"My dear lady,—They say here we are going to see mighty hard times. My master talks of suppressing my breakfast, and he wants to hire me to a shepherd in order that I may earn some money for a living. But as I have the reputation of loving mutton-chops, nobody will hire me to keep sheep. If you see anywhere in Paris a pretty diamond collar which does not cost more than five-and-twenty cents, bring it to
"DOG MIRZA.
"14th March, 1855."
Hope dawned upon him in 1856. He was promised a pension of three hundred dollars from the Government out of the literary fund of the Minister of Public Instruction's budget. It would have been, from its regularity of payment, a fortune to him. It would have saved him from the anxiety of quarter-day when rent fell due. But the pension never came. The Government gave him the decoration of the Legion of Honor, which certainly gratified him. But money for bread would have been of more service. When Rachel lay upon that invalid's chair which she was never to quit except for her coffin, she gazed one morning upon the breakfast of delicacies spread before her to tempt the return of absent appetite. After some moments of silence, she took up a piece of bread as white as the driven snow, and, sighing, said in that whisper which was all that remained to her of voice,—"Ay, me! Had the world given me a little more of this, and earlier in my life, I had not been here at three-and-thirty." Those early years of want which sapped Rachel's life undermined Murger's constitution. His rustic life repaired some of the damage wrought, and would probably have entirely retrieved it, had his life then been freer from care, less visited by privation. Had the money the Government and his friends lavished on his corpse been bestowed on him living, he had probably still been numbered among the writers militant of France. Some obscure parasite got the pension. He continued to work on still hounded by debt. "Five times a week," he wrote in 1858, "I dine at twelve or one o'clock at night. One thing is certain: if I am not forced to stop writing for three or four days, I shall fall sick." In 1860 we find him complaining that he is "sick in soul, and maybe in body too. I am, of a truth, fatigued, and a great deal more fatigued than people think me." Death's shadow was upon him. The world thought him in firmer health and in gayer spirits than ever. He knew better. He felt as the traveller feels towards the close of the day and the end of the journey. It was not strange that the world was deceived, for Murger's gayety had always been factitious. He often turned off grief with a smile, where other men relieve it with a tear. Sensitive natures shrink from letting the world see their exquisite sensibility. Besides, Murger's gayety was intellectual rather than physical. It consisted almost entirely in bright gleams of repartee. It was quickness, 'twas not mirth. No wonder, then, that the world was deceived; the mind retained its old activity amid all its fatigue; and besides, the world sees men only in their hours of full-dress, when the will lights up the leaden eyes and wreathes the drawn countenance in smiles. Tears are for our midnight pillow,—the hand-buried face for our solitary study.
So when the rumor flew over Paris, Murger is sick!—Murger is dying!—Murger is dead! it raised the greatest surprise. Everybody wondered how the stalwart man they saw yesterday could be brought low so soon. Where was his youth, that it came not to the rescue? The reader can answer the question. Of a truth, the last act of the drama we have sketched in these pages moved rapidly to the catastrophe. He awoke in the middle of one night with a violent pain in the thigh, which ached as if a red-hot ball had passed through it. The pain momentarily increased in violence, and became intolerable. The nearest physician was summoned. After diagnosis, he declared the case too grave for action until after consultation. Another medical attendant was called in. After consultation they decided that the most eminent surgeons of Paris must be consulted. It was a decomposition of the whole body, attended with symptoms rarely observed. The princes of medical science in Paris met at the bedside. They all confessed that their art was impotent to alleviate, much less to cure this dreadful disease. Murger's hours were numbered. The doctors insisted upon his being transported to the hospital. To the hospital he went: 'twas not for the first,—'twas for the last time. His agonies were distressing. They wrung from him screams which could be heard from the fifth floor, where he lay, to the street. Death made his approaches like some skilful engineer against some impregnable fortress: fibre by fibre, vein by vein, atom by atom, was mastered and destroyed.
During one of the rare intervals of freedom from torture, he turned to the sick-nurse who kept watch by his pillow, and, after vacantly gazing on her buxom form and ruddy cheek, he significantly asked,—"Mammy, do you find this world a happy place, and life an easy burden?" The well-fed woman understood not the bitterness of soul which prompted this question. "Keep quiet, and sleep," was her reply. He fell back upon his pillow, murmuring, "I haven't! I haven't!" Yet he was only eight-and-thirty years old, and men's sorrows commonly commence later in life. A friend came to see him. As the physicians had forbidden him all conversation, he wrote on a card this explanation of his situation:—"Ricord and the other doctors were of opinion that I should come to Dubois's Hospital. I should have preferred St. Louis's Hospital. I feel more at home there. Enfin!..." Is there in the martyrology of poets any passage sadder than these lines? Just think of a man so bereft of home and family, so accustomed to the common cot of the hospital, so familiar to hospital sights and sounds and odors, that he can associate home with the public ward! Poor Murger!
So lived and so died the poet of youth, and of ambitious, struggling, hopeful poverty. We describe not his funeral, nor the monument reared over his grave. Our heart fails us at sight of these sterile honors. They are ill-timed. What boot they, when he on whom they are bestowed is beyond the reach of earthly voices? The ancients crowned the live animal they selected as the sacrifice for their altars; it saw the garlands of flowers which were laid on its head, and the stately procession which accompanied it, and heard the music which discoursed of its happiness.
THE GREAT AIR-ENGINE.
There is an odd collection of houses, and a stretch of green, with half a dozen old elms, raspberry-bushes, and pruned oaks growing on it, opening out from this window where I work; this morning, they blended curiously with this old story that I want to tell you, helping me to understand it better. And the story, too, explained to me one reason why people always choose to look at those trees rather than the houses: at any trees before any houses. Because, you see, whatever grows out of Nature is itself, and says so: has its own especial little soul-sap, and leafs that out intact, borrows no trait or trick or habit from its neighbor. The sunshine is sunshine, and the pine-burr a pine-burr, obstinately, through and through. So Nature rests us. But whatever grows out of a man's brain is like the brain, patched, uncertain: a perverse streak in it somewhere, to spoil its thorough good or ill meaning.