Out of Bohemia

— A bust of Henry Mürger is at last to be set up ”

as he himself sang of the public garden which remains the central breathing-space of the Latin Quarter. Some surviving poet among his friends — François Coppée or Catulle Mendès — will inaugurate the modest memorial with a discourse of personal sentiment, after the French fashion. Perhaps he will forget to say that the world-wide renown of the Quartier Latin itself is due to the author of Scènes de la Vie de Bohèrne. The name even, I believe, goes back only to Balzac, a generation before. There may be traces of a civitas Latina in documents of the time when the old University of Paris ruled its own side of the river, and had its own police to check the youthful spirits of its twenty thousand students, more cosmopolitan and squalidly lawless than the twelve thousand of to-day.

Mürger came at the crisis of this century’s student squalor of body and ferment of mind. Railways had not then leveled up the poor scholar to respectability. He came en diligence from the provinces, with barely the money needful for his course of studies, but with the full determination to live what he imagined was the Parisian life. The result was “ Bohemianism,” to which Henry Mürger gave name and fame. It is now a thing of the past, except for the ignoble rosserie which young dilettanti affect in their race for notoriety. Robert Louis Stevenson, who had walked the modern Quarter, pronounced even the grisette “ an extinct mammal.” The student may still spend more than his allowance along the broad, well-lighted Boul’ Mich’ (Boulevard Saint-Michel) ; but its cafés are splendid, and his lodgings, near at hand, are in that latest apartment-house style which Bohemia never knew. And at the end of each term he goes off by train to pass his vacation in the bosom of his family, where lie takes a bath of respectability and replenishes his purse.

When Mürger, with Aurélien Scholl, who still lives to bear brilliant witness of that other Paris in his chroniques of to-day, Bouvin the painter, and Champfleury the future authority on art, went to dine with Schanne, — the “ Schannard ” of the Vie de Bohème, — each one brought his own cutlet with him. Maradant, one of the brotherhood, was late on a certain day, and was freely criticised in his absence. Schanne took up his defense. “You’re jealous of Maradant, because his family allows him twenty sous a day.”

Armand Baschet, another of the group, was son of a physician who was able to make both ends meet for his son as well as for himself. They said of him with respect, “ Armand’s father has a château on the banks of the Loire, and an acre-lot in the cemetery.”

The air was still heavy with the vapors of Romanticism. When Mürger’s first book was accepted, the publisher refashioned his name. Until then he had been plain “ Henri Murger,” — both being French names, and the latter pronounced regularly, Margé. The publisher gave an exotic look and sound by introducing the English y and German ii, and insisting on the rolling of the final r, as if Murgère. But with all his Petits Pavés and Chanson de Musette and Vacations de Camille, Henry Mürger gained little fame and less money. He sold his Vie de Bohème outright for live hundred francs. As is usual, the reading public recognized its truth to nature only when the life it portrayed was already passing away.

By that time poor Henry Mürger was beyond conversion. His comrade Schanne married the daughter of a Paris toy-maker, and settled down to business like the veriest bourgeois. Mürger, glad to escape from a quarter where unpaid debts and debtmaking facilities were evenly balanced, crossed the river to the heights of Montmartre.

Mimi Pinçon, whose real name was Anaïs (like so many of her kind, without a family surname), followed him faithfully until his death, a few years later. In the Bohemia where their lives were passed, her influence over him was for good, “ pure womanly.” Of an evening, he sat in the cafés of the boulevard, along which he was now recognized as the founder of a new school of literature and life, and addressed by the title dearest to the heart of the French man of letters, cher maître. Late in the night he would sup with kindred spirits, at their expense or on credit. His favorite restaurateur had an infallible means of drawing at least a promise to pay from his impecunious company. Locking the door of the room where they were dining, he ensconced himself in their midst with his violin, playing interminable music until they had signed notes allowing him to touch their royalties. Meanwhile, Mimi was at home, and starved as best she might. Mürger staggered back to the little room in the early morning, to find her anxiously watching over him when he awoke toward noon. With a brave smile on her pinched lips, she encouraged him to renewed effort. “ Come, come, remue-toi ; work at something.” She did not say that only three francs were left on the chimney-piece for all their household expenses.

He was not, in those waking hours, without a clear insight into the heedless, unmanly ways of his life. When he went for an advance to the Society of Dramatic Authors, which had placed the drama in which faithful, starving Mimi still thrills the audience of the Comédie-Française, he found all his royalties attached. Butcher and baker and many a less honorable creditor were lying everywhere in wait for him. The Revue des Deux Mondes gave him three thousand francs for a romance. But his affairs did not look up the more. At last he was obliged to leave Mimi to face these bourgeois enemies of Bohemian life alone, while he slept on a bench in the anteroom of a friend. There he gave, one morning, the lesson of his life’s experience to the young Catulle Mendès, who was just up from Toulouse to conquer Paris with romances and plays. “ Had I followed the counsel given me in the cruel words of that sincere morning,” says the latter, now that he has published his own hundredth volume, “ I should have been spared much pain.”

“ Ah ! I know well what you think. What matters distress, when you have glory ? My son, there is no such thing as glory. I am known, yes ; famous, if you wish. When I pass, people name me. Under the Odéon galleries, young men who have nothing with which to buy my books turn their pages at the stall. All that does not give the pleasure you might think beforehand. ... I tell you the truth, and I counsel you to go away and to stay far from us forever. Do you know why I tore up your manuscripts ? Because you perhaps have talent. I could not have kept myself from telling you so, and I should have been the cause of a dreadful life and a useless one. For of what use are we, except to serve our own despair ? . . . Oh, I know well that what I say to you will be fruitless. If you have talent, some one who is not less sad, — for we are all sad, each like the other, — but one who is less convinced of the need of doing this present duty, will say to you, ‘ That is good, very good. You must work, young man.’ Oh, the criminals ! Have no talent at all, — that is the grace I wish you ! ”

A few weeks later he was taken to the hospital, and then to a lowly tomb in the cemetery of Montmartre. His last words had been, "No music ! no noise ! no Bohemia ! ” A friend who helped to secure a resting-place for his remains came back, some days after, with one of those wreaths of bead-and-metal immortelles which the scoffing Parisian uses in his only act of piety, the remembrance of his dead. The day was dark and rainy. Kneeling in the mud by the little black wooden cross, which had painted on it the name of Henry Mürger, was a mourning figure, heavily veiled. She stole away at the arrival of a stranger. When friends had time to think and wonder what would become of the faithful Mimi, it was found that she had already disappeared in the shadows of that Bohemia which the young still imagine to be another Arcady, but in which Mürger and its other denizens experienced only shortlived joys with a lifelong mélancolie mansardière.