ses toits déchiquetés, ses tours
Qui ressemblent de loin à des cous de vautours,
Et ses clochers aigus à flèche dentelée,
Comme un peigne mordant la nue échevelée.
THÉOPHILE GAUTIER
The last chapter was devoted to certain accidental adjuncts of la vie de Bohème by way of general illustration, though they consisted of simple amusements common not only to the Parisians of the day but to civilized society of most epochs. The present chapter, which I have reserved till the last, might logically have claimed an earlier place, for its subject, as I have already pointed out, is distinctive of the society in which Bohemia played an important part. Bohemia, of course, neither monopolized Paris nor even a portion of it, but the Paris of Bohemia's florescence and decline was a unique background for these events, a necessary condition, though temporary in itself, which it would pass the bounds of human possibility to reconstruct. Interesting as it is to imagine correctly the dress of the Bohemian and his mistress, the places where they dined, or the gardens where they danced, the re-presentation of the city where they lived, so small, so sensitively vibrant, so congested, so hopelessly out of date, except for a few new patches, so dirty, so noisy, and so picturesque, ranks far higher in importance. Yet, though I might have put this chapter first, I choose to put it last because I cannot hope that it will be appreciated by any but those who have already some memory of Paris and on whom the spell of its fascination has, at least, been lightly cast. The general description of Bohemian life may provide some entertainment to those who know not Paris; for their sake I have sought not to break the general interest. My story is now told, and I am free to call those who have breathed, even for a moment, the quick breeze off the Seine or seen the sunshine strike through the trees in the Tuileries Gardens, to stay with me for a last look back upon that city of beauty and adventure which calls, like the East, to those who love it. To have gained even a superficial view of modern Paris, to have caught some of her accents and contrasts—the radiance of the Bois de Boulogne, the vivacity of the boulevards, the cafés overflowing on to the pavements, the view from her bridges, the differences between the two banks, the mean alleys lurking mischievously at the back of splendid thoroughfares, the broadest omnibuses comically invading the narrowest streets—is to have formed some general notion with which an earlier Paris can be compared. And with a reader who has penetrated deeper, whose nostrils yearn for her indescribably subtle perfume, who knows the different aspects of her streets from days of diligent tramping, who has seen her river blending with her sky in a hundred harmonies, who has felt her moods and her humours, finding like a true lover her blemishes as adorable as her perfections, who has recognized her past in her present, and who, though a stranger, has divined in ecstasy the wild throb of her romantic heart—with him my task is easier still. Such a one will already have guessed the intoxication of the air which a Roger de Beauvoir delicately breathed, when Paris, her spirit newly quickened with the exhilaration of a potent elixir, was yet unspoiled by modern cosmopolitan vulgarity, and her inner soul shone out, through all her deformities and incongruities, with a gay and unmasked confidence.
She did not shine before an unseeing generation, for the Parisians of the Romantic age adored their city, dandies, Bohemians, and bourgeois alike, all passionately conscious of their privileged citizenship, though they could admit with Maxime du Camp that under Louis Philippe she was "one of the dirtiest, the most tortuous, and the most unhealthy" in the world. As they lived in her, so they wrote of her—with pride. Victor Hugo did her great homage in "Notre Dame de Paris" and "Les Misérables," Eugène Sue in "Les Mystères de Paris," and Paul de Kock in all his work, but these achievements appear as slight and partial sketches beside the wonderful and penetrating picture which Balzac drew of Paris—at once the background and the protagonist—in his greatest novels. Balzac, besides giving us a world, gave us a great city. Minute as were the studies he made of the provinces, they are nothing to the picture that he drew of the city which he regarded as the brain of the whole world, the leader of its civilization. He gloated over Paris as a scientist gloats over an interesting organism that he has first observed and then skilfully dissected. He had dissected Paris even on the threshold of his career. In some of his early stories, like a brilliant young surgeon fresh from his researches, he overweights the matter in hand with the results of the laboratory. "Ferragus" begins with a long comparison of the streets of Paris; "La Fille aux Yeux d'Or" with a marvellous tirade on the restless race for money and pleasure that is run by all classes, a tirade which, probing as it does all the strata of society, is an epitome, in some sort, of all his work. Paris, that small enceinte which was enclosed within what is now the second line of boulevards, still innocent of the reforming hand of Haussmann, becoming rich, but hardly yet industrial, not yet the pleasure-ground of all the world, destitute of railways, squalid, ill-kept, nevertheless was transformed by his wonderful imagination into the type of all great cities, which will ever remain true. To him she was "le plus délicieux des monstres," as he says in "Ferragus." "Mais, ô Paris," he cries, "qui n'a pas admiré tes sombres paysages, tes échappées de lumière, tes culs-de-sac profonds et silencieux; qui n'a pas entendu tes murmures, entre minuit et deux heures du matin, ne connaît encore rien de ta vraie poésie, ni de tes bizarres et larges contrastes. Il est un petit nombre de gens ... qui dégustent leur Paris.... Pour ceux-là Paris est triste ou gai, laid ou beau, vivant ou mort; pour eux Paris est une créature; chaque homme, chaque fraction de maison est un lobe du tissu cellulaire de cette grande courtisane de laquelle ils connaissent parfaitement la tête, le cœur et les mœurs fantasques. Aussi ceux-là sont les amants de Paris...."