“You know well enough,” said the other. “It was the evening when we didn’t come home till morning. At any rate, that saved us fuel and candles.”
There is nothing like rigid economy, as we see.
“March 20.—Breakfast, one franc, fifty centimes; tobacco, twenty centimes; dinner, two francs; an opera glass”—needed by Rodolphe, who, as editor of the “Scarf of Iris,” had to write a notice of an art exhibition; and so on, and so on. As the account continued, “miscellaneous expenses” reappeared with ever-increasing frequency; indeed, the two financiers had in the end to admit that this “vague and perfidious title,” as Rodolphe called it, had proved a delusion and a snare.
Such, then, are the four principal characters with whose doings and misdoings the “Scenes of Bohemian Life” are mainly occupied. A word only about the women of the book.
It is while he is in their company, I suppose, more than at any other time, that the Anglo-Saxon reader feels how far the pathways of Bohemia lie outside the boundaries of respectable society. Louise, the fickle bird of passage; Musette, vagabond and careless; Mimi, charming, heartless, ill-fated; Phémie, beneath whose delicate exterior was concealed a veritable volcano of passion;—yes, the face of the moralist will certainly harden as he dwells on the giddy vagrancy of their lives, and the hopeless tragedy in which the music and the laughter inevitably find their earthly close. About this matter I shall try to say something presently. For the moment I want only to point out that, though the women of Murger’s book are drawn from known or conjectured originals, the portraiture does not seem to be nearly as close as it is throughout in the case of the men. This does not mean only that each girl in the “Scenes” is a more or less blurred compound of various famous figures of the old Latin Quarter; it means, also—and this is, of course, far more important,—that the characters have undergone much transfiguration. The magic and grace by which, amid all their personal shortcomings and delinquencies, these heedless adventurers of the studio and the café are actually marked, are largely, it is to be feared, the results of Murger’s own idealizing imagination and delicately poetic touch.
There is an important point, suggested by the present part of our subject, which demands a moment’s attention. The principle indicated in the well-known lines of Lafontaine—
“Deux coqs vivaient en paix: une poule survint,
Et voilà la guerre allumée!”—
is generally held to be one of universal applicability. But the life of our Bohemian brotherhood for once gives it the lie direct. Never, even in the most trying seasons of love and jealousy, did the ties slacken which bound the four companions—Colline, the great philosopher; Marcel, the great painter; Schaunard, the great musician; and Rodolphe, the great poet—as they called one another. Rodolphe and Mimi might lead a cat-and-dog life; Marcel might quarrel with Musette, and make it up only to quarrel again; Schaunard might see fit to address some of his telling observations to the person of the melancholy Phémie; but artist and poet, philosopher and painter, rubbed on together in peace; and if the truth must be told, smoked many a pipe in company over the grave of their dead passions. Truly the domestic side of their life left much to be desired. At one time they all occupied the same house, and then the unfortunate neighbors lived, as it were, on a volcano. Six months went by; things grew daily more and more intolerable; and then the final breaking-up of the establishment came about. “But,” adds Murger—and the remark exhibits clearly the kind of understanding which existed among the strangely-assorted friends—“in this association, despite the three young and pretty women who formed part of it, no sign of discord appeared among the men. They frequently gave way to the most absurd caprices of their mistresses; but not one of them would have hesitated a moment between the woman and the friend.”