It was only after his constitution had been shattered, and he had grown prematurely old, that Murger found his way out of Bohemia. The path into that land of glamour and enchantments had been easy enough, like the road to Avernus; the passage back again into the common world was in his case, as in the case of so many others, a steep and difficult one. But after months and years of toil and waiting, success came at last, and little by little he was able to break with tenacious old associations, and settle down to a more steady and regular routine of life. He established a connection with the “Revue des Deux Mondes”; and with a position now practically assured, took up his abode at Marlotte, near Fontainebleau. Here he had every chance of restoring his enfeebled health, and starting his career anew upon a different and a wiser plan. But the hour had gone by. A brief period of work and quiet happiness was brought to a close in January, 1861, when Henri Murger breathed his last in the house where he had already spent so many weeks of suffering—in the Hôpital St. Louis. He had not completed his thirty-ninth year.
Of the general work of Murger, this is not the place to speak. It is considerable in quantity, and much of it has substantial claim to critical attention; for his prose is finely wrought, and his lyrics—instance the superb “Chanson de Musette,” so highly but justly praised by Gautier,—are sometimes of rare purity and sweetness. But it is by the “Scenes of Bohemian Life,” and by these alone, after all, that Murger keeps his hold to-day upon the broader reading public. It has been said that he only wrote at his best when he was writing straight out of his own life. This is perhaps at bottom the reason why this one singular book possesses vitality far in excess of all his other productions. These may still be read with enjoyment, though in the tremendous stress of modern affairs, and with the ceaseless activity of the printing-press, they are more likely to be ignored by all but special students. But the “Scenes of Bohemian Life,” as Mr. Saintsbury has rightly insisted, take a permanent place in the literature of humanity. Here we may notice one more illustration of the curiously distorted judgments which authors often pass upon their own works. In later years he was accustomed to speak slightingly and almost petulantly of the volume which has carried his name over into a new generation; even, it is said, going so far as to affirm that “that devil of a book will hinder me from ever crossing the Pont des Arts”—that is, from entering the Academy, which was one of the unfulfilled ambitions of his life. But, in another and finer sense, it has placed his name among those of the Immortals.
We may now pass from the author to his volume, on the title-page of which he might well have written the famous quorum pars magna fui of Virgil’s hero. “Murger, c’est la Bohème, comme la Bohème fut Murger,” was the declaration of one of his personal friends; and the stuff of his wonderful scenes, with all their extravagance and rollicking absurdity, with all their poignant pathos and whimsical humor, is, as we have said, stuff furnished by close observation and intimate experience, though the crude material is transmuted into gold by the secret alchemy of genius. It has been said that many of Murger’s chapters were actually written—in the French phrase, for which we have no satisfactory equivalent—au jour le jour; that he made the scenes of his Bohemian life into literature, so to speak, while they were still being enacted. To this effect Théophile de Banville reported that “that which was done by Rodolphe”—who, as we shall presently see, is generally to be identified with Murger himself—“during the month when he was Mademoiselle Mimi’s neighbor, has perhaps had no parallel since letters began. His days he passed in composing verses, sketching plots of plays, and covering Mimi’s hands with kisses as with a glove; but his daily bread was his feuilleton for the ‘Corsaire,’ and as Rodolphe had neither money nor books to invent anything but his own life, each evening he wrote as a feuilleton for the ‘Corsaire’ the life of that day, and each day he lived the feuilleton for the next. It was thus that the morrow of I know not what quarrel, after the fashion of the lovers of Horace, Mimi, leaning on her lover’s arm, was bowed to in the Luxembourg by the poet of the ‘Feuilles d’Automne,’ and returned home quite proud to the Rue des Canettes; and that same evening Rodolphe wrote on this theme one of his most delightful chapters.”[[25]] This account of the connection between Murger’s book and his daily life, probably overstates the matter, or is to be accepted as approximately true only in regard to exceptional occurrences, like the one directly referred to. But that the substance of the volume was throughout furnished by experience is certain. The principal characters, and even some of the minor ones, have long since been traced back to their archetypes; the spots rendered famous by many a memorable scene—such as the Café Momus and the shop of the old Jewish bric-a-brac dealer, Father Médicis—are known to have actually existed in the old Latin Quarter, though in the evolution of modern Paris the historic landmarks have been swept away; while there is no question that in most of his stories Murger either drew immediately upon actual circumstances, or at least built his superstructure of fancy upon a very solid foundation of fact.
The heroes of the “Scenes of Bohemian Life” are four in number. To each member of the strange group—the “Quatuor Murger,” as it came to be called—we will yield the honor of a separate paragraph or two of characterization.
First we have Alexandre Schaunard, who, though he cultivates “the two liberal arts of painting and music,” devotes the larger part of his attention to the latter, and is indeed particularly engaged at the time when we make his acquaintance, in the composition of an elaborate symbolic symphony which might almost be said to anticipate some of the crazy theories of more recent doctrinaires, representing as it does “the influence of blue in the arts.” This strange production had a real existence, and its originator in the book has been identified with Alexandre Schaune, who also drove an artistic tandem with much enthusiasm for a season, though he subsequently forsook Bohemia and adopted a more profitable career in the toy-making business. He and Murger became acquainted in 1841, lived together at one time in the closest intimacy in the Rue de la Harpe, and remained friends till the latter’s death. Schaune survived among “new faces, other minds,” till 1887, and only a short time before he died published some memoirs which contain many matters of interest for the Murger student. He bore among his companions the nickname of Schannard-sauvage, and in Murger’s original manuscript the name was so written—Schannard. By a printer’s error, however, the first n was turned into a u, and the historian thought well, in reading the proof, to let the blunder pass.
Schaunard in the book is specially distinguished among his acquaintances for having raised borrowing to the level of a fine art. By dint of many careful observations and delicate experiments he has discovered the days when each one of his friends is accustomed to receive money, and thus, following the periodic ebb and flow of the financial tide, spares himself the trouble and annoyance of appealing to the generosity of those who, at the given moment, are likely to be in as low water as himself. Having, furthermore, “learned the way to borrow five francs in all the languages of the globe,” the painter-musician is able, as a rule, to keep pretty firmly on his feet. By a critical friend he was once described as “passing one half of his time in looking for money to pay his creditors, and the other half in eluding his creditors when the money has been found.”[[26]] But it should be remembered that this calls for some discount as a friend’s judgment, and likely, therefore, to be a trifle over-colored; and it is but doing justice to Schaunard to say that, towards the immediate companions who had come to his rescue from time to time, he behaved upon a more honorable plan. To facilitate, and at the same time to equalize so far as possible, the “taxes” which he levied, he “had drawn up, in order of districts and streets, an alphabetical list containing the names of all his friends and acquaintances. Opposite each name was inscribed the maximum sum which, having regard to their state of fortune, he might borrow from them, the times when they were in funds, their dinner-hour, and the ordinary bill of fare of the house. Beside this list, Schaunard kept in perfect order a little ledger, in which he entered the amounts lent to him, down to the minutest fractions; for he would never go beyond a certain figure, which was within the fortune of a Norman uncle whose heir he was.[[27]] As soon as he owed twenty francs to an individual, he closed the account, and liquidated it at a single payment, even if for the purpose he had to borrow from others to whom he owed less. In this way he always kept up a certain credit, which he called his floating debt, and as people knew that he was accustomed to pay when his personal resources permitted, they willingly obliged him when they could.”
Schaunard plays his part to the amusement, if not always to the edification, of the reader in many delightful episodes in the “Scenes.” It is through his misadventures with his landlord that the establishment of the club is largely, though indirectly, brought about; it is he who paints the provincial Blancheron’s portrait in fancy dressing-gown, while Marcel goes off to dine with a deputy in his—the said Blancheron’s—coat; it is he, again, who is hired by an Englishman to play the piano from morning till night, as a means of getting even with an actress living near by, whose parrot and shrill declamation combined, have proved rather too much for even British nerves,—a transaction out of which, we need scarcely add, the virtuoso made a good deal more money than he did from his famous symphony. On the whole, however, of the four friends with whose doings our volume is mainly occupied, Schaunard is by far the least attractive figure. He is coarse and morose; has a harsh, rasping voice; is apt to be put out about trifles; sometimes treats his male friends with scant courtesy; and has an unpleasant habit of employing, with his more intimate associates of the other sex, Captain Marryatt’s argumentum ad feminam—in other words, of conversing with them occasionally through the medium of a stout cane. Poor Phémie—the melancholy Phémie—had every right more than once or twice to complain of the strength and efficacy of his logic; nor were matters made very much better for her, we may opine, when, after one of their quarrels, he gave her in grim joke, and as a keepsake, the stick with which he had addressed to her so many telling remarks.
After Schaunard comes Marcel the painter, a character of more amiable type, who appears to be a compound portrait of the two artists, Tabar and Lazare. He is essentially a good fellow, bright, enthusiastic, happy-go-lucky, and shiftless; and though, after the fashion of the world in which he lives, he has an “insolent confidence in luck,” he is manly enough, upon occasion, to “give fortune a helping hand.” He is the hero of many amazing and some very ludicrous adventures, of which we can find space here only for a single specimen. Like Schaunard, he is devoting as much of his time and energy as he can save from the manufacture of pot-boilers and the consideration of the “terrible daily problem of how to get breakfast,” to the composition of one great work, which is to be his open sesame to fame—“The Passage of the Red Sea.”[[28]] Was ever so much labor expended with such little practical result, one may wonder, by any artist whatsoever—painter, musician, or poet? For five or six years Marcel had worked away at his canvas with unflagging diligence and courage, and “for five or six years this masterpiece of color had been obstinately refused by the jury”; so that, by dint of going and returning from the artist’s studio to the exhibition, and from the exhibition back to the studio, the picture had come to know the way so well, that, had it been set on wheels, it could have gone to the Louvre by itself. Marcel, of course, attributed the policy of the jury to the personal spite of its members, and persisted, in the teeth of all discouragement, in regarding his production as the pendant to “The Marriage in Cana.” Hence, nothing daunted, he returned again and again to his vast design, after indulging in a sufficient amount of abuse to relieve his ruffled temper. At length, under conviction that the child of this world might possibly succeed where the child of light had failed, he began to seek for means whereby, without altering the general plan of his gigantic undertaking, he might deceive the jury in supposing it to be an entirely fresh and hitherto unexamined work. Thus, one year he turned Pharaoh into Cæsar, and the “Passage of the Red Sea” became “The Passage of the Rubicon.” This ruse failing, he covered, as by miracle, the Red Sea with snow, planted a fir-tree in one corner thereof, dressed an Egyptian in the costume of the Imperial Guard, and sent forth his canvas as “The Passage of the Beresina.” But, unfortunately, the jury had wiped its glasses that day and was not to be duped. It recognized the inexorable picture by dint of a multi-colored horse—his “synoptic table of fine colors,” Marcel privately called this astonishing steed—that went prancing about on the top of a wave of the Red Sea; and again the masterpiece was churlishly blackballed. “Till my dying day I will send my picture to the judges,” vowed Marcel, after this new repulse; “it shall be engraved on their memories.”—“The surest way of ever getting it engraved,” remarked Colline, who chanced to be near by. And so the poor painter might have been left to try further and still wilder experiments, but for the kindly intervention of Daddy Médicis, an old Jew who had constant dealings with the Bohemians, and often managed to do them a friendly turn without, as may be imagined, sacrificing himself overmuch in the transaction. This singular individual, coming one evening to Marcel’s room, offered to purchase the famous picture “for the collection of a rich amateur,” and proposed one hundred and fifty francs as a fair price. At first, the artist grumbled; there was at least a hundred and fifty francs’ worth of cobalt in the dress of Pharaoh alone, he protested. But the Jew stood firm, and at last the painter yielded; whereupon Daddy Médicis gave the Bohemians a dinner, at which “the lobster ceased to be a myth for Schaunard, who contracted for this amphibious creature a passion bordering on madness.” As for Marcel himself, his intoxication came near upon having deplorable results. Passing his tailor’s shop, at two o’clock in the morning, he actually wanted to wake up his creditor, and give him on account the hundred and fifty francs he had just received. A ray of reason, which still flitted in the mind of Colline, stopped the artist on the brink of this precipice.