Years passed away. Henry Murger's promised novel was long coming to the "Revue des Deux Mondes." At last it came; another followed eighteen months afterwards; then he contributed a third. He displayed unquestionable talents; he commanded moderate success. He had been told by so many people that it was a hard matter to please the readers of the "Revue des Deux Mondes," that it was necessary for him to free himself from all his studios' fun, and everything tinctured with the petty press, that he really believed for true everything he heard, and appeared awkward in his movements. His students, his grisettes, and his young artists were all on their good behavior, but were not more droll. Marivaux had come down one more flight of stairs. Alfred de Musset had steeped the powder and the patches in a glass of Champagne wine. Henry Murger soaked them in a bottle of brandy or in a flagon of beer.
Henry Murger's gratitude, whenever we met, continued to exhale in enthusiastic hymns. I lost sight of him for some time. I was told that he lived somewhere in the Forest of Fontainebleau, to escape his creditors' pursuit. At the critical moment of my literary life, I read one morning in a petty newspaper a biting burlesque of which I was the grotesque hero: I figured (my name was given in full) as a member of a temperance society, whose members were pledged to total abstinence from the use of ideas, wit, and style; at one of our monthly dinners, we were said to have devoured Balzac at the first course, De Béranger for the roast, Michelet for a side-dish, and George Sand for dessert. The next day, and every day the petty paper appeared, the joke was renewed with all sorts of variations. It was evidently a "rig" run on me. This joke was signed every day "Marcel," which was the name of one of the heroes of Henry Murger's novel, "La Vie de Bohême"; but I was very far indeed from thinking that the man who was under so many "obligations" to me (as Henry Murger always declared himself to be) should have joined the ranks of my persecutors. A few days afterwards I heard, on the best authority, that Henry Murger was the author of these articles. I felt a deep chagrin at this discovery. Literary men constantly call Philistines and Prudhommes those who lay great stress upon the absence of moral sense as one of the great defects of the school of literature and art to which Murger and his friends belong; and yet there should be a name for such conduct as this, if for no other reason, for the sake of the culprits themselves,—as, when poor Murger acted in this way to me, he was as unconscious of what he did as when he raised heaven and earth to hunt down a dollar. He was not guilty of a black heart, it was only absolute deficiency of everything like moral sense. Henry Murger was under obligations to me, as he said constantly; I had introduced and recommended him to a man and a magazine that are, as of right, difficult in the choice of their contributors; I had, for his sake, conquered their prejudices, borne their reproaches. Whenever his novels appeared, I treated them with indulgence, and gave them praise without examining too particularly into their moral tendency, to the great scandal of my usual readers, and despite the scoldings Monsieur Louis Veuillot gave me. There never was the least coolness between Henry Murger and myself; and yet, when I was attacked and harassed on every side, he hid himself under a pseudonyme, and added his sarcasms to all the others directed against me, that he might gratify his admiration for De Balzac and put a little money in his pocket.
By-and-by I continued to meet Henry Murger again on the Boulevard, and at the first performance of new pieces. Do you imagine he shunned me? Not a bit of it. He did not seem on these rare occasions to feel the least embarrassment. He gave me cordial shakes of the hand, or he bestowed on me one of those profound bows which brought his bald head on a level with his waistcoat-pockets. Then he published a novel in "Le Moniteur," after which he was decorated. Nothing was now heard from or of him for a long time. Not a line by Henry Murger appeared anywhere. I never heard that any piece by him was received, or even refused, by a single one of the eighteen theatres in Paris. At last I met him one day before the Variétés Theatre. I went up to speak to him, and ended by asking the invariable question between literary men,—"What are you at work on now? How comes it that so long a time has elapsed since you gave us something to read or to applaud?"
"I will tell you why," he replied, with melancholy sang-froid. "It is not a question of literature, it is a question of arithmetic. I owe eight hundred dollars to Madame Porcher, the wife of the 'authors'-tickets' dealer, who is always ready to advance money to dramatic authors, and to whom we are all constantly in debt. I owe four hundred dollars to the 'Moniteur,' and three hundred dollars to the 'Revue des Deux Mondes.' Follow my reasoning now: Were I to bring out a play, my excellent friend, Madame Porcher, would lay hands on all the proceeds, and I should receive nothing. Were I to give a novel to the 'Moniteur,' I should have to write twenty feuilletons (you know they pay twenty dollars a feuilleton there) before I cancelled my old debt. Were I to contribute to the 'Revue des Deux Mondes,' as soon as my six sheets (at fifty dollars a sheet, that would be three hundred dollars) were printed and published, the editor would say to me, 'We are even now.' So you see that it would be unpardonable prodigality on my part to publish anything; therefore I have determined not to work at all, in order to avoid spending my money, and I am lazy—from economy!"
His reply disarmed the little resentment I had left. I took his hand in mine, and said to him,—"See here, Murger, I must confess to you I was a little angry with you; but your arithmetic is more literary than you think it. You have given me a lesson of contemporary literature; and I say to you, as the 'Revue des Deux Mondes' would say, 'Murger, we are even!'"
I ran off without waiting for his reply, and whispered to myself, as I went, "And yet Henry Murger is the most talented and the most honest of them all!"
Let me continue the story of my misfortunes. The tempest was unchained against me. It is true, there were among my adversaries some persons under obligations to me,—some persons who were full of enthusiasm at my first manner, and who would have made wry faces enough, had I published their flattering letters to me,—other persons, to whom I had rendered pecuniary services,—others, again, who had come to me with hat in hand and supple knees, to beg my permission to allow them to dramatize my novels. But what were these miserable considerations, when the great interests of national literature, taste, and glory were at stake? I was the vile detractor, the impious scorner of these glories, and it was but justice that I should be put in the pillory and made the butt of rotten eggs. Voltaire blasphemed, Béranger insulted, Victor Hugo outraged, were offences which cried aloud for chastisement and for vengeance. Balzac's shade especially complained and clamored for justice. It is true, that, while Balzac was alive, he was not accustomed to anything like such admiration. He openly avowed that he detested newspaper-writers, and they returned the detestation with interest. Everybody, while he was alive, declared him to be odd, eccentric, half-crazy, absurd. His friends and his publishers, in fine, everybody who had anything to do with him, told rather disreputable stories about him. No matter for that. Balzac was dead, Balzac was a god, the god of all these livers-by-the-wits, who but for him would have been atheists. Monsieur Paulin Limayrac tore me to pieces in "La Presse." Monsieur Eugène Pelletan shot me in "Le Siècle." Monsieur Taxile Delord mauled me in "Le Charivari." To this episode of my exposition in the pillory belongs an anecdote which I cannot omit.
I was about to set off for the country, where I reckoned upon spending some weeks of the month of May, in order to recover somewhat from these incessant attacks made upon me. I had read in a café, while taking my beefsteak and cup of chocolate, the various details of the punishment I was about to undergo. One of my tormentors, who was a great deal more celebrated for his aversion to water and clean linen than for any article he had ever written, declared that I was about to be banished from everything like decent society; another vowed by all the deities of his Olympus that I was a mountebank and a skeptic, who had undertaken to defend sound doctrines and to tomahawk eminent writers simply by way of bringing myself into public notice; a third painted me as a poor wretch who had come from his provincial home with his pockets filled with manuscripts, and was going about Paris begging favorable notices as a means of touching publishers and booksellers; a fourth depicted me, on the other hand, as a wealthy fellow, who was so diseased with a mania for literature that I paid newspapers and reviews to publish my contributions, which no human being would have accepted gratuitously. As I left the café, one of my intimate friends ran up to me. His face expressed that mixture of cordial commiseration and desire to make a fuss about the matter which one's friends' faces always wear under these circumstances.
"Well," said he, "what do you think of the way they treat you?"