Vie de Bohème: A Patch of Romantic Paris
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Title: Vie de Bohème: A Patch of Romantic Paris
Author: Orlo Williams
Release date: July 21, 2012 [eBook #40293]
Language: English
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VIE DE BOHÈME
[Illustration: La Cydalise.]
VIE DE BOHÈME
A PATCH OF ROMANTIC PARIS
BY ORLO
WILLIAMS
[Illustration: colophon, ARTI et VERITATI]
RICHARD G. BADGER
THE GORHAM PRESS BOSTON
_First Published 1913_
PRINTED AT
THE BALLANTYNE PRESS
LONDON
TO
MY WIFE
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I. LA VRAIE BOHÈME 1
II. A FRINGE OF HISTORY 21
III. LE MAL DU SIÈCLE 35
IV. PARISIAN SOCIETY 65
V. LES VIVEURS 87
VI. LA BOHÈME ROMANTIQUE 109
VII. THE SECOND "CÉNACLE" 126
VIII. LA BOHÈME GALANTE 158
IX. SCHAUNARD AND COMPANY 194
X. MURGER AND HIS FRIENDS 219
XI. AMUSEMENTS OF BOHEMIA 252
XII. THE PARIS OF BOHEMIA 282
INDEX 303
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
_To face
page_
LA CYDALISE. _By Camille Rogier_ _Frontispiece_
THE SPIRIT OF ROMANTICISM 44
(From the cover of a Romantic periodical)
BOUSINGOTS. _By Frances Trollope_ 56
(From "Paris and the Parisians in 1835")
LES CHAMPS ELYSÉES. _By Eugène Lami_ 67
A VIVEUR. _By Gavarni_ 78
FASHIONABLES. _By Gavarni_ 86
PÉTRUS BOREL. _By Louis Boulanger_ 138
(After an etching by Célestus Nanteuil)
CÉLESTIN NANTEUIL. _By Himself_ 142
A FESTIVITY IN THE IMPASSE DU DOYENNÉ 168
(From "Les Confessions" by Arsène Houssaye)
GÉRARD DE NERVAL 190
A GRISETTE. _By Gavarni_ 216
A BAL MASQUÉ AT THE OPÉRA. _By Eugène Lami_ 274
THE GALOP INFERNAL. _By Gavarni_ 276
A GUINGETTE 278
THE RUE ST.-DENIS 294
THE RUE DE LA TIXANDERIE. _By Méryon_ 295
THE RUE PIROUETTE. _By Méryon_ 297
I
LA VRAIE BOHÈME
_La Bohème, c'est le stage de la vie artistique; c'est la préface
de l'Académie, de l'Hôtel-Dieu ou de la Morgue._
MURGER: "Scènes de la Vie de Bohème."
If there is one reason for which the growth of newspapers during the
last century may be looked at askance, it is the journalist's
persistency in perpetuating phrases. Phrases and catchwords at the
moment of invention are works of a peculiar genius, of which some men
have an abnormal share, though it may crop out suddenly in the most
unlikely places; but a good catchword, that crystallization of a drop of
some elusive current that is momentarily passing through public opinion,
that apt naming of some newly formed group of men or ideas, never comes
out of an inkpot: it is essentially, as the French finely recognize, a
_mot_, a pearl of speech. It darts out in some happy moment of human
intercourse, often almost unconsciously, when the words on a man's lips
are less than usual rebellious to the expression of his thoughts, or
when the exhilaration of some public utterance has charged the air so
that the little telling point, hitherto cold and dormant, flashes
suddenly into incandescence. Such a phrase, born on the lips of one, can
only be nurtured on the lips of many: its success implies continued
utterance. It becomes a heaven-sent convenience to save human
circumlocution, a new topic for the dullards, a new toy for the
_blasés_. In these communicative days, indeed, journalism increases a
thousand-fold the possibilities of its radiation, but a good catchword
has always made its way without the help of print. There has never
existed a human society, at any developed stage of civilization, that
has not been perfectly capable of hitting off a new idea or a new group
in some telling phrase or name without the intervention of a scribe. At
the same time, conversational man, left to himself, is no less quick to
forget than to invent. A new phrase properly fades as soon as the
novelty of that which inspired it, but once it has appeared upon a
single written page it has been given an artificial life of varying but
incalculable duration. This artificial existence has been infinitely
increased by the newspaper. The journalist, who has little time to
think, is naturally loth to let a convenient label go, so that, long
after its original parcel of ideas or beings has passed away, he will
keep tagging it on to other parcels with a certain show of relevance
which effectually conceals the fact that it ought long ago to have been
filed for the etymological dictionary.
A phrase which has thus lingered artificially in common use is the word
"Bohemian." Nobody can deny that it is a useful label, simply because it
is so vague, conveying as it does the sense of some deliberate
divergence from the usages of polite society, without being in the least
embarrassingly clear as to the degree or direction of that divergence.
It is a term, so apparently specific, so really loose, equally capable
of carrying blame and admiration, which people will go on applying to
men and women, their lives and their clothes, without inquiring whether
there is in fact any answering reality. It would be easy enough to
confuse its simple users by a few question. They might be asked, for
instance, what a Bohemian is, when they would probably reply, in the
slipshod phraseology of to-day, that he is an odd person who wears funny
clothes and does quaint things. But then, it might be pointed out, a
docker from Limehouse is equally odd and quaint from their point of
view, though they do not call him a Bohemian; on which they will rather
pettishly explain that they mean artists and musicians and so on, people
who don't "work." To help them out on this point, in fine, they mean
people who potentially rank with the members of learned professions, but
who choose to live a less respectable life, in which paying calls,
dressing for dinner, and attending to the dictates of social morality
are considered of small importance, though the exact degree of social
unorthodoxy is left as undefined as the qualifying degree of artistic
performance. The same lady will comprehend in the term the middle-aged
civil servant who haunts studios of an evening, wears pale tweeds, but
is otherwise a pearl of inartistic chivalry, and the scaramouch of a
painter, whom she calls "charming" because he is clever, and whose
absorption in art has entirely ruined him as a social being. I propose
another question. Why are Bohemians so called? The answer seems
easy--because they live in Bohemia. And Bohemia? Again the label
produces a difficulty. To pursue any geographical inquiries concerning
Bohemia in a Socratic spirit would quickly produce exasperation in any
catechumen, and I will presume the result without the method. The
answers would generally amount to this: that it seems agreed, simply
since the word is used, that there is a Bohemia, but its latitude and
longitude are indefinable. It is not confined to Chelsea or St. John's
Wood, or even, of course, to England; apparently it transcends the
ordinary differences of nationality, existing always and everywhere. The
possibility of its having existed once and somewhere--I give away freely
at this early stage the foundation of this book--never occurs, for
labels have a tremendous potency of suggestion. Bohemia is commonly
assumed to exist now in the midst of this commercial day. It is
generally accepted--with more or less warmth according to individual
tastes--as an institution not, perhaps, entirely desirable for itself,
but a necessary patch in the motley dress of civilization. It is
proclaimed gleefully or admitted under constraint, as the case may be,
that clever, artistic men and women, wisely or perversely, choose to
gather there, and that certain epithets, such as quaint, amusing,
unconventional--the ethical implications of the adjectives differing
with their user--are applicable to it. But _la vie de Bohème_, once so
vivid a reality, has now no tangible substance: it wanders about, the
palest ghost of a legend, formless and indistinct. The young may look
forward to it and the old pretend to look back on it, but young and old,
in either case, are turning their mind's eye upon a mere abstraction.
The word "Bohemian" has become as conventional as "gentleman," with less
content for all its greater glamour.
The glamour of Bohemia, too, is projected from a paradox. On the
assumption that it exists, those who wish to live in Bohemia idealize
it; those who have lived in it boast of it; and those who might have
lived in it, but did not, pretend that they did. Yet those who wish to
live in it know nothing of it, and those who lived in it, for all their
boasting, have left it. It seems to take shape, like a mirage, only in
prospect or retrospect. There are witnesses to the distant glint of its
magic towers in the rosy mists of sunrise or the golden haze of sunset,
but of the light and shade within its streets there are none, for those
who might be supposed to be passing through its gates are strangely
reticent, and seem mysteriously to lose the sense of their glorious
nationality. A man may say with a thrill, "I will be a Bohemian," or
with a glow, "I was a Bohemian," but of him who said, "I am a Bohemian,"
the only proper view would be one of deepest suspicion. He would
certainly be a masquerader.
Yet many people, at least in England, do so masquerade--people who
affect Chelsea, slouch hats, and ill-cut garments, who haunt Soho
restaurants, talk and smoke cigarettes in half a dozen studios, toady
sham genius, flutter in emancipatory "movements," and generally do
nothing on quite enough a year. Not long ago a distinguished artist,
genially inspired by dinner at a club of Bohemian traditions and most
respectable membership, gave utterance to the view that, though the
velvet coat had disappeared before evening dress, the Bohemian still
existed. Upon that a writer in an evening paper made the wise comment:
"There are people, it is true, who indulge in mild
unconventionality; they feed in Soho, and talk of cabarets. But
these people are seldom artists and never Bohemian. The
unconventionality of these people is a mere outward pose, which
compels any artist who wishes to preserve his individuality and
good name to pay careful attention to the external forms.
Bohemianism, such as it was, sprang up in Paris, and that is
sufficiently good reason for its failure in England."
The journalist has here risen above the temptation of the label, and his
words are just. The gist of the matter lies, perhaps, in his last
sentence, but that point must wait its turn. There is no doubt that
there exists in London, not to speak of other cities, a large body of
people of varying ages, occupations, beliefs, and principles who keep up
a masquerade of Bohemianism. As a body they are worthy citizens enough,
whose intelligence on some subjects is above the average, but they are
masqueraders none the less if they wish to pass as _enfants de Bohème_.
A reason for this masquerade may be found partly in the very human love
of "dressing up" which is never to be discouraged, partly in the
glorification of Bohemia in which writers of novels and reminiscences
are prone to indulge. Probably George du Maurier's "Trilby" has been
responsible for more misconceptions on this matter than any other single
book, on account of its very charm, a charm that needs no further praise
at this date. The author himself, who wrote about that which he knew,
made no extravagant claims to have drawn Bohemia in the early part of
"Trilby," but it is that which in the eyes of most of his readers he is
unavoidably represented as doing. So far as Taffy, the Laird, and Little
Billie are concerned, they are simply transplanted Britons of the
Victorian era, art students with means enough to pursue their studies
without pot-boiling and to keep open house for a collection of other
joyous young people, of whom Svengali was alone the complete Bohemian,
while Trilby herself with perfect propriety mended their socks. Trilby's
part in this studio life is a sentimental idyll which nobody would wish
to destroy, but it is none the less true, in spite of her creator's plea
for her _quia multum amavit_ in a delightful page of circumlocution,
that he has effectually distilled out of her any essence of Bohemianism
which she is dimly represented as possessing. George du Maurier knew
Paris when Bohemia was no more, but even he must have known the rougher,
wilder, less comfortable side of the Quartier Latin. Yet that he glossed
it over is perfectly comprehensible. Even those who lived to write about
the Bohemia that once was could not help tinging their memories with the
romantic yearning of middle age. In a life where hardship and happiness
kaleidoscopically alternate, pain--especially in the shape of material
want or the sense of unjust neglect--obscures in the moment of struggle
the more brightly coloured glasses of health and joy which more often
than not surround it. In retrospect, by a merciful dispensation, the
sombre lines almost entirely disappear, only to be recalled by an
unnatural effort of memory. What stood out in retrospect, in the special
case of _la vie de Bohème_, was the happiness of youth that would never
return, its _insouciance_, its untrammelled companionships, the poetry
of its first love, its gaiety and irresponsible humour, its courage, its
ready makeshifts in adversity. The ex-Bohemian had, what the Bohemian
had not, a contrast by which to measure his regrets--the cares of
domesticity, the wearisome demands of society upon its members, the
responsibilities and cares of an assured position, howsoever humble, the
dulling of pleasure's edge, joints stiffening, hair bleaching. The snows
of yesteryear were falling upon others now; and that the young rogues
might not be too uplifted, he must write his _militavi non sine gloria_,
hinting the while that the special glory of Bohemia paled at the precise
moment of his exodus. George du Maurier poured over "Trilby" some of
this romantic recollection, and other less gifted novelists have done
the same for certain _coteries_ that have lived in London. To them is
due much of the glamour still implied in the phrase "Bohemian," a
glamour which is seldom corrected by a reading of George Gissing's "New
Grub Street." Yet no conception of Bohemia into which the sombre details
of that book will not naturally fit can possibly approach the truth.
This last sentence, I am aware, may be used to challenge my acquaintance
with the truth since I assume its existence. To any such challenge the
whole of this book is an answer, and its reader will at the end, it is
hoped, be in possession of at least as much truth as its author, if not
the little more which criticism supplies. In the case of a subject so
little complicated an elaborate initial summary of aims and processes
and steps of proof will be unnecessary. Those who wish to do so will
have little difficulty in following a study, which provided no little
entertainment to the student, of the life that was truly to be called
Bohemian. I have been so far concerned to hint that I do not deal in any
heterogeneous parcels which have come to pass under an old label. The
label was applied at a particular time to a particular parcel, and the
one and only original parcel is the _vie de Bohème_ which in this book I
attempt to unwrap.
It might be supposed from the commonness of allusions to Bohemia and
Bohemianism that the terms were contemporary, at least, with the
intrusion of artists and men of letters into society, and that before
the existence of the Bohemia whose capital is Prague the name of some
other nation was, in the same way, taken in vain. However, this is not
the case. The _grœculus esuriens_ to whom the Roman poet so
scornfully refers had no doubt many Bohemian qualities, but the emphasis
of the taunt is laid on his foreign nationality, not upon his mode of
existence. Even after the Bohemia of the atlas came into being it knew
for many centuries no usurper of its name. Will Shakespeare, Ben Jonson,
and the merry company of the "Mermaid" tavern neither called themselves
nor were called Bohemians. Samuel Johnson, Goldsmith, and the other less
distinguished inhabitants of Grub Street suffered many verbal
indignities, but not that. Coleridge and Charles Lamb might be alluded
to as Bohemians now, but in their day the term had even yet not been
invented. Murger's preface to "Scènes de la Vie de Bohème" proves that
so late as 1846 a universal understanding of his title could not be
taken for granted, since he begins by carefully distinguishing the
geographical Bohemia from the artistic. The modern sense of the term
originated, in fact, in Paris at the time of the Romantic movement,
being only an extension of the meaning of "gipsy" or "vagabond" long
attached to the word _bohémien_ in France. Our "Bohemian" was introduced
into the English language by Thackeray, who learnt it during his
student-period in Paris.
This piece of etymology, nugatory as it may appear, is, in fact, very
important. It is the first real delimitation of our inquiry. _La vie de
Bohème_ is essentially a French term, and it is therefore fitting that
we should examine its implications in that language. Murger in his
preface is contradictory, but his very contradiction is pregnant and
valuable. At the outset he applies the term _bohémien_ to the literary
and artistic vagabonds of all ages. "La Bohème dont il s'agit dans ce
livre n'est point une race née aujourd'hui, elle a existé de tous temps
et partout, et peut revendiquer d'illustres origines." Homer, he says,
was the first Bohemian of Greek antiquity, and his tradition was carried
on by the medieval minstrels and troubadours; Pierre Gringoire and
François Villon, Clément Marot and Mathurin Regnier, Molière and
Shakespeare, Rousseau and D'Alembert were the leading citizens of their
contemporary Bohemias. This brings Murger to his own day, of which he
says: "Aujourd'hui comme autrefois, tout homme qui entre dans les arts,
sans autre moyen d'existence que l'art lui-même, sera forcé de passer
par les sentiers de la Bohème." If Chelsea were here to make a
triumphant interruption, it would have spoken too soon, for he proceeds
to give the definition which serves as an epigraph to this chapter, and,
without a word of warning, contradicts what he has said before in the
sentence: "Nous ajouterons que la Bohème n'existe et n'est possible qu'à
Paris." This is a highly serious matter. It leaves old Homer nothing but
a Greek poet, and Chelsea--well--little more than Chelsea. However, I
cannot imagine Homer objecting, and Chelsea must forgive me, if I accept
Murger's statement in the strictest possible way. Further, the Paris
implied is the Paris of Murger's own day. That this was so may appear
more clearly in the sequel, but for the present it must suffice to say
that the Paris of the Romantic period, which gave birth to Bohemia, was
unlike the Paris of earlier days in many respects, and no Romantic had
any conception of the cosmopolitan Paris of to-day. _La vie de Bohème_,
far from being a vague label, was a phrase packed with intimate meaning,
meaning which at the time was not at all so fully manifest as under
criticism and comparison it may now appear. It depended for its peculiar
qualities upon the social and material conditions of Louis Philippe's
Paris, which have long since passed away.
We go, therefore, beyond Murger and strike out Villon, Gringoire, and
Marot from the roll of Bohemia. At most they were only potentially
enrolled and lived, like Socrates, in a state of unconscious grace.
Whether or no Bohemia can be said to exist to-day or to have existed in
the Middle Ages, at least it can only be by analogy from the very
definite and localized _Bohème_ which was part of Paris between 1830 and
1848. Though Louis Philippe, the _bourgeois_ king, the admirer of the
_juste milieu_, was her ruler, the life of Paris never beat with a
quicker pulse than in those days; never was she more gay, more witty,
more intellectually scintillating, more paradoxical, in fact more
absolutely Parisian than when Victor Hugo, Sainte-Beuve, Alfred de
Musset, the Princess Belgiojoso, Théophile Gautier, Gérard de Nerval,
Nestor Roqueplan, and Baudelaire were among her citizens, when Roger de
Beauvoir was dazzling upon a truly brilliant boulevard, when the dandies
gracefully lounged and quizzed upon the steps of Tortoni's, when
Alexandre Dumas gave his famous fancy-dress ball which drew all Paris,
when Marie Dorval shone beside Mademoiselle Mars, when Fanny Elssler and
Taglioni danced while Duprez and Grisi and Rubini sang, when Gavarni and
Daumier drew their caricatures, when Musard conducted his furious
quadrilles, when there were still _salons_ in which men and women still
knew how to talk, when life was still an artistic achievement in an
artistic setting. Memoirs and reminiscences abound of this enchanted
city in the time when her intense inner light had not paled before the
glare of commercialism and cosmopolitanism, but such sketches and
side-views must yield to the all-comprehending picture contained in the
works of Balzac, that magnificent magician. Through him the Paris of
Louis Philippe shines doubly brilliant, for its world of flesh and blood
was not more wonderful than the fictitious world with which he peopled
it, a world of high and low, rich and poor, squalor and splendour, vice
and virtue, wit and stupidity--miraculous issue from one poor mortal
brain. The Princesse de Cadignan, Madame D'Espard, Madame Firmiani, and
Mademoiselle des Touches were its higher, Coralie, Esther, Jenny Cadine,
Florine, and Madame Schontz its lower, divinities, and their worshippers
were de Marsay, the engaging Lucien de Rubempré, the remarkable
Rastignac, Maxime de Trailles, La Palférine, and all the corrupted crew
of Crevels, Malifats, and Camusots; in it the greasy, dirty Maison
Vauquer contrasted with the splendid boudoir of a Delphine de Nucingen,
the illuminated poverty of a D'Arthez with the vicious luxury of the
Nathans and Finots, the huge _coups_ of a Nucingen with the petty usury
of a Père Samanon, the simplicity of a Cousin Pons with the malignity
of a Cousine Bette. Into this world of feverish movement and poignant
contrasts fits _la Bohème_, lighted by its double facets of fact and
fiction. As the actual Bohemians from Pétrus Borel and Théophile Gautier
to Baudelaire and Murger play their part in the world of fact, so the
fictitious Bohemians from Raphael de Valentin and D'Arthez down to
Rodolphe, Marcel, and Schaunard play theirs in the world of fiction.
They are all part of that pageant which, though it took eighteen years
to pass and declined in bravery towards its close, may conveniently be
called the pageant of 1830.
To disentangle the Bohemian contingent from its accompaniment of press
and bustle is my aim in this book, which was suggested, I may frankly
say, by some meditations on a second reading of Murger's "Scènes de la
Vie de Bohème," a work of perennial delight that deserves a better
acquaintance in England. In spite of the vivid light thrown by Murger on
the life which he is describing, his stories are apt to be misleading
unless read in the light of certain knowledge--knowledge which he could
presume in his contemporaries and which it is the aim of this book, with
all humility, to revive. Murger's little volume, after it has produced
its first flush of pleasure and amusement, raises many disconcerting
questions to a thoughtful reader. The scene it paints, for instance, is
remarkably different from the two sides of literary life depicted in
Balzac's "Illusions Perdues." Neither the brotherhood of the Rue des
Quatre Vents nor the fast set into which Lousteau introduces Lucien are
connected by an obvious link with Rodolphe and his friends. Then there
is the question whether Rastignac in his days at the squalid Maison
Vauquer was in any sense a Bohemian. Or, again, it may be asked how far
fiction agrees with fact. Did Murger himself lead the same kind of life
as a Schaunard or Marcel, and if he did, was the same to be said of
other writers and artists, of Théophile Gautier or Gérard de Nerval? How
did Bohemia arise, and how far was it, as Murger asserts, a necessary
stage in the artistic life? These are some of the obvious inquiries to
which it has been my part to attempt an answer, and I would crave the
reader's indulgence if, at the outset, I seem to shrink from plunging at
once into _la vie de Bohème_. The external details of a way of life
cannot be seen in a true light if the social conditions and, still more,
the state of mind of which it was an expression are not first made
clear. For that reason a little "fringe of history" makes its appearance
and leads to a short consideration of what French writers have called
_le mal romantique_. Nevertheless, I have tried to keep the main subject
always in view, and not to be led away into discussing aspects of the
Romantic period which are not relevant. This is not, I claim with all
deference, a concoction of all the old legends and Romantic love
affairs. George Sand, for instance, and Alfred de Musset only poke
their heads in; Alfred de Vigny and Marie Dorval, Sainte-Beuve and
Madame Hugo play no part. Bohemia alone is our concern, a theme which is
displayed for what it is worth without any distracting embroideries.
If, then--to return to the train of thought with which I began--Bohemia
turns out to be something definite, with a beginning, a development, and
an end, some negative criteria, at all events, will be supplied by which
to judge the applicability of the label "Bohemian" to any set of
conditions existing to-day, and to decide whether the disappearance of
certain special implications and unique circumstances does not drain the
term of all definite meaning except as applied, in retrospect, to the
very persons, manners, and ideas which it originally described. By
analogy from that meaning, there is no harm in saying that there have
always been, and always will be, Bohemian individuals with a Bohemian
state of mind. Richard Steele was a Bohemian; Lamb, perhaps, was a
little too staidly settled at the India House, but his friends, George
Dyer, George Burnett and, above all, Coleridge, were certainly Bohemian
individuals. They were of that ultra-Bohemian type which never grows out
of its Bohemianism, men who remain permanently in what should only be a
"stage" till they pass the age when, as Nestor Roqueplan said, the
"bohémien" risks being confounded with the "filou." Such men as
Coleridge and Dyer would be called eccentrics even in the true Bohemia;
like poor Gérard de Nerval, they were not entirely sane, and the
Bohemian _type_ had essentially perfect sanity. It is for this very
reason that _la Bohème_, at its proper time, could exist, and why before
and after that time it did not exist. Sane young men, no matter what
their fads, fancies, and enthusiasms may be, have no need and no
possibility of making to-day that particular demonstration which
resulted in Bohemia. The social forces drive them in other directions.
It has long been admitted in France that Bohemia is dead, and that it
has been or ever will be revived in England is a delusion resting upon
the unintelligent use of a word. Even young Englishmen, as we now
consider youth, are too old, far too old, to live the life of which they
flatter themselves they are preserving the tradition. The boy who has
submitted to discipline for over a dozen years, learned to honour his
neighbour on the cricket and football field and to respect society as
embodied in the unwritten laws of school life--what has he in common
with the youth in France, a bachelor of letters at eighteen, bursting
with his own individuality, passionate in pursuit of his own ideas,
revelling in his new liberty, dreaming, as only a Frenchman can dream,
of glory and love, who could attach no meaning to such a phrase as
"playing the game," wayward, capricious, uproarious, and completely
unbalanced? Yet it was such who made the traditions of _la vie de
Bohème_. To those who are impelled to break away and lead joyous,
untrammelled young lives of privation and artistic striving all sympathy
is due, but by masquerading under a tattered banner they do not revive
its glory nor increase their own. Paris once had room for Bohemia, but
London never. Chelsea and Soho, Highgate and St. John's Wood are to-day
no more Bohemian, in the true sense of the word, than Piccadilly or
Grosvenor Square. In the lapse of years a few accidental attributes of
the real Bohemia have come to be regarded as the essentials of the
false. We are fond of labels and catchwords, lightly casting away their
implications. So it has come to pass that Bohemia--that dirty, hungry,
lazy, noisy vale of youthful laughter and tears, so enchanting in
prospect or retrospect, so uncompromising in actuality, which many had
to pass through and most would have avoided--is looked on as the
pleasant home of more or less artistic natures, that men of stable
occupations, regular means, and fastidious temperaments may choose for a
dwelling-place, just as they may choose a garden city.
Well, let them masquerade, yet Bohemia is dead, and more honour may be
done to its memory by recalling how it walked and lived than by casting
lots for its old-fashioned garments. Its virtues and its faults were
balanced as equally as its good and bad fortunes, but if it were to be
revived, the resurrection should begin with that which was its chief
glory, the intense artistic enthusiasm that was its charter. "Nous
étions ivres du beau," wrote Théophile Gautier. London, indeed, would be
the better for the infusion of a more Dionysiac spirit into her æsthetic
appreciations and ideals. But that is not of the times. At the end of
his charming book, "Les Enfants Perdus du Romantisme," M. Henri
Lardanchet quotes a speech made by the president of some university
society to the effect that the youth of to-day, preoccupied with
extremely definite problems, has no longer the poetic enthusiasm of the
past generation, whereon he is moved to exclaim:
"Ah! ne vous glorifiez pas de l'avoir chassé, cet enthousiasme! Il
était à la fois la rose et la chanson au bord de vos vingt ans
désolés; il était l'opulence orgueilleuse de votre âge, il était
votre grâce, votre génie, votre fierté, ô jeunesse!--toute votre
jeunesse...."
Let us take this for the epitaph of _La Bohème_.
II
A FRINGE OF HISTORY: THE REVOLUTION OF 1830
In the first chapter of Murger's "Scènes de la Vie de Bohème," Marcel,
the painter, requires his _concierge_, in return for a tip of five
francs, to tell him every morning the day of the week, the date, the
quarter of the moon, the state of the weather, and the form of
government under which they are living. A hasty generalization from this
episode might conclude that the more noteworthy vicissitudes of society,
which we call history, were of singularly small importance to those
concerned with Bohemia. The main current of events, it would seem,
rolled on, leaving the stagnant backwater undisturbed, where, in the
easy garment of "art for art's sake," a few geniuses and many
_dilettanti_ lolled the day through in unpatriotic apathy. Such a
conclusion from Murger's picture of Bohemia is, in fact, inevitable, but
it is a wrong one, and the fault lies only with Murger. The French
people, at any rate the Parisians, are extremely susceptible to the
impressions of passing events, political, artistic, or social. They are
more excitable, as we say, than ourselves. We only become agitated in
response to orders from Fleet Street, whereas they are apt to ferment
spontaneously, their natural liveliness of mind acting as the yeast. It
is this quality of interest in passing events, fostered by their
fondness for discussion, which renders their criticism so trenchant and
their partisanship so ardent. So that we can scarcely believe Bohemia,
eclectic as it was, to have been unmoved or, at least, uninfluenced by
the objects of contemporary comment or debate. For this reason our
picture would be seen in a false light without some reference to
history. Moreover, I have been rash enough to impose upon myself the
limitation of dates, which are dangerous things in themselves, always
requiring justification. I put the classic period of _la vie de Bohème_
between 1830 and 1848, the exact period of Louis Philippe's reign. At
first sight the reign of this _bourgeois_ prince would seem to have
little enough connexion with the florescence and decadence of the very
antitype of _bourgeoisie_, but this is only a further reason for not
neglecting history. The Revolution of 1830 was of the highest importance
for France: it was the inevitable explosion of dissatisfaction, both
political and artistic, with the powers that ruled. What I wish to make
clear is that, whereas before this date Bohemia, if it existed, was but
an unconsidered fringe on the ancient student life of the Quartier
Latin, after 1830 it not only received a population but became a force.
For a few years it was an integral part of the larger Paris, a
considerable element in public opinion and, to some extent, in social
life, a factor that could not be ignored. Disturbance, however, yielded
to peace, and the interests of the public shifted. The living spirit of
Bohemia gradually hardened into a dead tradition. By 1848 independence
and individual liberty, the watchwords of Bohemia, were replaced in the
mind of citizens by thoughts of social reform which culminated in the
Republic of 1848. Art, for the time, fell from her place of glory, and
Bohemia relapsed for ever into obscurity.
The battle of Waterloo seemed to have undone all the good of the
Revolution of 1789. The Bourbons came back to power, with Louis XVIII, a
lazy man, on the throne, and his brother, the Comte d'Artois, leading a
band of ultra-Royalists behind him. The ultra-Royalists, exasperated by
the "hundred days," were breathing fire and slaughter, full of zeal to
destroy the liberty and philosophy of the Revolution and to replace it
with absolutism and priest-rule. Against them was arrayed the party of
"Independents" with Béranger, their poet, and between the two were the
"doctrinaires" or moderate Royalists. The "Ultras," whose violence began
by damaging their own cause, were put into power by the assassination of
the Duc de Berry in 1820, and Villèle was their minister. The succession
of Charles X only strengthened the forces of reaction, till in 1828
Villèle was defeated and gave place to a Liberal, Martignac. But
Martignac's party were not strong enough to support him long, and in
1829 he was succeeded by Polignac and a Royalist ministry. The Liberals
now prepared for stubborn resistance. Societies were formed, with
branches throughout the provinces, which were joined by all shades of
Liberal opinion, and their hero was Lafayette. The blindness of Charles
X precipitated events. Exasperated by the adverse result of the
elections of 1830, he suspended the constitution by his famous
ordinances on July 26. Paris rose at once, and four days later all was
over. Louis of Orleans was in Paris by the 30th, and took the oath as
King in August. This is only a bald statement of facts, but they are
facts that can be seen by the eye of imagination. By 1830 Paris was a
boiling cauldron of passionate enthusiasm. Revolution was aflame once
more. Barricades--the mere word is a trumpet-call to Frenchmen--had been
erected once more in the streets, and once more blood had flowed in
their defence. Paris for years had smouldered with indignation, and now
her young men glowed with triumph. The people should come to its own
again, and they should be its champions. The eyes of France were on
them, and they knew that their comrades in the provinces, intoxicated by
the songs of Béranger, enraged by the petty vexations of Royalist
officials, were envying them their opportunity and eagerly looking for
any chance that would bring them to the city that so nobly stood for
liberty.
The Revolution of 1830 was not only political, it was also artistic, and
the artistic results were really the more permanent. This artistic
revolution is generally known as the Romantic movement, about which so
much has been written that I need not refer to it at length. Just as the
Liberal spirit smouldered for many years against the Royalist
oppression, so the Romantic spirit smouldered against the restraints of
the dead classic tradition of the eighteenth century. The process of
combustion, beginning as it did with Rousseau, was a slow one, and, as
it has been said, Romanticism only potentially existed, as a movement,
before 1820. In that year Victor Hugo founded his journal, the
_Conservateur Littéraire_, gathering round him a brilliant company of
writers. For ten years the movement grew in intensity, fostered by the
institution of _cénacles_ and the only too successful proselytism of
Victor Hugo, who disdained no recruit whom he could by flattery enlist.
It is not too much to say that the youth of all France was fired by the
revolt against classicism in poetry and drama. Every schoolboy wrote
verses and every ardent soul longed to enter the very arena in Paris,
where the _perruques_ of the Institute were so signally defied. Paris
became doubly desirable as the field on which political and artistic
liberty were being won. The triumph came in 1830 with the performance of
"Hernani." That victory of the Romantic army is now a commonplace, but
in 1830 it was magnificently new, and it was, moreover, the public
manifestation of _la Bohème_. The effect of this double excitement was
overwhelming. It literally tore the more intelligent among the young men
of France from the roots of all their attachments and interests. To
establish liberty, to revolutionize literature, these were their dreams,
in comparison with which all ordinary professional prospects seemed
dreary and unworthy. So the year 1830 saw Paris harbouring in her
garrets a host of enthusiasts, most of them very young, burning with
ideals and flushed with apparently glorious victories. They felt
themselves incorporated in one great brotherhood of defiance to
established authority, so that those who mocked their poverty and
lawlessness in the name "Bohemian" were unconsciously justified, for a
corporate name is the sign of a corporate existence. _La Bohème_ in 1830
was not a haphazard collection of _dilettanti_ and artistic eccentrics;
it was a fellowship inspired by similar enthusiasms and bound together
by the struggle against similar misfortunes.
Misfortunes, indeed, were not slow to come. Society is wonderfully quick
to repair the breaches in its walls made by gallant assaulters, and the
heroes who have been foremost in the attack find that their bravely made
passage has closed behind them, and that they are left to be broken and
starved into submission. So it was after 1830. Louis Philippe was at
heart a Royalist who had little understanding of the Revolution. His
great achievement was to keep on his throne for eighteen years by
encouraging the moneyed middle class, thus laying the foundation of
French industrial prosperity. _Enrichissez-vous_ was the order of the
day, an order ironically unsuitable to the reformers of Bohemia. Those
among them whose ideals were political rather than literary became
uncompromising Republicans, formed secret societies, carried on a
violent Press campaign of articles and caricatures against Louis
Philippe and his ministers, and plotted further armed risings in Paris,
the most serious of which was the ill-fated insurrection of the Cloître
Saint-Merri in 1832. They were to find that they had presumed too far
upon their strength. In spite of the Legitimist risings in La Vendée,
labour troubles at Lyons, and disaffection in Paris, Louis Philippe's
government was powerful enough to meet all emergencies. Press laws were
made doubly stringent, secret societies were prohibited, caricatures
were exposed to a censorship, and the police was exceedingly vigilant.
Above all, the _bourgeoisie_ held firm. They were tasting prosperity and
power, and had no desire to let political disturbance interfere with
their enjoyment. Happy were those who could repent of youthful political
excesses and return to comfortable homes and settled careers. Those who
had no refuge but Bohemia came to know the chill of disappointment and
repression. Their bright dreams faded away into grey reality; they found
themselves suspects and outcasts, with the problem of subsistence,
instead of being miraculously solved, only rendered more acute. They had
no outlet for their energies, and those whom neither the barricades nor
the cholera of 1832 carried off saw the fellowship of assault followed
by the isolation of retreat. They drifted away in little bands to join
the societies of social reformers like Saint Simon, Fourier, or Père
Enfantin. Consumption, starvation, and suicide were the ends of many of
them, and their traces gradually faded from Bohemia, which became
identified purely with the lives of its literary and artistic
inhabitants.
The poets and artists of Bohemia survived longer, not only as
individuals, but as a united brotherhood, mainly because artistic
rebellion cannot be put down, as it does not manifest itself, by force,
and also because the campaign in which "Hernani" was the central
engagement really culminated in a lasting victory. For some years after
1830 there was plenty for the young band to do in reducing block-houses
and chasing the persistent critics of the old school, who conducted a
most robust guerilla warfare. Yet hardship and misfortune dogged their
footsteps also. The Romantic victory of 1830 was won by an army; its
spoils were shared by the few leaders--Victor Hugo, Sainte-Beuve, de
Vigny--who, as M. Henri Lardanchet has rather unkindly said,[1] "without
a word of farewell or a motion of gratitude abandoned their army to
famine." To tell the truth, many of the devoted enthusiasts were young
men of mediocre talents at a day when the standard was very high. Verses
were a drug in the market, and he was a lucky man who could earn a few
francs by filling a column or two in a little fashion paper boasting a
few hundred subscribers. Journalism was not yet a commercially
flourishing business, expenses were high, subscribers few, and Press
laws menacing. The starveling poets and dramatists of Bohemia fell upon
lean years, in which the weaker and more utterly destitute were
destroyed by their privations, like Elisa Mercœur and Hégésippe
Moreau. Nevertheless, the Romantics were not crushed out of existence.
The stout hearts of those who held out still beat to a common measure,
and maintained artistic fellowship in an ideal as an essential element
of _la vie de Bohème_.
Bohemia was glorious for a few years after 1830 as it has never been
since because it proclaimed a creed, the creed of Romanticism. It was
glorious then because, with Romanticism, Bohemia was a living force.
Given this connexion, there was some point in the bravado, the
extravagances and conceits of Bohemian life. They were an irregular
army, those young men, and they rejoiced in their irregularity. _Épater
le bourgeois_ was a legitimate war-cry when the _bourgeois_ stood for
all that was reactionary in art. To scare the grocer with a slouch hat
and a medieval oath was not only a youthful ebullition, it was a
symbolic act. The sombrero defied artistic convention as typified in the
top hat; the medieval oath, in its contrast with the paler expletives of
modernity, symbolized the return to life and colour in art after a
century of grey abstraction. It was with the decline of Romanticism that
Bohemia lost its living spirit. Unlike Republicanism, that gathered
unseen strength in failure to blossom for a more worthy generation,
Romanticism lost its vitality through its very success. It may be
likened to some conflux of waters which to force from its way the inert
mass of an obstacle rises to a mighty head: the obstacle is swept away,
and the seething waters resolve themselves into a workaday river humbly
serving the sea. So the Romantic movement has served literature for many
decades now, and it was quietly flowing between the banks before Louis
Philippe lost his throne. Success, it might be said, came to it too
soon, especially as success in that day meant money. The dangers of
Republicanism were staved off for the moment by force; the dangers of
Romanticism were for ever discounted by payment. Authorship was made to
serve a commercial end, and all was over. In 1836 Emile de Girardin
founded _La Presse_, which was sold at a far lower price than any other
paper. The inevitable followed. Circulation went up by leaps and bounds,
contributors were paid respectable prices, expenses were defrayed by the
profits of advertisement, and journalism in France was at once on a
commercial footing, for other papers were not slow to follow.
Literature, from being purely an art, quickly became a trade. The
struggle for a new artistic ideal gave way to the struggle for loaves
and fishes, which is contemporary with mankind. A man's artistic creed
went for nothing, when all the public asked was that he should make
himself conspicuous before they gave him their countenance. Once
artistic success became a matter of royalties it was an easy prey to
_bourgeois_ conditions, which were that art and literature should either
be merely entertaining or point a respectable moral. Only a few
Romantics were proof against this insidious influence. To those
recalcitrants we owe the motto "Art for art's sake."
The effect of this change upon Bohemia is not difficult to imagine. _La
vie de Bohème_ implies youth, so that its generations change as rapidly
as those of a university. The generation of 1830 had either disappeared
or become famous--that is, potentially rich--in a few years. The
struggle which had convulsed all Paris was a thing of the past, and
Romanticism was so far accepted, swallowed, and digested that by 1843
the necessity was felt for reverting to the classical tradition again,
for a change, with the so-called _école de bon sens_. There was no
longer any trumpet-call to which Bohemia could respond as a brotherhood,
as Victor Hugo learned when, on wishing to enlist a fresh army to go
into battle for "Les Burgraves," he was told "il n'y a plus de jeunes
gens." The swaggering heroes of 1830 were now writers of successful
novels and comedies, or safely chained, as critics, to the careers of
remunerative journals. Rebellion was impossible, for there was nothing
to rebel against. Success depended more upon individual enterprise than
common enthusiasm. There was nothing left, therefore, for the new
generations of Bohemia but to fall back upon tradition. If there was no
more certainty in ideals there was at least something definite in slouch
hats and medieval oaths, in defying conventions of dress and accepted
table manners. So the symbols of Romanticism became the realities of
Bohemia after all that they symbolized was as lifeless as a cancelled
bank-note. Further, the population of Bohemia lost that great asset in
life, personal pride. Their predecessors of 1830 were arrogant, no
doubt, but with the arrogance of an advance-guard in a desperate
venture. There was no desperate venture now toward, and advance meant,
not progress, but prosperity. The poorer brethren of art who peopled
Bohemia were now, inasmuch as they were not prosperous, failures. They
had no sense of intellectual achievement to keep up their courage, when
such achievement was measured in gold. It was inevitable that their
_moral_ should be affected; the recklessness, which was formerly that of
bravado, became that of despair, and a less reputable atmosphere grew
up round Bohemia which has never been dispelled from its tradition.
Nevertheless, dead as the spirit was, the tradition of 1830 remained
very strong, being kept alive not only by oral transmission, as all
traditions are, but also by the art of the sturdy few who remained
faithful to the uncompromising standard of disinterestedness in art
which it implied. Gautier, Flaubert, Baudelaire, the de Goncourts, and a
few others stood out unflinchingly against commercialism on the one hand
and prosy doctrinairism on the other. Their struggle was not wholly
effectual, but, so far as Bohemia is concerned, was important. After
1848, when everything had to have a social "purpose" and art for its own
sake seemed dead, they sat down, like the Psalmist, by the rivers of
Babylon and remembered Zion. From their regrets the legend of _la sainte
Bohème_ arose idealized and purified, and it was made immortal in pages
of prose by Gautier and in de Banville's "Ballade de ses regrets pour
l'an 1830." This legend, tinged as it already was with sentiment, spread
to the public, by whom it was resentimentalized, a fact of which other
authors, Murger included, were not slow to take advantage.
"Ils savaient tirer parti des ressemblances réelles entre la vie de
Bohème et la vie de l'étudiant bourgeois au 'Pays latin' pour
établir une confusion avantageuse, confusion qui est déjà manifeste
dans les 'Scènes de la Vie de Bohème.' Chanter ainsi la Bohème
c'était un peu chanter la jeunesse bourgeoise."[2]
If this be true, then Bohemia after 1848, when the public interest was
purely absorbed in Socialistic reforms, lapsed once more into being a
mere fringe on the student life, and, as such, equally negligible. Its
classic days were over, never to return, for the society of Paris grew
too large to be again convulsed by a purely artistic conflict. The
leaders of the new _Parnasse_ made a considerable sensation, but they
founded, not a new Bohemia, but only another _cénacle_. History
establishes the florescence and decline of the classic _vie de Bohème_
beyond much doubt, for it went with the florescence and decline of a
common spirit.
III
LE MAL DU SIÈCLE
I have identified the classic period of Bohemia with the time of the
Romantic victory. It was not then lighted by dim lanterns hung outside
the door of every artistic idiosyncrasy, but reflected flamboyantly a
general state of mind. I disclaim once for all the intention of adding
another to the many studies of the Romantic movement, but in my aim of
explaining the living reality out of which grew the tradition of _la vie
de Bohème_ I am compelled to dwell upon the turgid mental content of the
early nineteenth century. The eccentricities of Bohemia were then but
slight exaggerations of a universal spiritual ferment, though, after the
good wine was made, a later and decadent Bohemia artificially reproduced
the symptoms of a process that was formerly natural and necessary. _Le
mal romantique_, _le mal du siècle_, are common phrases upon the lips of
French critics, who to-day affect to treat with contempt what was, after
all, a new Renaissance. Without adopting their attitude, it must be
admitted that, inestimable as were its results, it was an alarming
convulsion. The English took it in a milder and earlier form. Its most
extreme manifestation, Byron and the "Satanic" school, was a thing of
the past before 1830. But the French were thoroughly and virulently
affected, and exhibited all the most violent symptoms.
We may best begin, perhaps, by looking at a particular "subject," to use
a medical phrase, in the correspondence of J.-J. Ampère, son of the
great scientist. The younger Ampère, after a violent adoration of Madame
Récamier, who was old enough to be his mother, settled down into a most
respectable and successful man of letters, and he was never in any sense
a Bohemian. He was a well-educated and perfectly normal man, so that the
ravages of _le mal du siècle_ may be well judged when he writes to his
friend, Jules Bastide, in 1820:
"My dear Jules, last week the feeling of malediction was upon me,
round me, within me. I owe this to Lord Byron; I read through twice
at a sitting the English 'Manfred.' Never, never in my life has
anything I have read overwhelmed me as that did; it has made me
ill. On Sunday I went to see the sunset upon the Place de
l'Esplanade; it was as threatening as the fires of hell. I went
into the church, where the faithful were peacefully chanting the
Hallelujah of the Resurrection. Leaning against a column, I looked
at them with disdain and envy."
Two months later Jules Bastide delivered his soul in a similar strain:
"I feel that the slightest emotions might send me mad or kill me.
The evening of our parting I opened at random a volume of Madame
de Staël and read the dream of Jean Paul. When I came to that
terrible line, 'Christ, nous n'avons point de père,' a shudder
seized me. An hour later I had a fever; it lasted a fortnight."
Another friend wrote to Ampère in 1824:
"All my ideas turn towards Africa.... Is it solitude that I seek in
Africa? Yes, but it is not only that; it is the desert, the
palm-tree, the musk-rose, the Arab! A romanesque and _barbaresque_
future is what ravishes me."
In 1825 Ampère, then twenty-five years old, wrote to Madame Récamier:
"Return, for my life is no longer tolerable without you; my spirit
is wholly employed in trying to _support_ the emptiness of my
days."
In these delirious passages are contained the most marked symptoms of
the time, the satanic gloom that drew its inspiration from Byron, the
nervous sensibility imitated from the heroes of Madame de Staël,
Châteaubriand, and Sénancour, and the longing for a life of Oriental
colour which found a later expression in Victor Hugo's poems. However,
it would be unfair to put down this spiritual _bouleversement_ to the
influence of "René," "Obermann," "Werther's Leiden," or "Manfred." They
became, indeed, the breviaries of the afflicted, but the cause of the
affliction lay deeper in the reaction of the French nation after the
Napoleonic wars. Napoleon's victorious campaigns drained France of its
best blood and its best energies, leaving an inheritance of anæmia and
neurasthenia to the next generation, without diminishing that feverish
desire for glory, that determination to work one's will upon a passive
world, which was the spirit of Napoleon's armies. Older and more settled
people were content to reap the rewards of peace, but the young men,
exalted by the exploits of their fathers, looked in vain for some
channel in which to discharge their superfluous electricity. Under the
restored Bourbons there was none. The fathers had had free play upon
historic battlefields, the sons were cribbed and confined in the narrow
bounds of everyday life. Moreover, the revolutionary wars had revealed
vast, unexplored pastures to the French mind. New countries, languages,
and literatures were brought into its view. The gorgeous East, in
particular, seized upon the French imagination. The desert was vast and
untrodden, the Arab was dignified and free, and under unclouded skies
the primitive nobility of mankind revealed itself in splendour and
space.
Here, then, is the root of _le mal du siècle_ from which the divers
symptoms sprang. Of these, perhaps, the most marked and most general was
an exaggerated sensibility, a kind of melancholy madness. Young Henri
Dubois, who at any other epoch would have been content to learn his
trade behind the counter of Dubois and Dupont, cloth merchants, and to
settle down into a peaceful home with Mademoiselle Dupont, now plied
the yard measure with disgust and yearned for an existence more worthy
of his "complicated state of mind." He was a perfect magazine of pent-up
emotions, ready to expire in a delirium of joy or an ecstasy of despair
after the manner of René and Werther. He was quite willing to love
Mademoiselle Dupont on the condition that she would lend herself to a
tempestuous passion, allow her hands to be bathed in tears for hours
together by her prostrate cavalier, receive folios of hysterical ravings
by the post, and dread the fatal dagger if she had smiled from her desk
at a customer. She was urged daily to fly to a brighter destiny upon
distant shores, and nightly trembled that the coming morning would find
Henri transfixed by his own poniard. It was impossible to be reasonable;
only a clod, dead to all beauty, could be so brutal. M. Louis Maigron,
who in his book, "Le Romantisme et les Mœurs," gives some very
remarkable instances of these aberrations in actual correspondence, says
very truly: "Une foule de 'cratères' ont alors superbement fumé au nez
des bourgeois." The Romantic ideal supposed a sensibility always
stretched to its utmost, _des âmes excessives_, as M. Bourget says,[3]
capable of constant renewal, and a consumption of emotional energy which
is irreconcilable with the laws of any organism. If a young man failed
for a moment to find food for melancholy broodings in the shortcomings
of society, he could always fall back for a good groan upon his own
insufficiencies of sensibility. Now, of course, the "feelings of
malediction" which afflicted the Henri Dubois are of small moment in
themselves. Time comfortably settled them down. It was the young men of
real sensibility and imagination, the coming poets and artists, in whom
the ravages of _le mal du siècle_ were more than a passing phase. The
boundless yearnings that found expression in such lines as these:
_Amour, enthousiasme, étude, poésie!_
_C'est là qu'en votre extase, océan d'ambroisie_
_Se noîraient nos âmes de feu!_
_C'est là que je saurais, fort d'un génie étrange,_
_Dans la création d'un bonheur sans mélange_
_Être plus artiste que Dieu_[4]--
could not but lead to a profound dissatisfaction with existence, which
Maxime du Camp in his reminiscences very happily describes:
"It was not only a fashion [he says], as might be believed; it was
a kind of general prostration which made our hearts sad, darkened
our thoughts, and caused us to see a deliverance in the glimpse of
death. You would have thought that life held in chains souls that
had caught sight of something superior to terrestrial existence. We
did not aspire to the felicities of paradise: we dreamed of taking
possession of the infinite, and we were tortured by a vague
pantheism of which the formula was never found.... The artistic and
literary generation which preceded me and that to which I belonged
had a youth of lamentable sadness, sadness without cause and
without object, abstract sadness, inherent in the individual or in
the period....
"Nobody was allowed to be without an _âme incomprise_; it was the
custom and we conformed to it. We were 'fatal' and 'accursed';
without even having tasted life, we tumbled to the bottom of the
abyss of disillusionment. Children of eighteen years, repeating
phrases gathered from some novel or other, would say: 'J'ai le
cœur usé comme l'escalier d'une fille de joie,' and one of
Pétrus Borel's heroes went to the executioner to say to him: 'I
should like you to guillotine me!' This did not prevent us from
laughing, singing, or committing the honest follies of youth; that
was also a way of being desperate; we imagined that we had a
satanic laugh, while we really possessed the fair joy of spring."
These exquisite sensibilities, when they were not turned back upon
themselves in black despair, roamed far and wide in search of new
sensations upon which to exercise themselves. This _exotisme_, as the
French have called it, is another of the most marked symptoms of
Romanticism. The time was ripe for its satisfaction. The French mind,
shut for so long in the formalism of the eighteenth century, now found
that there were innumerable new ways to _rêver la rêve de la vie_. The
men of learning who followed in Napoleon's wake renewed the interest in
archæology by their discoveries; the historical novels of Scott and the
history of Michelet revealed the full and generous life of earlier ages;
the forged poems of Ossian caused a perfect rage for Celtic mysticism;
and the bold lawless life of the East, with its tyrannous Ali Pashas and
its Greek patriots, shone out with a new splendour. An unsatisfied
longing for another age and another clime animated every young breast.
Societies even were formed in provincial towns in which subscriptions
were pooled, and the winner of the lucky number drew the money to take a
voyage in Italy. The glories of Greece and the grandeurs of Rome, as
savouring of the classical, appealed only to a few; other eclectics fed
upon German mysticism and the fantastic weirdness of Hoffmann's
supernatural tales. A far greater number became Celts in imagination;
dressed in the dignity of outlawry and the garb of an Irish bard or a
Scotch chieftain, they defied the haughty English. Maxime du Camp, for
instance, wrote a poem in his school-days called "Wistibrock
l'Irlandais." "When I am depressed," he says in his reminiscences, "I
read it again, and there is no vexation that resists it." Anybody who
wishes to gain some idea of the _genre frénétique_, as Nodier called it,
in its Celtic dress will derive considerable entertainment from Pétrus
Borel's "Madame Putiphar." It is full of murders and intrigues and
tirades which foam at the mouth. The hero, Patrick FitzWhyte, falls in
love with Deborah Cockermouth, daughter of Lord and Lady Cockermouth,
the opening dialogue of whom upon the battlements is magnificent. My
lord, who is described as "one of those gigantic fungous and spongy
zoophytes indigenous to Great Britain," permits himself to address my
lady as "Saint-hearted milk soup!" After a good deal of clandestine
philandering and interminable translations of imaginary Irish ballads
the young couple elope to Paris, where Madame Putiphar (Madame de
Pompadour) seduces the heroine, and the hero after a series of dreadful
adventures is imprisoned in a loathsome dungeon in the Bastille, the
taking of which by the people of Paris is described with quite
astonishing force.
[Illustration: The Spirit of Romanticism]
Wild adventures, horrors and tragedies in any age were fondly dwelt upon
in comparison with the insupportable monotony of contemporary life; but
the Middle Ages made a stronger appeal than any. There was a perfect
mania for medievalism. Nothing pleased overwrought imaginations more
than to picture existence amid all the riot and magnificence of those
more spacious days. How they would have rattled a sword and clanked a
spur, how defiantly tilted their plume, how breathlessly loved and how
destructively fought! Why did they not live in the joyous time when
every minute brought an adventure instead of spilling one more drop from
the cup of _ennui_, and when a man shaped his own ends according to his
passions, throwing a curse to the poor and a madrigal to the fair? Then,
all their life was not grey. Splendour of colour with ample grace of
form decked out existence like a picture by Veronese. Costly satin vied
with magnificent brocade; all was a riot of velvet and purple dyes, fur
and old lace; drinking cups, worthy of giants, chiselled by a Cellini,
offered wine worthy of the gods; swords were masterpieces of the finest
Toledo; jewelled harness caparisoned fleet Arab horses; feasts were
Gargantuan, jests more than Rabelaisian; and all this wonderful wealth
of glittering colour was thrown into magnificent relief against the
solemnity of antique battlements and the sombre shadows of Gothic
architecture. This, apart from all innovations of dramatic form, was the
secret of the delirious popularity of "Hernani," "Lucrèce Borgia," "Le
Roi s'amuse," and the "Tour de Nesle," and of the craze for historical
novels, verses in baroque metres, slouch hats _à la Buridan_, velvet
pourpoints, daggers, mysterious draperies and massive chests, drinking
cups made out of skulls, and illuminated breviaries of which Gautier
makes such fun in "Les Jeunes France." To it we owe Balzac's splendid
"Contes Drolatiques," Lassailly's "Roueries de Trialph," and Roger de
Beauvoir's "L'Écolier de Cluny." Gautier in his early poems was as
romanesque as any of his "Jeune France," as those who know his early
poems must admit. "Débauche" is a frank orgy, and "Albertus" is a gem of
the Gothic, with its supernatural setting, the "fatality" of its hero,
the horror of its _dénouement_, the wild fantasy of its witches'
chamber, and its amorous wealth of descriptive detail in which old
fabrics, old furniture, swords, daggers, and hangings abound. Victor
Hugo, above all, was the chosen bard of the Gothic and the romanesque.
Besides his dramas, his "Odes et Ballades" were in the mouth of every
child who could pay four halfpence for an hour's luxury in the _cabinet
de lecture_; and schoolboys would declaim for hours in antiphon such
passages as the invocation of "La Bande Noire":
_O murs! ô créneaux! ô tourelles!_
_Remparts! fossés aux ponts mouvants!_
_Lourds faisceaux de colonnes frêles!_
_Fiers châteaux! modestes couvents!_
_Cloîtres poudreux, salles antiques,_
_Où gémissaient les saints cantiques,_
_Où riaient les rires joyeux!_
_Églises où priaient nos mères,_
_Tours où combattaient nos aïeux!_
or the frenzied descriptions of the witches' dance in "La Ronde du
Sabbat," or lines from "La Chasse du Burgrave"--which even Hugo called
"un peu trop Gothique de forme"--or with a
_Çà, qu'on selle,_
_Ecuyer,_
_Mon fidèle_
_Destrier._
_Mon cœur ploie_
_Sous la joie_
_Quand je broie_
_L'étrier_
proclaimed their attendance at the "Pas d'Armes du Roi Jean."
The star of the Gothic and the medieval was indeed high in the heavens,
but it paled before the full sun of Araby and the East. Napoleon had
dreamed of a Mohammedan empire, and before his dream could fade Navarino
and Missolonghi fired men's minds again. Victor Hugo was also the
champion of Oriental rhapsody. Even in 1824 he had seen the
possibilities of Oriental colour in French verse, when he wrote "La Fée
et la Péri," a poem in which the Peri, who stands for romanticism, says:
_J'ai de vastes cités qu'en tous lieux on admire,_
_Lahore aux champs fleuris, Golconde, Cachemire,_
_La guerrière Damas, la royale Ispahan,_
_Bagdad que ses remparts couvrent comme une armure,_
_Alep dont l'immense murmure_
_Semble au pâtre lointain le bruit d'un océan._
His collection of poems entitled "Les Orientales" was published in 1829
and took Paris by storm, provoking passionate enthusiasm and equally
passionate protest. In the preface he asserts that Orientalism is a
general preoccupation. "The colours of the East have come, as if
spontaneously, to impress themselves upon all his [the poet's] thoughts
and all his musings; his musings and his thoughts have become, in turn,
and almost without his willing it, Hebrew, Turkish, Greek, Persian,
Arabic, even Spanish, for Spain, too, is the East." There are fine poems
in "Les Orientales"--"Les Djinns," for instance, will always be
famous--but it is impossible to read the volume through to-day without
considerable amusement, so very full-blooded are they. There are lofty
apostrophes to Byron and the Greeks, followed by dreadful tales of
Turkish cruelty, gruesome ballads like "La Voile," in which four
brothers kill their sister, epigraphs like "O horror! horror! horror!"
valiant Klephtes, houris, scimitars, and all the catalogue which the
poet himself gives in "Novembre":
_Sultans et sultanes,_
_Pyramides, palmiers, galères capitanes,_
_Et le tigre vorace et le chameau frugal;_
_Djinns au vol furieux, danses des bayadères,_
_L'Arabe qui se penche au cou des dromadaires,_
_Et la fauve girafe au galop inégale._
_Alors éléphants blancs chargés de femmes brunes,_
_Cités aux dômes d'or où les mois sont des lunes,_
_Imams de Mahomet, mages, prêtres de Bel ..._
Then, as if Victor Hugo did not whip the passions enough, Alfred de
Musset lent a hand in the hurly-burly with his "Contes d'Espagne et
d'Italie," which made the young maniacs frantically demand:
_Avez-vous vu dans Barcelone_
_Une Andalouse au sein bruni?_
_Pâle comme un beau soir d'automne!_
_C'est ma maîtresse, ma lionne!_
_La marquesa d'Amaëgui._
Delacroix, too, was sending the critics into ecstasies of rage with his
vivid Eastern scenes and the horrors of his "Massacre of Scio." The
ideas of the young men with inflamed sensibilities seethed in turbulent
disorder. To be in the movement they had to have at least a poniard and
a narghile, a medieval cloak and an Oriental divan. Those with money to
spare decorated their rooms like sombre Gothic manors, those with no
money enriched their conversations with a wealth of medieval diction. No
make-believe was too ridiculous to shut out the actual place and time in
which they lived. Balzac's novel "La Peau de Chagrin," which has won a
celebrity far beyond its merits, is most unmistakably marked with the
frenzies of 1830. His revelling in the supernatural, the massed effects
of careful detail in the description of the curiosity shop where the
wild-ass skin hangs, the wild riot of the orgy, the terrific excesses in
which Valentin ruins his life, the duel and the horrible end, are just
as much the _genre frénétique_ as anything by Pétrus Borel. The hero,
Valentin, is simply a type of his time, and his tirade on taking the
supernatural skin is hardly an exaggeration:
"Je veux que la débauche en délire et rugissante nous emporte, dans
son char à quatre chevaux, par delà les bornes du monde, pour nous
verser sur des plages inconnues! Que les âmes montent dans les
cieux ou se plongent dans la boue, je ne sais si alors elles
s'élèvent ou s'abaissent, peu m'importe! Donc, je commande à ce
pouvoir sinistre de me fondre toutes les joies dans une joie. Oui,
j'ai besoin d'embrasser les plaisirs du ciel et de la terre dans
une dernière étreinte, pour en mourir. Aussi souhaité-je et des
priapées antiques après boire, et des chants à réveiller les morts,
et de triples baisers, des baisers sans fin dont la clameur passe
sur Paris comme un craquement d'incendie, y réveille les époux et
les inspire une ardeur cuisante qui les rajeunissent tous, même les
septuagénaires!"
As for the "orgy," it was so much a fashion that Gautier in his "Les
Jeune France" scores a delightful hit with the story of a society of
young men who combine for a colossal feast, in which various sections
follow out in exact detail the descriptions of orgies given by their
favourite novelists and the end is a farcical confusion.
Building castles in Spain is a fascinating pastime, but the ingenuities
of imagination cannot entirely shut out the individual from his
surroundings. From 1820 to 1830 the young man of France was continually
running against the sharp corners of the world and receiving the elbow
prods of his fellow-men. Exalted by his excited sensibility, he
conceived at once a contempt and a hatred for the insensibility of
society, which produced in him a feeling of moral superiority and
solitude. This abnormal vanity, shown in the deification of "l'homme
supérieur" and a proud contemplation of his social outlawry, is a third
marked symptom of _le mal du siècle_.[5] It broke out in several
different forms. One was a romantic worship of energy and strong will,
as typified by the career of Napoleon. Given these qualities, a man
could rise from the lowest depths to impose his wishes on the world.
However, self-styled supermen have invariably found their theories
rebellious to practical application, and Henri Dubois, if he started
upon a Napoleonic path, soon discovered that society selects its "homme
supérieur" when it wants him, and that uncalled-for aspirants receive
the point of its toe. He reserved his superiority, therefore, more
usually, for less material manifestations and conflicts. His rare
spirit, susceptible to all "the finer shades," stood mournfully but
prudently on high, scorning the base, unfeeling throng below it, and
calling out through space for kindred spirits to cherish. "My friend,
take care of yourself," writes young Ampère to his friend. "Obermann
cries to us, 'Keep close together, ye simple men who feel the beauty of
natural things.' Let us help one another, all of us who suffer." So
Henri Dubois and his friends suffered and helped one another, shedding
pints of tears and being just as ridiculous as they could be.
Solitary suffering makes men philosophers or poets. Philosophy requiring
some intellectual capacity and mental preparation, Henri Dubois often
took the further step from crying in the wilderness to enshrining his
laments in metre, being encouraged in this by the certain fact that
young men and true poets were indeed striking the Romantic harp to a new
and surprising tune. The poet was the real "homme supérieur" of the
time, not only in fancy but in fact. Henri accordingly proceeded another
stage towards sublimity by way of the faulty syllogism: "The poet has an
exquisite soul; I have an exquisite soul; therefore I am a poet." The
Romantics conceived the poet as a God-sent prophet. This was the
attitude, above all, of de Vigny; Lamartine and Sainte-Beuve adopted it
in their early days, and certain passages of Victor Hugo--for instance:
_O poètes sacrés, échevelés, sublimes,_
_Allez, et répandez vos âmes sur les cimes,_
_Sur les sommets de neige en butte aux aquilons,_
_Sur les déserts pieux où l'esprit se recueille,_
_Sur les bois que l'automne emporte feuille à feuille,_
_Sur les lacs endormis dans l'ombre des vallons!_
--show that he was not averse to it. So every youth who could rhyme
"âme" with "flamme" put on the aureole of a "poète échevelé," revelled
in the ecstasies of solitary contemplation, and sneered magnificently at
all who attended to business as soulless _épiciers_. This was a harmless
enough delusion, but it became less harmless when combined with the idea
that for the sake of experience the poet should abandon himself entirely
to his passions. The great artist, indeed, has his own morality, but
Victor Hugo's "Mazeppa" or Lamartine's stanza
_Mais nous, pour embraser les âmes,_
_Il faut brûler, il faut ravir_
_Au ciel jaloux ses triples flammes:_
_Pour tout peindre, il faut tout sentir._
_Foyers brûlants de la lumière,_
_Nos cœurs de la nature entière_
_Doivent concentrer les rayons,_
_Et l'on accuse notre vie!_
_Mais ce flambeau qu'on nous envie_
_S'allume au feu des passions_
were dangerous matchboxes in the hands of children. It was a fatality,
too, that several poets of some merit died during these years of want or
neglect. Gilbert, the satirist, expired in hospital, breathing piteous
plaints, and Hégésippe Moreau, the poet of "La Voulzie," was equally
unfortunate. Society can hardly be blamed for not supporting all its
lyrically inclined members, but it was natural that the "poète échevelé"
should smoulder with indignation at such disasters, and cheer the
sentiments of de Vigny's drama "Chatterton" till his lungs gave out. It
was still more of a fatality that certain other poets attained a
momentary celebrity by committing suicide, leaving rhymed farewells to a
stony-hearted society and a tedious life. To win fame by a pathetic
death in a pauper's hospital, or to bid defiance to the world with a
superb gesture of self-destruction, was a far too common ambition.
Sainte-Beuve himself observed that "la manie et la gageure de tous les
René, de tous les Chatterton de notre temps, c'était d'être grand poète
et de mourir." A perfect epidemic of suicide was due to _le mal du
siècle_, as M. Louis Maigron shows in his work that I have already
cited. Among other strange stories he gives at length the confession of
an old man who in his youth was president of a suicide club, formed in a
provincial town by a set of romantic schoolboys as late as 1846. Happily
the club was short-lived, but it resulted in the self-destruction of one
of its most gifted members. In the letter with which he announced his
coming death from Lucerne he wrote:
" ...I have no precise reason to have done with life except the
insurmountable disgust with which it inspires me. Chance of birth
gave me a certain fortune; I am not denied an intelligence perhaps
slightly above the common level; it would have been in my power to
marry an adorable child: so many conditions of happiness, in the
eyes of the vulgar. But my poor soul, alas, cannot content itself
with them. Nothing can charm my heart any longer, 'mon cœur
lassé de tout, même de l'espérance'; it will be closed, without
ever having been opened."
He left his little library to the club, specially reserving for the
president "Werther," "René," "Obermann," "Jacques," and the works of
Rabbe. They were his breviaries, he said, covered as they were with
notes that revealed all his soul.
The pose of pathetic despair was not, however, the only one in which the
feeling of moral solitude showed itself. Another very common attitude
was that of revolt against society, an aping of Mephistopheles, the
fallen angel doomed to everlasting unhappiness, strong only in his
disillusionment and his clear vision of the canker in the heart of every
bud. The word "satanism" summed up this attitude: its breviaries were
"Manfred" and Dumas' violent tragedy, "Antony." It rejoiced in the cult
of the horrible, in Hoffmannesque dabblings in the supernatural, in
pessimistic poetry like Gautier's "Tête de Mort," and such lines in his
early sonnets as:
_Mais toute cette joie est comme le lierre_
_Qui d'une vieille tour, guirlande irregulière,_
_Embrasse en les cachant les pans démantelés,_
_Au dehors on ne voit que riante verdure,_
_Au dedans, que poussière infecte et noire ordure,_
_Et qu'ossements jaunis aux décombres mêlés._
Its effects, in society, were chiefly obtained by the satanic laugh.
Gautier soon grew out of his satanic mood, Dumas was never anything more
than a fine romancer, while Victor Hugo, Lamartine, and de Vigny were
too lofty poets to indulge in such artificialities; but satanism
deserves mention because it was a traditional business with one party in
the romantic Bohemia--the party of the _Bousingots_.
[Illustration: Bousingots]
The origin of the term _Bousingot_ has been a matter of dispute among
French writers. Philibert Audebrand in his memoir of Léon Gozlan says it
was invented by that brilliant journalist to satirize the young
republican enthusiasts of 1832 in the _Figaro_. Charles Asselineau in
his "Bibliographie Romantique" says that after some hilarious souls had
been arrested for singing too loudly in the streets "Nous avons fait du
bousingo"--_bousingo_ being the slang for "noise"--it became a popular
designation for the more furious Romantics. The matter seems to be
settled more or less in Asselineau's manner by a passage in the letter
written by Philothée O'Neddy to Asselineau after the publication of the
"Bibliographie Romantique" to give a more correct account of the second
_cénacle_. He asserts that there never were any self-styled
_Bousingots_, but that after the arrest of the hilarious revellers the
affair got into the newspapers and the term remained as a _bourgeois_
hit at the Romantics. The proper spelling of the word was _bouzingo_,
and Gautier exclaimed one day: "These asses of _bourgeois_ don't even
know how _bouzingo_ is spelt! To teach them a little orthography several
of us ought to publish a volume of stories which we will bravely call
'Contes du Bouzingo.'" The suggestion was thought a happy one, and the
book was even advertised as imminent, but it was never written.
Gautier's promise of a contribution was afterwards redeemed in "Le
Capitaine Fracasse," but Jules Vabre's famous treatise "Sur
l'incommodité des commodes" did not progress beyond the title. In common
parlance, however, the name remained _Bousingots_, and its general
meaning was quite clear. Just as the Gothic frenzy made the party of
_Jeune-France_, who were the Christian-Royalist section of the
Romantics, so the political agitation, combined with the feeling of
antagonism to society, made the _Bousingots_. The meaning became
subsequently enlarged to express all the extravagances of the Romantics,
their idealization of the artist and their disorderly ways; but this
extension was illegitimate. Literature and poetry were, it is true, the
preoccupation of the more prominent _Bousingots_, but their distinctive
mark was a profession of ultra-democratic views and manners. The leader
of them all was the mysterious Pétrus Borel,[6] whom I have already
mentioned as the author of "Madame Putiphar." His other chief work was a
volume of poems entitled "Rhapsodies." The young men of 1830 worshipped
him as the coming champion before whom the star of Victor Hugo was
ingloriously to wane. They were grievously disappointed. After the first
crisis of _le mal du siècle_ his inspiration faded away, and he died an
obscure officiai in Algeria. Baudelaire, in "L'Art Romantique," says of
him:
"Without Pétrus Borel, there would have been a lacuna in
Romanticism. In the first phase of our literary revolution the
poet's imagination turned especially to the past.... Later on its
melancholy took a more decided, more savage, and more earthy tone.
A misanthropical republicanism allied itself with the new school,
and Pétrus Borel was the most extravagant and paradoxical
expression of the spirit of the _Bousingots_.... This spirit, both
literary and republican, as opposed to the democratic and bourgeois
passion which subsequently oppressed us so cruelly, was moved both
by an aristocratic hate, without limit, without restriction,
without pity, for kings and the bourgeoisie, and by a general
sympathy for all that in art represented excess in colour and form,
for all that was at once intense, pessimistic, and Byronic; it was
dilettantism of a singular nature, only to be explained by the
hateful circumstances in which our bored and turbulent youth was
enclosed. If the Restoration had regularly developed in glory,
Romanticism would have never separated from the throne; and this
new sect, which professed an equal disdain for the moderate party
of the political opposition, for the painting of Delaroche or the
poetry of Delavigne, and for the king who presided over the
development of le _juste-milieu_, would have had no reason for
existing."
Charles Asselineau fills up the picture. The _Bousingot_, he says, was
as rough and cynical as the _Jeune-France_ was dandified and exquisite,
and showed genius in discovering at once the _plastique_ of his idea. In
contrast to the extravagant luxury affected by the medievalists, he
adopted the manners of the people in habits and dress, smoking clay
pipes and drinking the "petit bleu" of low pot-houses. Instead of raving
about cathedrals, he spent his ingenuity in devising bitter satires
against the king and his officers or fresh settings in caricature for
Louis' famous _tête de poire_. "The fusillade of St.-Merry and the laws
of September were the _Bousingot's_ Waterloo. From the moment he was
forbidden to protest in a visible manner, and was deprived of his
insignia, his waistcoat, his stick, and his pipe with a pear-shaped
bowl, the _Bousingot_ had to retire. He became serious, an economist or
a humanitarian philosopher, and showed his revolt against society and
power by writing novels 'in which the idea predominated over the form.'
The novel with a tendency, that literary monstrosity, is the only legacy
left by the _Bousingot_ to the literature of the nineteenth century."[7]
In Balzac's wonderful gallery of portraits there is a picture of a
_Bousingot_. Raoul Nathan, the author, appears frequently in his
Parisian scenes, but his outlines are only elaborated in the little-read
"Une Fille d'Eve." There was something great and fantastic in his
appearance, as if he had fought with angels or demons. He was strongly
built, with a pocked face and a tanned complexion. His long hair was
always untidy, but his eyes were Napoleonic and his mouth charming. His
clothes always looked old and worn, his cravat was askew, his long,
pointed beard untended. The grease from his hair stained his
coat-collar, and he never used a nail-brush. His movements were
grotesque, his conversation caustic and full of surprises. His talent,
great but disorderly, had shown itself in three novels and a book of
poetry: he was critic, dramatist, vaudevillist. Jealous ambition led him
to embrace politics. Beginning at the extreme of opposition, he went
from Saint Simonism to republicanism and through all the stages to
ministerialism, being rewarded by a government appointment.
"Nathan offre un image de la jeunesse littéraire d'aujourd'hui, de
ses fausses grandeurs et de ses misères réelles; il la représente
avec ses beautés incorrectes et ses chutes profondes, sa vie à
cascades bouillonnantes, à revers soudains, à triomphes inespérés.
C'est bien l'enfant de ce siècle dévoré de jalousie ... qui veut la
fortune sans le travail, la gloire sans le talent et le succès sans
peine, mais qu'après bien des rébellions, bien des escarmouches,
ses vices amènent à émarger le budget sous le bon plaisir du
Pouvoir."
Balzac, we all know, was a little too ready to believe in the depravity
of human nature, particularly when men of letters were in question.
Moreover, he was profoundly antagonistic to the creed of the
_Bousingots_. His portrait of Nathan is distinctly ill-natured, but it
bears out the profound remark of Baudelaire, that if the Restoration had
developed in glory Romanticism would never have separated from it. In
another extravagant tirade (in "Béatrix") Balzac complains that the
Revolution of 1830 opened the flood-gates of petty ambition, and the
result of modern "equality" was that everybody did his utmost to become
conspicuous. This complaint was very largely true, but as far as the
_Bousingots_ are concerned Baudelaire puts the facts in a truer light.
The policy of _juste-milieu_ inevitably caused revolt among the
over-excited young men of the day. The _Bousingots_ were part of this
revolt, but the best of them had no thought of self-advancement. On the
contrary, the testimony of contemporaries goes to show that the saving
virtue of the Romantic Bohemia, _Bousingot_ and _Jeune-France_ alike,
was disinterestedness. Baudelaire says in extenuation of Pétrus Borel
himself: "He loved letters ferociously, and to-day we are encumbered
with pretty, supple writers ready to sell the muse for the potter's
field." Asselineau avers that if there was much of the ridiculous in
their excesses, there was nothing sordid. "They never talked of money,
or business, or position." The artist Jean Gigoux,[8] in regretting the
past, says that the _rapin_ of his later years, if better dressed, knew
less than those of his young days, and was greedy of honours and money,
things which the _rapins_ of old sincerely despised. Indeed, it is
impossible to read much about the Romantics of 1830, high or low,
aristocratic or Bohemian, without coming to the conclusion that they
were neither jealous nor mercenary. So the _Bousingots_--though some
rolled their eyes and knitted their brows "as if they would bully the
whole universe," others "fixed their dark glances on the ground in
fearful meditation," others, "gloomily leaning against a statue or
tree," threw "such terrific meaning into their looks as might be
naturally interpreted into the language of the witches in
'Macbeth'"[9]--did these things in all sincerity, with an ambition, not
to "get on," but to "do something."
We cannot, then, judge the classic _vie de Bohème_ in a true light
without taking into account this _mal du siècle_ which with its various
symptoms infected the greater part, certainly the more intelligent part,
of the younger generation. Many outlived the fever and smiled at its
remembrance; but at its height it was powerful. It was a healthy fever
in so far as it implied devotion to an ideal, _the_ ideal of true art,
which was then born again. Moreover, the ideal consumed in its fire many
pettinesses of the artistic soul, the commercialism of some, the haughty
vanity of others. Balzac's Lucien de Rubempré was not a true son of 1830
when he sold his independence to corrupt journalism, and Victor Hugo was
not only intriguing when he intoxicated young poets by flattering
letters. There was a true fellowship of art such as has not existed
since. The poet or artist whose name was in everyone's mouth did not for
that reason deny his friendship to one who had never published a line
or exhibited a picture. If a man had talent he was greeted as brother by
all his fellow-craftsmen, high or low. This common brotherhood inspired
by one ideal of art suffused and welded together Bohemia with a radiant
heat. Only when the radiance became dim did the mass grow cold and
crumble in pieces which retained but the semblance of a spark. Bohemia,
to change the metaphor, was not then a block of model dwellings, with
nothing in common but steel girders and a stone staircase, but it was a
corporation fed by common hopes and warmed at a common hearth. Its more
ridiculous defects--its vanities and morbid excitability, its violent
defiance of social convention, its passion for the exotic and the vivid,
its fits of melancholy and its uproarious rejoicings--were not
individual vices, but marks of a generation. Its grandeur and its
follies are traceable to a common source. Its greatest fault was not
extravagance, for that is a venial folly, but ignorance, which even
youth cannot wholly excuse. The seed of dissolution really lurking in
Bohemia was what Philibert Audebrand has truly called its _enfantillage
de l'esprit_.[10] In the flush of Romanticism the zealots neglected
those studies which give firmness to the mind. They rejected history and
philosophy; being young, they were not well read and they did not care
to become so. Foreign literature was a closed book to them, in spite of
their professed admiration for Dante, Goethe, Shakespeare, and Byron;
even of their own literature their knowledge was sadly defective. "Tout
bien vu," says M. Audebrand with a shake of the head, "ils n'avaient pas
d'autre docteur que la Blague." This cap will not fit all the heads, but
it has an undeniable texture of truth. When the first ebullition was
over, and the Bohemians of 1830 had departed from their joyful college
to spread its doctrines in a workaday world, they left nothing but a
tradition behind them. Their house had been built upon a light soil, and
the time had come to make new and solid foundations. But the tradition
did not include such wholesome industry, and Murger's generation, denied
the excitement and warmth of building, were content to sit down in the
hasty edifice to enjoy only the pastimes of their predecessors, stopping
up the ever-widening crevices, that let in a cold blast of public
opinion, with the unsatisfactory makeshift of _la blague_.
IV
PARISIAN SOCIETY--LE TOUT PARIS
The events of the time, the spiritual exaltation of young France, and
the _éclat_ of the Romantic struggle gave to Bohemia a definite
position. This position was accentuated by the smallness of Parisian
society. The diversity and complexity of life in a great modern city are
such that, even if all other obstacles were swept away, this alone would
still make it impossible for Bohemia to rise again. Bohemians must live
where rents are low--on the outer circumference, that is, of a city. In
the larger capitals of Europe the inner circle, which contains the
commerce and luxury, the hurry and bustle, has extended enormously in
the last fifty years or so. The increase of middle-class prosperity has
thrown far back the alleys and mean houses, to give place to
"residential" districts; the easiness of modern travel has brought vast
hotels and a constant foreign population; shops and theatres fill
immeasurably more space. Bohemia is driven to the extremities of the
spider's web, so that, in Plato's phrase, it is no longer one, but many.
It would be absurd to imagine a solid cohort formed from Hampstead,
Chelsea, and Camden Town, to say nothing of Wimbledon or Hampton Court,
for the purpose of forcing some "Hernani" upon the London public (or its
newspaper critics). Public opinion can hardly be corrected when the
agents of correction are forced to disperse in the last motor omnibus.
Moreover, this extension of the inner circle has made its inhabitants
less susceptible to sudden assaults. Unconventional demonstrations have
upon it no more effect than the poke of a finger upon an india-rubber
ball. The interests of Bohemia, even if this circle be not entirely
indifferent to them, are only a fraction of its multitudinous
preoccupations, which include the fluctuations of the money market, the
results of athletic contests in all parts of the globe, the progress of
foreign wars, the crimes and railway accidents of the week, the
development of aviation, and the safest method of crossing the street.
Bohemia can no longer be pointed to and felt by society as part of
itself, and when this is the case the name is nothing but a metaphor.
Speaking of the year 1841, Baudelaire in "L'Art Romantique" says:
"Paris was not then what it is to-day, a hurly-burly, a Babel
inhabited by fools and futilities, with little delicacy as to how
they kill time. At that time _tout Paris_ was composed of that
choice body of people who were responsible for forming the opinion
of the others."
[Illustration: Les Champs Elysées]
The glory of Bohemia rests partly on this fact. During Louis Philippe's
reign this state of society, comparable in some respects with the
ideal polity of the Attic philosophers, was, it is true, being disrupted
from within. The balance of power between wealth of gold and fecundity
of ideas was gradually changing--a change of which Balzac is the
immortal epic poet. Yet, though the power of a Nucingen was increasing,
and Paris was about to start on its new prosperity as the
pleasure-ground of Europe, this precious _tout Paris_ lasted till the
reign was over. Paris was small, in extent, in population, in the number
of those who formed its opinion. Of its actual compactness as a city I
shall speak in a later chapter; suffice it now to say that the
boulevards of Montmartre and Montparnasse bounded it on the north and
south, that the Champs Elysées was still a wilderness, and that outside
the fortifications lay open country. The population about 1835 was only
714,000; railways were hardly beginning, factories only tentatively
being erected. The working classes were chiefly engaged in commerce or
_petits métiers_, and the heights of Ménilmontant smiled as green and as
free from slums as the Champs Elysées were free from luxurious hotels.
The passing foreign population, though there was a certain number of
English attracted by cheap living, was almost negligible. Brazilians and
Argentines, Germans and Americans were hardly to be seen; even French
provincials walked delicately instead of forming, as they do now, the
chief _clientèle_ of the Parisian theatres. _Le tout Paris_ was,
therefore, a nucleus within a circle of three segments--the middle
class, the aristocratic families, and Bohemia.
The middle class, though the most numerous, was only potentially
important at the time. Politics and money-making were its only
preoccupations. It was divided, of course, into an infinity of grades,
all of which may be illustrated from characters in Balzac's "Comédie
Humaine." There were the bankers and usurers from the Du Tillets down to
the Samanons, the successful merchants like Birotteau, the world of
officials so accurately described in "Les Employés," the judges like old
Popinot, and all the men of law from a Desroches down to his youngest
clerk. Some were as sordid and bourgeois as the Thuilliers, others
luxurious debauchees like the Camusots and Matifats, others, like the
Rabourdins, fringed upon the _beau monde_. The sons of men enriched and
decorated by Napoleon formed perhaps the cream of the middle class, and
of these Balzac has given his opinion in describing Baron Hulot's son,
who plays so large a part in "Cousine Bette":
"M. Hulot junior was just the type of young man fashioned by the
Revolution of 1830, with a mind engrossed by politics, respectful
towards his hopes, suppressing them beneath a false gravity, very
envious of reputations, uttering phrases instead of incisive
_mots_--those diamonds of French conversation--but with plenty of
attitude and mistaking haughtiness for dignity. These people are
the walking coffins which contain the Frenchman of former times;
the Frenchman gets agitated at moments and knocks against his
English envelope; but ambition holds him back, and he consents to
suffocate inside it. This coffin is always dressed in black cloth."
This sombre portion of the background need, therefore, trouble us no
further. It dominated politics and was ignored by _tout Paris_.
The aristocracy of the Faubourg St.-Germain is almost equally
negligible. Being legitimists, they sulked after 1830, either living on
their country estates or shutting themselves gloomily within the gaunt
walls of their _hôtels_ in the Faubourg. This retirement, too, was not
wholly due to _bouderie_, for many of them, like Balzac's Princesse de
Cadignan, suffered heavy financial losses by the Revolution. Their
self-denying ordinance caused a great diminution in the general gaiety
of Paris for some years. Legitimist drawing-rooms, where a brilliant
host of guests had been wont to gather, were hushed and dark while the
dowagers gravely discussed the latest news of the Duchesse de Berry. The
few official _fêtes_ were severely boycotted, and even the
entertainments of foreign ambassadors suffered. It was an irksome
business for the younger members, particularly the ladies of the
aristocracy, who eventually gathered courage to break out into small
entertainments, and in 1835 there was the first of a series of
legitimist balls, the subscriptions for which went to recompense those
whose civil list pensions had been suppressed in 1830. After this the
Faubourg St.-Germain became more lively, and certain houses were opened
to a wider circle of guests. Eugène Sue, for instance, till he became
impossible, was to be found in many legitimist drawing-rooms.
Nevertheless, the Faubourg St.-Germain avoided attracting the public eye
by any conspicuous festivities, and this had two effects. In the first
place, it brought the more joyous festivities of _tout Paris_ and the
riotous celebrations of Bohemia into greater relief; and, in the second,
the men of the aristocracy, like the Duc d'Aulnis, were driven to find
distraction and amusement in a gayer world into which their own
womankind was debarred from penetrating. It was they who formed a
certain section of _tout Paris_; they were the _viveurs_, the _dandies_,
the young bloods of the newly founded Jockey Club, the members of the
_petit cercle_ in the Café de Paris, who joined hands with what may be
called _la haute Bohème_.
There was, however, a certain amount of neutral ground between the
aristocracy of birth and that of wit to be found in the literary
_salons_ of the day, which, if not quite so illustrious as they had once
been, shone with a considerable amount of brilliance. Among the
legitimists these were, of course, not to be found, but the aristocracy
of Napoleon was represented by the _salons_ of the Duchesse de Duras
and the Duchesse d'Abrantès. The latter, widow of Napoleon's marshal
Junot, was a particular friend of Balzac, who was the most notable
figure to be found at her house. She was always dreadfully in debt, and
after being sold up she died in a hospital in 1838. The _salon_ of the
Princess Belgiojoso in the Rue Montparnasse attracted particular
attention because, with an aristocratic hostess, it had all the
_entrain_ of more purely artistic gatherings. Till troubles in Italy
called them back to their estates the Prince and Princess Belgiojoso
were among the gayest of the gay. The Prince with his boon companion,
Alfred de Musset, ruffled it merrily on the boulevard, while the
Princess, who had many of the most brilliant men of the day for her
lovers, filled her apartments with poets, artists, writers, and, above
all, musicians. One who frequented her drawing-room hung with black
velvet, spangled with silver stars, says she had a "fierté glaciale,
mais curiosité suraiguë." The splendour of her entertainments was royal,
and her concerts were magnificent. To this the _salons_ of Madame
Ancelot and Madame Récamier were a striking contrast. The former was
composed chiefly of serious men of letters and politicians, while at
L'Abbaye-aux-Bois Madame Récamier acted as priestess to the adoration of
the aging Châteaubriand. The _salons_ of the pure Romantics made no
pretence of splendour and were entirely free from the atmosphere of
officialdom. The chief of them were those of Madame Hugo, of Madame Gay
(who was succeeded by her daughter, Delphine de Girardin), and of
Charles Nodier, the genial librarian of the Arsenal. In all of these, as
in the _salon_ of the Princess Belgiojoso, _tout Paris_ was to be found
in force. The gatherings round Victor Hugo were a little too much
flavoured by the fumes of the censer, but those of the Girardins and of
Nodier were of the most charming gaiety. Balzac, in a humorous article,
drew a malicious sketch of the exaggerated enthusiasms of Nodier's
guests when a poem was read before them. "Cathédrale!" "Ogive!"
"Pyramide d'Egypte!" were the approved exclamations of ecstatic
approbation. Madame Ancelot[11] confesses that she found the
conversation very amusing, but very strange. "There was never a serious
word," she says, "never anything profound, sensible, or simple; every
word was meant to cause laughter, to make an effect. The more a thing
was unexpected--that is, the less it was natural--the more prodigious
was its success." She, no doubt, was prejudiced, and the fact remains
that every guest who wrote in after years of Nodier's _salon_, its merry
conversation followed inevitably by dancing, did so with most grateful
praise, for Nodier died in 1846, leaving his Romantic friends to write
regretful reminiscences. The _salon_ of Sophie Gay and her daughter was
equally infected by high spirits, but it was less purely literary.
Liszt, Thalberg, and Berlioz made music here; Roger de Beauvoir met
Lamartine, and the Marquis de Custine sat by Balzac or Alphonse Karr.
The de Vignys also had a _salon_, and Théodore de Banville speaks most
warmly of their kindly hospitality; but there was a certain aloofness
about the creator of "Eloa," and another of his guests found that in his
house colouring seemed absent, so that "the regular guests seemed to
come and go in the moonlight."[12]
To speak at greater length about the _salons_ of the Romantic period
would here be beside the mark. Bohemians, no doubt, were often to be
found at Victor Hugo's or Nodier's, but on those occasions they were
consciously straying outside their own boundaries. Neither the stately
house in the Place Royale nor the librarian's dwelling at the Arsenal
was within the domains of Bohemia, and no Bohemian of the time would
have dreamed of claiming them, as the later "Parnassiens" might have
claimed the _salons_ of Nina de Kallias and Madame Ricard, for parts of
their ordinary existence. The case, however, is different with the
relations between _le tout Paris_ and Bohemia. _Le tout Paris_ was, as I
have said, a nucleus, but a nucleus of disparate and constantly shifting
particles. This perfectly undefined body had, of course, no definite
place of assembly, but so far as it could be identified with any
particular locality it may be said to have congregated on the boulevard.
The Boulevard des Italiens--_the_ boulevard--was the chosen spot for the
saunterings of the chosen few, a fact which by itself is a proof of the
smallness and privacy of Paris compared with the present day, when this
same boulevard is flooded from morning till night by a hurrying stream
of indistinguishable humanity. In the days of Louis Philippe nobody,
except an ignorant foreigner, ventured to appear on this sacred preserve
in the afternoon without some semblance of a title. The title may have
been so small as a peculiarly elegant waistcoat, a capacity for
drinking, or a happy invention for practical jokes, or it may have been
the reputation for a ready wit and a trenchant pen; but whosoever dared
to show himself in this select society was sure to have some particular
justification for making himself conspicuous, otherwise he was certain
to be quizzed out of existence. The newcomer, if he survived a short but
swift scrutiny, entered an informal though exclusive club of which every
member was known to the others--he was known, that is, to "all Paris."
All Paris, in a sense, it truly was, not because the greatest poets and
statesmen belonged to it--for they had better things to do than to waste
so much time--but because it served as the central intelligence
department or, I might almost say, as the brain of Paris. A word uttered
there was round the town in two hours; there a poet was made or a play
damned--in the twinkling of an eye. One day of its activity furnished
all the wit of the next day's newspapers, which is hardly surprising
when so many of its members were journalists. _Le tout Paris_ was not
hide-bound in its requirements; it admitted high birth as one
qualification for membership, wealth if accompanied by good manners as
another, but a certain way to its heart was by a brilliant handling of
the pen. In spite of the exaggeration of the Parisian scenes in
"Illusions Perdues," there is no unreality in Balzac's picture of
Lucien's sudden rise from impoverished obscurity to fame and money.
Lucien, the provincial poet, after his disappointing elopement with
Madame de Bargeton, retires discomfited to a garret in the Quartier
Latin. The door of rich protectors is shut in his face, no publisher
will read his poems or accept his novels. The serpent arrives in the
shape of Lousteau, who shows him the devilish power of journalism. By a
lucky chance Lucien is asked to write a dramatic criticism for a new
paper. He succeeds brilliantly, and he has Paris at his feet. The
publisher cringes before his power and publishes all that he had
formerly rejected; with money, fine clothes, and a reputation, he can
answer stare for stare and return the impertinences of Rastignac and de
Marsay; even Madame de Bargeton in the Faubourg St.-Germain cowers from
his revengeful epigrams. So long as he remains a power in the Press he
is flattered and caressed and plumes himself, a butterfly only just
emerged, in the glittering _tout Paris_ of his day.
The moral of Lucien de Rubempré, so far as we are immediately concerned,
is not ethical, but resolves itself into the truth that there was an
open passage between Bohemia and _le tout Paris_ which was crossed by
not a few. Gautier crossed it, so did Arsène Houssaye, Ourliac, the
dramatist, and several others. There were also men who seemed to spend
their time between the two, like the elder Dumas, Roger de Beauvoir, and
Alfred de Musset, who combined the extravagance of Bohemia with the
luxury of the boulevards in different proportions, without ever being
entire Bohemians or complete _viveurs_, and who maintained such a
continuous communication between the more literary sections of _le tout
Paris_ and the finer talents of Bohemia that it would be in some cases
difficult to say where one left off and the other began. It is therefore
impossible to write of the _vie de Bohème_ without entering into this
larger and more conspicuous life of what may be called _la haute
Bohème_. Not only was it the sound-board from which in a lucky moment
the struggling whisperer on the left bank might hear his utterances
booming forth to a multitude eager for novelty, not only was it an
unofficial academy to which every Bohemian might aspire to belong as
soon as he had made his mark, but it was also, during the years
following 1830, animated by such a spirit of revelry and reckless
amusement that the riots of true Bohemia were as pale ghosts before its
more notable orgies. There were strong reasons for the merging of the
two Bohemias, and the only precise distinction was the possession or
want of money. Bohemia proper has no money except what it can make by
its art, and as its inhabitants are young that is little enough. _La
haute Bohème_, with a less strict limitation of years, makes money and
spends it recklessly. Instead of pleading youth as the excuse of its
folly, it claims the indulgence due to artistic achievement. However, so
far as the generation of 1830 were concerned, this distinction was not
absolute, for the Bohemians of 1830 were not invariably so destitute as
their successors, so that they were enabled to mix to some extent in the
gayer life of the artistic _boulevardiers_.
The most universal word--which I shall adopt--applicable to this _haute
Bohème_ is the contemporary name for them, _les viveurs_. They were a
particular product of the time, and no words of mine can describe them
better than a passage from Balzac's "Illusions Perdues." The period of
the novel is some years before 1830, but this particular description is
far more applicable to the years that followed the second Revolution. I
quote it in French, because it is impossible to do it justice in a
translation:
"A cette époque florissait une société de jeunes gens, riches et
pauvres, tous désœuvrés, appelés _viveurs_, et qui vivaient en
effet avec une incroyable insouciance, intrépides mangeurs, buveurs
plus intrépides encore. Tous bourreaux d'argent et mêlant les plus
rudes plaisanteries à cette existence, non pas folle, mais enragée,
ils ne reculaient devant aucune impossibilité, faisaient gloire de
leurs méfaits, contenus néanmoins en de certaines bornes: l'esprit
le plus original couvrait leurs escapades, il était impossible de
ne pas les leur pardonner. Aucun fait n'accuse si hautement
l'ilotisme auquel la Restauration avait condamné la jeunesse. Les
jeunes gens, qui ne savaient à quoi employer leurs forces, ne les
jetaient pas seulement dans le journalisme, dans les conspirations,
dans la littérature et dans l'art, ils les dissipaient dans les
plus étranges excès, tant il y'avait de sève et de luxuriantes
puissances dans la jeune France. Travailleuse, cette belle jeunesse
voulait le pouvoir et le plaisir; artiste, elle voulait des
trésors; oisive, elle voulait animer ses passions; de toute manière
elle voulait une place, et la politique ne lui en faisait nulle
part."
[Illustration: A Viveur]
Balzac gives his own character, Rastignac, as an instance of the typical
_viveur_, but Rastignac had a purpose in his heart, while some of the
most prominent among the _viveurs_ had none but to amuse themselves.
These I name first, for, having no other preoccupations, they set the
tone of the whole society. They were chiefly members of the aristocracy
who found no place for their energies in a _bourgeois_ State which
sought no military glory. One of their leaders, the Duc d'Aulnis, who
settled down afterwards to serve the State worthily, gives in his
memoirs the reason why so many young men of good family gave themselves
up to riotous living, as he did under his _nom de plaisir_ of
Alton-Shee. He and other young legitimists resigned their commissions in
1831 on finding that Louis Philippe, _le roi des barricades_, sided with
the insurrectionists, so that, as he says, "the class of idlers was
increased by a large number of legitimists who had resigned their
commissions and by a contingent of refugees belonging to the Italian,
Polish, and Spanish aristocracies. To distract their minds from the
thoughts of so many broken careers, so many hopes disappointed, they
dashed with an irresistible rush into the pursuit of enjoyment and
sought to appease their generous aspirations in an unbridled love of
pleasure."
These were the young men who spent all their time in imitating Brummell
or the Comte d'Orsay, paying minute attention to every curve of their
voluminous frock-coats, the patterns of their waistcoats, and the
folding of their cravats; who drove and rode irreproachable horses
imported from England, and founded the French Jockey Club under the
auspices of Lord Seymour; who dined copiously at the Café de Paris and
adjourned to lounge at the Opéra in the _loge infernale_, where the
cream of Parisian dandyism paraded with its _lorgnette_ for the
edification of the public. In racing and gambling they found their
excitement; their consolation was the venal love of a ballet dancer.
For no moment of the day did they pursue a worthy ambition, and their
only excuse was that, being idle perforce, they attained a certain
exquisiteness even in pleasure. Sadly the Duc d'Aulnis sums them up:
"Our generation had the love of liberty, passion, gaiety, an
artistic nature, little vanity, the desire to be rather than to
appear; then came discouragement, scepticism, the pursuit of
amusement, the habit of smoking which fills the intervals, the
taste for intoxication, that fugitive poetry of vulgar enjoyments,
and every prodigality to satisfy our desires. If one considers what
we leave behind us, our baggage is light: the folly of the
carnival, the invention of the cancan, the generalization of the
cigar, the acclimatization of clubs and races, will be merits of
small value in the eyes of posterity.... Of these joyous _enfants
du siècle_ brought by ruin to face pitiless reality, some escaped
from their embarrassments by suicide, others found death or
promotion in Africa, others shared their names with rich heiresses;
others, persevering at all hazards, swallowing affronts and braving
humiliations, lived on the precarious resources of gambling,
borrowing, toadying, and parasitism; the most wretched of all fell
step by step into the depths of infamy; only a very small number
tried to save themselves by hard work."
These men set the pace among the _viveurs_: they were seconded by the
more ambitious young men of whom Balzac's Rastignac is the type, who
were determined to succeed and uttered in their hearts his famous
threat to Paris by the grave of old Goriot, "Maintenant c'est entre
nous." These men became _viveurs_, not as a pastime, but as a means.
Rastignac, shocked to see that virtuous devotion would not save Père
Goriot from a broken heart, and sick of the Maison Vauquer's squalor,
determines to play society at its own game and make profit out of its
corruption. He becomes the lover of Madame de Nucingen, one of Goriot's
ungrateful daughters, and by allowing himself to become a tool in the
crafty Baron Nucingen's third liquidation lays the foundation of his own
fortunes. Such a man could not live in seclusion--he was forced into the
ranks of the _viveurs_, in order to become a conspicuous figure. A smart
tilbury and clothes from a first-class tailor were part of his
stock-in-trade; he could not afford to run the risk of humiliation
before his lady by laying himself open to affront by a more exquisite
"dandy" than himself. A Rastignac had to shine to compass his ends, and
he shone most brilliantly as a _viveur_, playing at idleness and debauch
to cloak his subtle schemes, and drowning the shame of his parasitism in
a passionate self-indulgence. Thanks to a strong will he is entirely
successful, and out of the wreck of his illusions and his generous
impulses builds himself a career as a politician.
Rastignac is one of the most wonderful characters created by Balzac's
penetrating pessimism; that he had a special place in his creator's
heart is proved, I think, by his frequent appearance on the stage.
Those who delight in the fascinating pastime of following Balzac's
characters through the whole extent of the "Comédie Humaine" will know
that it is impossible to understand Rastignac without reading "La Maison
Nucingen," a story which, for pure virtuosity, is second to none of
Balzac's masterpieces. They will remember that the scene is set in the
year 1836 in a private room at Véry's restaurant, where the impersonal
narrator, by overhearing the conversation in the adjoining room, is
entertained by the thrilling account of how Rastignac profited by Baron
Nucingen's third fraudulent liquidation. The shady financial proceedings
of the astute Alsatian--as exciting as a dashing campaign--are related
in a marvellous series of _boutades_ by Balzac's favourite grotesque,
Bixiou, the own brother of Panurge. Now Bixiou and the three friends
with whom he is dining are Balzac's examples of the third party among
the _viveurs_, that party to which the title _la haute Bohème_ is most
peculiarly applicable. They were neither aristocratic and wealthy, like
a Duc d'Aulnis, nor aristocratic and poor, like a Rastignac, but men of
obscure origin and unusual intelligence. They joined the ranks of the
_viveurs_ neither to banish the _ennui_ of enforced idleness, nor out of
cold calculation for a diplomatic end--for they were inevitably debarred
from attaining any position in the _beau monde_--but simply as a
distraction from their pursuit of worldly success as journalists,
artists, speculators, and general exploiters of society. They were not
single-hearted warriors for an ambition; their aim in life was not
purely diversion, it was merely to obtain the maximum of selfish
enjoyments, which included a satisfied vanity, a full purse, good food,
rare wine, and a pretty mistress. Of them Barbey d'Aurévilly's remark
was true: "Qui dit journalistes dit femmes entretenues. Cela veut
souper."
They had been pure Bohemians, most of them, in their earlier youth, with
higher ideals and more restricted enjoyments; but their gorge, too, had
risen at the squalor of their Maison Vauquer, and they had parleyed with
the devil. Discovering in themselves some talent for making money, they
had exploited it to the exclusion of all others. They traded either in
their own art or in that of others. On the boulevard they held their own
by their engaging sallies of malicious gossip, by their prodigal
extravagance, and, above all, by the fear which their power as
journalists, critics, caricaturists, or newspaper proprietors inspired.
They were Bohemians at heart, carrying the more pardonable disorders of
Bohemia into less exacting circumstances, spending their gifts and their
money without a thought, luxurious, venal, insatiable. Their type is to
be found to-day in the rich mercantile, especially Jewish, society of
all large cities; but in Paris of the thirties and forties they were
more powerful and more conspicuous. Though they could never hope to
enter the Jockey Club, they were hail-fellow-well-met with the _viveurs_
of blue blood; they served the Rastignacs when it was worth their while,
and they were so near to the true Bohemia that their example was at once
its temptation and its despair. Balzac himself sums up the four friends,
Bixiou, Finot, Blondet, and Couture, in a passage which, having myself
said so much, I quote in the original:
"C'était quatre des plus hardis cormorans éclos dans l'écume qui
couronne les flots incessamment renouvelés de la génération
présente; aimables garçons dont l'existence est problématique, à
qui l'on connaît ni rentes ni domaines, et qui vivent bien. Ces
spirituels _condottieri_ de l'industrie moderne, devenue la plus
cruelle des guerres, laissent les inquiétudes à leurs créanciers,
gardent les plaisirs pour eux, et n'ont de souci que de leur
costume. D'ailleurs, braves à fumer, comme Jean Bart, leur agare
sur un baril de poudre, peut-être pour ne pas faillir à leur rôle;
plus moqueurs que les petits journaux, moqueurs à se moquer
d'eux-mêmes, perspicaces et incrédules, fureteurs d'affaires,
avides et prodigues, envieux d'autrui, mais contents d'eux-mêmes;
profonds politiques par saillies, analysant tout, devinant tout,
ils n'avaient pas encore pu se faire jour dans le monde où ils
voudraient se produire."
Andoche Finot had risen by his acute perception of the commercial future
of journalism. We meet him in his early days in "César Birotteau,"
abandoning the puffing of actresses and writing of articles to less
perspicuous journalists, and devoting himself to what is now grandly
called "publicity." It was he who helped the worthy young Anselme
Popinot to push the _huile céphalique_ which repaired Birotteau's
shattered fortunes. In "Illusions Perdues" we find him again, first
proprietor of a small paper, then spending his profits and straining his
credit in buying a larger one--one of the spiders into whose web poor
Lucien fell. By 1836 he is a lord of the Press, a fictitious counterpart
of Emile de Girardin, who with Lautour-Mézéray, another _viveur_, made a
fortune by selling _La Presse_ at half the price of other newspapers.
Couture is a very minor character, a financial speculator, who only hung
on the fringe of the _viveurs_. Blondet and Bixiou are more important.
The former had many counterparts in Paris of the day. He was "a
newspaper editor, a man of much intelligence, but slipshod, brilliant,
capable, lazy, knowing, but allowing himself to be exploited, equally
faithless and good-natured by caprice; one of those men one likes, but
does not respect. Sharp as a stage _soubrette_, incapable of refusing
his pen to anyone who asked for it or his heart to anyone who would
borrow it."
Bixiou is no longer young in 1836. Balzac gives an earlier portrait of
him in "Les Employés," when he is a minor official, caricaturist and
journalist, poor, ambitious, a real liver of _la vie de Bohème_. But,
says Balzac, "he is no longer the Bixiou of 1825, but that of 1836, the
misanthropical buffoon whose fun is known to have the most sparkle and
the most acidity, a wretch enraged at having spent so much wit at a pure
loss, furious at not having picked up his bit of flotsam in the last
revolution, giving everyone a kick like a true Pierrot at the play,
having his period and its scandalous stories at his fingers' ends,
decorating them with his droll inventions, jumping on everybody's
shoulders like a clown, and trying to leave a mark on them like an
executioner."
Such, in general, were the _viveurs_ who postured in the front of the
Parisian stage--equally at home on the steps of Tortoni's or in the Café
de Paris, in the Princess Belgiojoso's drawing-room or the luxurious
boudoir of a Coralie or Florine, making the talk and spreading the
gossip, blowing up the reputations and blasting the characters of the
town. To know their habits and eccentricities places those of the true
Bohemia in a proper light. In drawing a composite picture of them I have
drawn upon fiction, but in another chapter I will justify these
generalizations by introducing some of the real heroes of _le tout
Paris_.
[Illustration: Fashionables]
V
LES VIVEURS
The most exalted section among the _viveurs_, the members of which were
farthest removed from any suspicion of Bohemianism, was formed of young
men from noble families. Their names, which do not concern us here, may
be found in the list of those who started the _petit cercle_ of the Café
de Paris. This was an exclusive dining club founded by a set of gay
livers who dreaded the political discussions of the one or two regular
clubs then existing, but wished to have a place where they could dine
together without disturbance by casual strangers. They hired, therefore,
some rooms from Alexandre, the proprietor of the restaurant, and
continued there till the club broke up in 1848. Little need be said of
them as a body, except that they were the arbiters of Parisian elegance.
As such, their chief effort was to curb the luxuriance of Parisian taste
within the limits of English correctness. Anglomania was all the rage.
Every dandy--a word then definitely adopted by the French--had his
tilbury or phaeton and his tiny English "tiger," smoked his cigar,
suffered from his "spleen," and tried to face life with an insolent air
of imperturbability--a crowning proof of good taste when the effort was
at all successful. This Anglomania was not entirely confined to the
boulevard; it was partly an effect of Romanticism. Lady Morgan[13]
laughs at it, giving a most amusing account of a performance of
"Rochester" at the Porte St.-Martin. The character that created the
greatest sensation, she says, was the Watchman, "who was dressed like an
alguazil, with a child's rattle in his hand." Whenever he appeared there
was a general murmur of "Ha! C'est le vatchman."--"Regarde donc, ma
fille, c'est le vatchman; ton papa t'a souvent parlé des
vatchmen."--"Ah, c'est le vatchman."--"Oui, c'est le vatchman." Great
play, too, was made with tea. Rochester entertained his merry companions
with tea; Mr. Wilkes poisoned his wife in it. This latter incident gave
the highest pleasure:
"Dieu, que c'est anglois! Toujours le thé et la jalousie à
Londres!"
The Parisian ideas and imitations of English manners were, no doubt,
pretty ridiculous, and must have caused considerable amusement to Lord
Seymour, one of the few Englishmen who were conspicuous among the
aristocratic _viveurs_. He was the illegitimate son of Lady Yarmouth,
daughter-in-law of the notorious Lord Hertford. He lived entirely in
Paris, where, being extremely rich, he kept a fine house at the corner
of the Rue Taitbout and the boulevard. Here he cultivated cigar-smoking
and physical exercise with great assiduity. He was a splendid boxer and
fencer, and all the finest bruisers and blades, amateur and
professional, were to be met in his _salle d'armes_. He took great pride
in his strength, which was abnormal, in his skill as a whip and his
success on the race-course. French sport owes him a permanent debt for
his successful starting of the Jockey Club, but he can hardly have been
a very popular member of a society, for he was cold and brutal, a man
who took a defeat rancorously and one who had a cynical delight in
causing suffering to his hangers-on. His misanthropy was the reason of
his gradually dropping out of society after 1842, and it would have been
beside the point to mention him here had it not been for the quite
undeserved notoriety which he acquired in Paris during the thirties as
the bacchanalian lord of misrule at all the carnivals. It was a strange
case of mistaken identity which persisted for many years in spite of
categorical denials. The more aristocratic of the _viveurs_ were not, as
I have said, Bohemians; but during the carnival, which was celebrated by
all the population with extraordinary licence, some of the more youthful
let themselves go and became revellers with the rest. For the last three
days of the carnival the streets of Paris, by day and by night, were
given up to an orgy. Crowds of masqueraders filled the pavements, the
restaurants, and the theatres, where fancy-dress balls were held. The
richer masks had carriages drawn by postilions, in which they drove
among the crowd, scattering confetti and sweetmeats and even money,
indulging in every kind of quaint antic and gallantry, and inciting the
vulgar to engage them in a wordy warfare in which volleys of the
coarsest expletives were fired on both sides. Riot reached its
culmination on the night of Shrove Tuesday, when the revellers, after an
orgy of feasting and dancing at the Barrière de la Courtille, on the
north-east of Paris, ended by descending the steep hill towards the city
in a state of bacchic frenzy. This was the famous _descente de la
Courtille_, at which, as at all the other revels, a certain carriage,
drawn by six horses and filled by a motley party of young men, was the
central object of admiration. No challenger ever worsted the leader of
this gang at a bout of blackguarding, no costumes equalled his in
originality, no mask so tormented and excited the crowd as he with his
harangues, his missiles, and his largesse. This was the man known to all
the populace of Paris as "Milord Arsouille," which, as all Paris would
have told you, was simply the _nom de guerre_ of Lord Seymour. But it
was not so. The real "Milord Arsouille" was a certain Charles de la
Battut, son of an English chemist and a French _émigrée_. His father,
unwilling to compromise his position in England by recognizing him, paid
for his adoption by the ruined Breton Count de la Battut. He was
educated in Paris, where, even in his youth, he showed a most dissolute
character. He delighted to frequent the lowest haunts, and there learnt
that mastery of slang and that skill as a boxer which were his pride.
The death of his real father gave him a large fortune, which he
proceeded to dissipate with the utmost extravagance and bad taste. His
house in the Boulevard des Capucines and his personal attire were
equally flamboyant. During his short period of glory he was on certain
terms of intimacy with the more rowdy among the young bloods of good
family, who in after years looked back, like the Duc d'Aulnis, with
shame to some of their exploits in his company. His most notable
achievement was to introduce the _cancan_ into the fashionable
fancy-dress ball at the Variétés in 1832, and his perpetual grief was
that all his eccentricities were attributed to Lord Seymour, in spite of
his utmost efforts to proclaim the difference of identity. In 1835 he
died, a shattered _roué_, at Naples.
The only other English name deserving comment in the _petit cercle_ of
the Café de Paris is that of Major Fraser, whose personality was an
enigma. He was one of the most popular characters on the boulevard, and
an honoured friend of the most exclusive diners at the Café Anglais or
the Café de Paris, yet nothing was known of his personal history. He
spoke English perfectly, but was not an Englishman; he never alluded to
his parents, and lived as a bachelor in an _entresol_ at the corner of
the Rue Lafitte. He was never short of money, but the source of his
income was a mystery; and when he died no letters were found, but only a
file of receipts, including a receipt from an undertaker for his funeral
expenses, and a direction that his clothes and furniture were to be sold
for the benefit of the poor. In spite of the mystery surrounding him he
was a prominent figure among the _viveurs_. His tight blue frock-coat
and his grey trousers were models for the most fastidious dandies; his
kindness and gentleness to everyone except professional politicians was
extreme; he quoted Horace freely and had a complete knowledge of
political history with a prodigious memory. Major Fraser's story could
be paralleled by the head waiter of many a London club. While he lived
he was a favourite; when he died he simply vanished.[14]
There are only two other members of the _petit cercle_ whom I wish to
mention--Alfred de Musset and Roger de Beauvoir--because they form a
link between the exclusiveness of that society and the hurly-burly
existence of _la haute Bohème_, to which both more properly belonged. In
the early Romantic days Alfred de Musset, with his beautiful, bored face
set off by the fair curls that fell over his eyes, was the petted
darling of Paris, its perfect dandy wafting the triple essence of
_bouquet de Romantisme_. Nevertheless, Alfred de Musset, though his name
was on the lips of all dandies and his poetry set a fashion in Bohemia,
never took among men the place that seemed to be his due. He might have
been a true Bohemian of 1830, but he disavowed his Romantic companions
of letters for the greater splendour of fashionable life; while among
the exquisites of the boulevard he found it impossible to preserve that
impassive demeanour and attention to the niceties of dandyism which were
inexorably demanded. His nature was far too passionate to make him for
long together a comfortable companion for men, and his personal history,
apart from his poetry, is a chapter of relations with women, of whom
George Sand is the most notable. The ashes of his career have been raked
over with most scrupulous care since his death, but it is no purpose of
mine to take part in the scavenging. To have omitted Alfred de Musset's
name would have been impossible, but having mentioned him, I can leave
him. Though he hymned Musette and drank deeply with Prince Belgiojoso,
he had as little place in Bohemia, high or low, as Lamartine or Victor
Hugo. Their throne was the study, his the boudoir.
There are no such reservations to be made for Roger de Beauvoir, whom
Madame de Girardin called "Alfred de Musset aux cheveux noirs." He was
the arch-_viveur_, with one exquisitely shod foot on the boulevard, the
other in Bohemia, the gayest of all those who supped, the insatiable
quaffer of champagne, the inexhaustible fountain of epigram, the king of
_la haute Bohème_, the very incarnation of the _Noctambule_ in
Charpentier's delightful opera, "Louise." His family was the good Norman
family of de Bully, and he took the name of Beauvoir from one of the two
estates which were his heritage. Those who were responsible for his
early guidance clearly intended that he should make his way in
diplomacy--a career in which his good looks, sympathetic voice, and
charming manners would have greatly helped his pioneering--for he was
sent to be Polignac's secretary when that unfortunate minister occupied
the embassy at London. When his chief came back to the stormy days of
July, the debonair secretary, judging no doubt that any association with
politics was incompatible with gilded ease, abandoned all attempts to
play the game of a Rastignac, and pursued his fantasies in airy
independence. The Romanticism of the _Jeune-France_ party attracted at
once the enthusiasm of a young man, just in his majority by 1830, who
was naturally a lover of brilliant colouring. He became a fanatical
medievalist, who displayed with pride a Gothic cabinet panelled in
carved oak, hung with black velvet, and lit by stained-glass windows.
The ceiling was covered with coats-of-arms; the chief decorations were a
panoply of armour and an old _prie-dieu_ on which a missal of 1350
opened its illuminated pages. Even in 1842, when Maxime du Camp first
met him, he still dreamt of reviving the age of chivalry, having just
created a sensation by waltzing at a ball in full armour, fainting and
falling with the clatter of innumerable stove-pipes. Undeterred by this
mishap, he proposed to form a company, to be called the "Société des
champs clos de France," which was to buy land for a tilting-ground, Arab
steeds, and armour for the purpose of holding weekly tourneys. The
shares were to be 1000 francs each, but as Maxime du Camp's guardian
prohibited the purchase of any by his enthusiastic ward, the project was
dropped. Like every true Romantic he wrote a medieval novel, but his
novel, "L'Écolier de Cluny," unlike those of the majority, was published
and brought him considerable fame. After its publication in 1832, he
became in some sort a man of letters, but he never added to his
reputation, being far too bent upon the pursuit of pleasure to bear the
restrictions of any profession. Having failed as a writer of
vaudevilles, he found his true vocation as the leader of a band of
revellers and a composer of wicked epigrams in verse. His epigrams,
always written _impromptu_ upon the pages of a notebook, were a real
addition to the gaiety of Paris. Here is one composed when
Ancelot--literary husband of a literary wife--was elected to the
Academy:
_Le ménage Ancelot, par ses vers et sa prose,_
_Devait à ce fauteuil arriver en tout cas,_
_Car la femme accouchait toujours de quelque chose,_
_Quand le mari n'engendrait pas._
His dress was of the highest elegance in a day when men were not
confined to a funereal black. His blue frock-coat, tight-waisted with
amply curving skirts, broad velvet _revers_, and gilt buttons, fitted as
neatly as one of his own epigrams; his blue waistcoats and light grey
trousers were treasures, his hat the curliest and shiniest to be seen.
In his own apartment he tempered the shadows of his Gothic furniture by
wearing a green silk dressing-gown and red cashmere trousers. So long as
their fortunes lasted he and his companions bade dull care begone. At
midday they left the softest of beds, and, after a serious hour of
dressing, met for déjeuner at the Café Anglais, the Maison d'Or, or the
Café Hardi. By four they were to be seen in force upon the boulevard,
displaying their waistcoats and quizzing the ladies upon the marble
steps of Tortoni's. Before dinner they would visit a drawing-room or
two, buy a picture or bargain for some _bibelot_--a Toledo blade or a
Turkish narghile--with a dealer in curiosities. The evening programme
was a set of variations upon the ground bass of dinner, opera, supper.
Roger de Beauvoir was one of the company who haunted the famous _loge
infernale_ at the Opéra, and it is needless to say that their attention
was devoted more to the ballet than to the music, for they were all
connoisseurs in choreography and had a personal acquaintance with the
dancers, which developed in most cases into something more than Platonic
affection. The _foyer des artistes_ was the enchanted garden of _la
haute Bohème_, where they sought their "Cynthia of this minute" as the
true Bohemians did at the Chaumière or the Closerie des Lilas.
The science of practical joking was sedulously cultivated by Roger and
his friends, who rejoiced to bring off successful "mystifications." One
of Roger's best was played upon Duponchel, the director of the Opéra.
One day the whole street where Duponchel lived was set all agog by the
appearance of a magnificent funeral procession, consisting of a hearse
and fifty carriages, with Roger and his friend Cabanon occupying the
first carriage as chief mourners; the head of the procession drew up at
Duponchel's door, to his great indignation. The joke up to this point
was of no especial originality, but Roger gave it a turn of his own. The
Romantic fashion dictated that every chapter in a novel should be headed
by an epigraph, as extravagant as possible, from the work of some
Romantic author. Roger therefore headed a chapter in his novel
"Pulchinella," which was just appearing, "Feu Duponchel (Histoire
contemporaine)." Even after he was hopelessly in debt he remained a
joker. Being saddled with a thin and dirty bailiff, he gave him ten
francs a day, washed him, dressed him as a Turk, and gave an evening
party in honour of his Pasha, who could only talk in signs. The supreme
_mystificateurs_, however, were Romieu and Monnier. Romieu was reputed
to be the most amusing man in Paris, and so firmly founded was his
reputation that nobody ever took him seriously. When he became prefect
of Quimperlé--an easy post which enabled him to take many a holiday upon
the boulevard--he was faced with the problem of dealing with a plague of
cockchafers in the prefecture. He hit upon the wise and perfectly
successful device of offering fifty francs for every bushel of dead
cockchafers. The Bretons were grateful enough, but all Paris was in a
roar. Here was the crowning farce of which only its lost joker would
have been capable, and it supplied the smaller comic papers with copy
for several days. Romieu made Monnier's acquaintance in an appropriate
way. About eleven o'clock one night the artist heard a knock at his
door, which he opened to a stranger, who came in and entered into a
polite conversation without a word of introduction. Monnier made no
comment, but replied with equal affability. After an hour or so, as the
stranger remained, he ransacked his sideboard and entertained his guest
with an impromptu supper. Time passed, the small hours struck, and still
the stranger made no sign of going. Monnier therefore announced that he
was ready for bed and that his sofa was at his guest's disposition. So
they parted for the night, and next morning when they met Monnier's
first words were "You are Romieu," a compliment returned by "You are
Monnier."
Monnier, says Champfleury in his memoir, belonged to Bohemia till the
end of his life; but it is clear that this Bohemia was that of the
boulevards and cafés. He was no real Romantic, and far too fond of a
good time to stay in the Bohemia which Champfleury himself knew so well.
As a writer of short stories and dialogues, an actor, and an artist he
had a huge success in the thirties, and he followed the pleasures of
life with inexhaustible zest. Balzac drew him as Bixiou in "Les
Employés." The portrait, according to Champfleury, was very true, but
unjust:
"Intrépide chasseur de grisettes, fumeur, amuseur de gens, dîneur
et soupeur, se mettant partout au diapason, brillant aussi bien
dans les coulisses qu'au bal des grisettes dans l'allée des Veuves,
il étonnait autant à table que dans une partie de plaisir; en verve
à minuit dans la rue, comme le matin si vous le preniez au saut du
lit, mais sombre et triste avec lui-même, comme la plupart des
grands comiques. Lancé dans le monde des actrices et des acteurs,
des écrivains, des artistes, et de certaines femmes dont la fortune
est aléatoire, il vivait bien, allait au spectacle sans payer,
jouait à Frascati, gagnait souvent. Enfin cet artiste, vraiment
profond, mais par éclairs, se balançait dans la vie comme sur une
escarpolette, sans s'inquiéter du moment où la corde casserait."
Innumerable stories are told of his practical jokes. Being an expert
ventriloquist, he was wont to enter an omnibus and without moving a
muscle utter in a feminine voice: "Je vous aime, monsieur le
conducteur," at which there would be tremendous consternation among the
petticoats. The dames swept the company with searching glares of
outraged decency, the _demoiselles_ blushed, and the embarrassed
conductor looked in vain for his temptress. One evening he was burdened
with a bore in some illuminated public garden. To escape the tedium of
conversation he pretended to be greatly interested in some matter which
necessitated his walking carefully all round the garden and gazing
intently at all the gas-lamps. After half an hour of these mysterious
peregrinations the bore, who had been forced to keep silence, asked with
impatience what was the matter. "I bet you five francs," said Monnier,
"that there are here seventy-nine _becs de gaz_ (gas-jets)." The bore
accepted the challenge with delight, and another half-hour was spent in
silent perambulation and calculation. At length he announced
triumphantly that he only counted seventy-eight. "Ah," said Monnier as
he made his escape, and pointing to the orchestra, "vous avez oublié le
bec de la clarinette."
Monnier, the great artist, the disappointed actor, was at the other end
of the scale to Lord Seymour and his friends. They had a position
without activity: his activity made his position. No great artist
remains long in Bohemia. Some work their way out on foot: he rose from
it, one might say, in a balloon, by which, after disporting himself for
some years above the mists, he was landed for his later days in the
obscurity of a province. Such a man, at home in all society, is
restricted by none. As he was not the perfect Bohemian, so he was not
the whole-hearted _viveur_, for whose complete picture I must return to
Roger de Beauvoir and his set, some of whom are described in Roger's own
little book, "Soupeurs de mon Temps." It is a melancholy epitaph of a
brilliant company. The sparkling wit of their gatherings has vanished
with the bubbles of the champagne they drank, and little is left on
record but the capacity of their stomachs. They took an immense pride in
their consumption of champagne. Briffaut, a clever journalist and a
particular friend of Roger's, was the king of topers. To him was due the
invention of "ingurgitation," which consisted in pouring a bottle of
champagne into a bell-shaped glass cover, such as was used to protect
cheese, and swallowing it at a draught. He once challenged a noted
English toper and gave him a glass a bottle; the victory was easily his,
for he disposed of a dozen. Among other champions who helped to make
Veuve Clicquot's fortune were Armand Malitourne, a singularly gifted
man, a journalist, and at one time secretary to the minister Montalivet;
Béquet, whose good taste Roger himself extolled; and Bouffé, the
director of the Vaudeville. Then there was Emile Cabanon, who lives in
Romantic annals as the author of the extravagant "Roman pour les
Cuisinières." Champfleury,[15] on the authority of Camille Rogier, the
artist, says that he appeared one day upon the boulevard and won himself
forthwith a place by his gifts as a story-teller, becoming a favourite
with all from Prince Belgiojoso downwards. He is one of the reputed
originals--there are two or three--of Balzac's Comte de la Palférine (in
"Un Prince de la Bohème"), who, being struck with the appearance of a
lady passing along the street, at once attached himself to her: in vain
she tried to get rid of the importunate by saying she was going to visit
a friend, for her cavalier came too and mixed with all urbanity in the
conversation, rising to take his leave at the same time as the object of
his sudden passion. This assiduity so captivated the besieged one's
heart that she struck her colours. It is _à propos_ of Cabanon that
Champfleury refers with some contempt to "les gentilshommes de lettres
du boulevard de Gand, qui nageaient comme des poissons dans le fleuve de
la dette, se fiaient plus sur leurs relations que sur leur plume,
dépensaient de l'esprit comptant en veux-tu en voilà." Alfred
Tattet,[16] the rich son of an _agent de change_, who was introduced to
the _viveurs_ by Félix Arvers, the poet of one sonnet, was another of
the crew. Alfred de Musset, Roger de Beauvoir, Romieu, and others made
merry at his sumptuous entertainments till he varied the monotony by
running over the frontier with a married woman, leaving Arvers to look
after his affairs. In 1843 he returned to settle down at Fontainebleau
with the wife of a German in Frankfort. Another young man, with the
promising name of Chaudesaigues--a corruption of the Latin for "hot
water"--came to Paris in 1835 with a fortune of 30,000 francs, which he
squandered in a few years, and then struggled on as a journalist till he
died of apoplexy.
I should wrong the _viveurs_ if I allowed it to be implied that they
were all purely pleasure-seekers. Some of them were successful business
men besides. Lautour-Mézéray, for instance, who was distinguished by the
white camellia in his buttonhole, laid the foundations of his fortune by
starting a paper called _Le Voleur_, which was entirely composed of
cuttings from other papers. Like Andoche Finot, he went on from small to
great, founding _La Mode_ and _Le Journal des Enfants_, the first
children's paper. He helped to start _La Presse_ with Emile de Girardin,
who was another of the more solid among the _viveurs_. Doctor Véron,
stout and self-important, his face half hidden in a huge cravat, held an
important place among them. He began life as a medical practitioner, but
made a fortune by exploiting a certain Pâte Regnault and took to
political journalism. Between 1831 and 1835 he was an extremely
successful director of the Opéra, and in 1838 bought _Le
Constitutionnel_, which he sold fourteen years later for two million
francs. To him, it is said, is due the invention of the _tournedos_.
Certainly, he was a prominent gastronome, and the terror of head
waiters, for he was no mere swiller of champagne, but one who insisted
on perfect vintages combined with perfect cooking. In the thirties, when
"Robert le Diable" was filling the Opéra and his own pocket, he was a
constant diner at the restaurants, but in later years he never dined
except at his own house, where Sophie, his cook and majordomo, alone
preserved the proper traditions of gastronomy. Mæcenas-like, he made a
certain literary set free of his table. Their places were always laid,
they helped themselves, and they remained as long as they pleased,
whether their host left them or no. Théodore de Banville and many others
have celebrated the excellent "cuisine" and its accompaniment of wit,
but a reader of Véron's "Souvenirs d'un bourgeois de Paris" will be
inclined to suspect that the doctor himself was rather a prosy humbug,
who only supplied the appropriate stimulus for the wit of his guests.
The chief of these, another celebrated _viveur_, was Nestor Roqueplan,
whose toilette was unsurpassed and whose wit inexhaustible. He was a
Parisian to the marrow; a day from Paris was to him a day out of
Paradise. Like most of his generation, he began as a journalist, but
diverged to become a director of theatres. The Panthéon, Nouveautés,
Saint-Antoine, Variétés, Opéra, Opéra Comique, and Châtelet passed
successively under his sway, and he lost money at them all except at
the Variétés, during his management of which he wrote those sparkling
"Nouvelles à la main" which are perhaps the freshest examples of purely
ephemeral contemporary wit.
The Revolution of 1848 dispersed the _viveurs_ for ever. It was not that
Paris diminished in gaiety during the Second Empire nor that the _cafés_
ceased to be invaded by merry bands of _fêtards_, but simply that Paris
became too gay, too large, and too cosmopolitan. The boulevard was no
longer to be kept sacred for a chosen few, and a new generation was
rising, which found other channels for its energies than ingurgitatory
wit-combats. Under the new _régime_ there was a court and a more
exciting foreign policy. The aristocracy threw off its sulks, the
prosperous industrial conquered his diffidence, the pleasure-loving
stranger found that all railways led to Paris. The old guard was
overwhelmed, or rather would have been overwhelmed if not already
well-nigh crumbled away. Men with clear heads and practical aims, who
had only devoted their leisure to enjoyment, like Véron, Roqueplan, de
Girardin, survived to retire with all the honours of war, forming small
_coteries_ for the cultivation of wit and good cheer, but shunning,
instead of affronting, the public eye. But the rest, the _viveurs_ of
every hour, where were they? Dead, worn-out, shattered in health, paying
the dismal reckoning for the dissipation of their heyday, poor,
neglected, forgotten. Misfortune overtook the gay Roger from the moment
he married Mademoiselle Doze, the actress. For six years he was pestered
with lawsuits for separation, till a divorce was finally procured. He
had drunk, as he said, 150,000 francs worth of champagne and written 300
songs. The francs were gone, the songs lost, and nothing was left but
the gout.
_Jadis j'étais des plus ingambes,_
_Mais hélas! destins inhumains,_
_Le papier que j'avais aux mains,_
_A présent je le porte aux jambes._
He could jest to the last, but in his last days he was a pathetic sight,
fat, prematurely old, infirm, confined to a wretched chamber, and denied
even the champagne which could charm away his regrets. The dapper figure
that had once filled a frock-coat so jauntily was now a shapeless
corpulence hidden in the loose folds of a greasy dressing-gown. He died
of gout, as Alfred de Musset died of drink. Malitourne, after sinking
lower and lower in drunkenness, died mad; apoplexy carried off
Chaudesaigues and Charles Froment; Arvers died of spinal paralysis;
Béquet ended in a hospital; gout killed Cabanon and Tattet; while
Briffaut expired in a mad-house. The mental pronouncement of their
funeral orations I leave to any moralist who chooses, bidding him
remember that if they failed as individuals to fulfil the highest
destinies of mankind they were victims of a strange fever in common with
all the generation of 1830.
Of that generation they were a part, perhaps the most conspicuous part
at the time. I might almost liken them to the set of "swells" in some
public school, privileged themselves yet censorious of others, always in
the eye of their small world, influential in their smallest acts,
embodying conspicuously the current fashion and expressing the
prevailing tone, shining inevitably as a pattern, envied by most,
respected, outwardly, by all. In Louis Philippe's time Parisian society
was as limited a corporation as a school. Its "swells" attained their
position, as all "swells" do, by excelling in a pursuit in which
excellence is universally admired. They excelled in tinging their life
with a medieval splendour of colouring, they had some prowess in poetry
and letters, they performed miracles of wit in the new spirit of busy,
ever-bubbling, _bruyant_ fun. As the "swells" of Romanticism they
justified their position so long as the conditions allowed. Bohemia, in
some respects, was like a "house" in the same school, with a smaller
corporate life of its own, yet influenced by the powers outside it, the
more so because some of its members had risen themselves to the company
of "swells." In this not very exalted, but true, simile is my reason for
devoting space to the _viveurs_. They were not Bohemians for the most
part, but many Bohemians hoped to be _viveurs_ as Etonians hope to be in
"Pop." On them rested the high lights of the picture, but we can now
peer into the background and discern the true Bohemia of 1830.
VI
LA BOHÈME ROMANTIQUE
MIL HUIT CENT TRENTE! _Aurore_
_Qui m'éblouis encore,_
_Promesse du destin,_
_Riant matin!_
_Aube où le soleil plonge!_
_Quelquefois un beau songe_
_Me rend l'éclat vermeil_
_De ton réveil._
_Jetant ta pourpre rose_
_En notre ciel morose,_
_Tu parais, et la nuit_
_Soudain s'enfuit._
THÉODORE DE BANVILLE
The Romantic Bohemia has been the theme of so many French writers, from
the time when the first reminiscences appeared to the present day, when
a Léon Séché and a Philibert Audebrand, following the lead of Charles
Asselineau, the pious _chiffonnier_ of Romanticism, industriously
collect the very last scraps of authentic information, that a foreigner
with all a foreigner's limitations may well hesitate to mar the pretty
edifice erected to the memory of 1830 by some clumsy addition of his
own. Yet I take heart from the consideration that even in France there
is, at least to my knowledge, no complete account of this Bohemia. Those
who would follow its annals in their original tongue must do so in a
multitude of books, published at different times, some of which are
rarities only to be found in museums and the largest libraries.
Moreover, the French chronicler writes from a point of view which a
foreigner cannot adopt, and makes assumptions which a foreigner cannot
grant. All the historical and literary associations on which I have
touched in a former chapter make it a subject which even to-day excites
passionate enthusiasm and equally passionate reprobation across the
Channel. The foreigner can approach in a cooler temper, though I
postulate in my readers a general sympathy for Gautier's scarlet
_pourpoint_ and all that it symbolized. In this cooler temper, then, not
seeing red, but with a tendency, at least, to see rosy, a foreigner may
glance at a life, so essentially limited by its period and its
nationality, without challenging unfavourable comparisons.
The Romantic Bohemia was part of Parisian society, a fact of which I
have already tried to point out the implications. It might add to the
general picture to know how society judged Bohemia. Contemporary record
is scarce, not only because Bohemia itself so largely supplied the
personal element in the journalism of its time, but also because the
conception--indeed, the name--was so new. There is, however, something
to be picked up from allusions here and there which is of some service
in the definition of boundaries. Nestor Roqueplan, for instance, in his
little book, "La Vie Parisienne," defines Bohemia as comprehending "all
those in Paris who dine rarely and never go to bed." He distinguishes
sloth and debt as the salient faults in the general disorder of its
life, and he is not too appreciative of its abilities, though he admits
that there is an inner Bohemia, "intelligente et spirituelle," composed
of a certain number of young men with the makings of excellent
ministers, irreproachable officials, and daring men of business. In
conclusion he asserts the great truth that "Bohemia must be young; it
must be continually renewed. If the Bohemian were more than thirty, he
might be confused with the rogue." This is excellent testimony from a
man who, himself no real Bohemian, had extensive relations with Bohemia
as one on whom its young playwrights inflicted the reading of their
plays. Balzac is the next witness, though it is remarkable that his only
specific reference to Bohemia is in the short story, "Un Prince de la
Bohème," which tells how the young Comte de la Palfèrine, a penniless
son of a general who died after Wagram, satisfied his vanity in the
person of his mistress, Madame du Bruel. He was debarred by his
position from having a wife worthy of his aristocratic pride, but that
at least his mistress might be worthy, Madame du Bruel, an actress
married to a writer of _vaudevilles_, worries her husband into the
acquisition of riches, political power, and a peerage. At the beginning
of this story--one of Balzac's most curious--he gives a general
definition of Bohemia:
"Bohemia, which ought to be called the wisdom of the Boulevard des
Italiens, is composed of young men all over twenty, and under
thirty, years of age, all men of genius in their manner, still
little known, but destined to make themselves known and then to be
very distinguished; they are already distinguished in the days of
the carnival, during which they discharge the plethora of their
wit, which is confined during the rest of the year, in more or less
comic inventions. In what an age do we live! What absurd authority
allows immense forces thus to be dissipated! In Bohemia there are
diplomats capable of upsetting the plans of Russia, if they felt
themselves supported by the power of France. One meets in it
writers, administrators, soldiers, journalists, artists! In a word,
all kinds of capacity and intellect are represented in it. It is a
microcosm. If the Emperor of Russia were to buy Bohemia for some
twenty millions, supposing it willing to quit the asphalt of the
boulevards, and were to deport it to Odessa, in a year Odessa would
be Paris. There it is, the useless, withering flower of that
admirable youth of France which Napoleon and Louis XIV cherished,
and which has been neglected for thirty years by that gerontocracy
under which all things in France are drooping.... Bohemia has
nothing and lives on that which it has. Hope is its religion,
self-confidence is its code, charity passes for its budget. All
these young men are greater than their misfortunes--below fortune,
but above destiny."
The narrator of the story, the witty Nathan, goes on to give some
particular _traits_ of La Palférine, who would be King of Bohemia, if
Bohemia could suffer a king. Some of these are rather vulgar
pleasantries which display the bluntness of Balzac's sense of humour
rather than La Palférine's wit, as when the Bohemian, angrily accosted
by a _bourgeois_ in whose face he had thrown the end of his cigar,
calmly replied: "You have sustained your adversary's fire; the seconds
declare that honour is satisfied." La Palférine was never solvent: once,
when he owed his tailor a thousand francs, the latter's head clerk, sent
to collect the debt, found the debtor in a wretched sixth-floor attic on
the outskirts of Paris, furnished with a miserable bed and a rickety
table; to the request for payment the count replied with a gesture
worthy of Mirabeau: "Go tell your master of the state in which you have
found me!" In affairs of love, though he was impetuous as a besieger, he
was proud as a conqueror. After having passed a fortnight of unmixed
happiness with a certain Antonia, he found that, as Balzac puts it, she
was treating him with a want of frankness. He therefore wrote to her
the following letter, which made her famous:
"MADAME,--Your conduct astonishes as much as it afflicts me. Not
content with rending my heart by your disdain, you have the
indelicacy to keep my tooth-brush, which my means do not allow me
to replace, my estates being mortgaged beyond their value.
Farewell, too lovely and too ungrateful friend!
May we meet again in a better world!"
Balzac's account is obviously tinged with literary exaggeration, though
the stories of La Palférine were no doubt gleaned among the gossips of
the boulevard. He shall be balanced by an adverse witness, one M.
Challamel, who, after a severe attack of _le mal romantique_ which
caused him to run away from his father's shop, settled down to be a
staid librarian. In his "Souvenirs d'un Hugolâtre" he says:
"In the wake of the freelances of the pen the _Bohemians_ abounded,
affecting the profoundest disdain for all that the bourgeois call
'rules of conduct,' posing as successors to François Villon,
playing the part of literary art-students, frequenters of
_cabarets_, often of disreputable houses, breaking with the usages
of polite society, and believing, in fine, that everything is
permitted to people of intelligence.... By the side of these sham
romantic Byrons there existed some good fellows who fell into the
excess of the literary revolution, and who paraded the active
immorality of debauch. Sceptics, materialists, loaded with debt,
they raised poverty to a system and laughed at their voluntary
insolvency. Some shook off early their Diogenes' cloak ... others
succumbed prematurely ... all had imitators who ended by forming
numerous groups and by founding a school. The spirit of Bohemia
became infectious, and engendered the spirit of mockery (_la
blague_)."
I conclude this general testimony with some lines from Alfred de
Musset's "Dupont et Durand," which is an imaginary conversation between
two old school-fellows, one of whom has become a prosperous citizen, the
other has failed as a Bohemian. The Bohemian says:
_J'ai flâné dans les rues,_
_J'ai marché devant moi, bayant aux grues;_
_Mal nourri, peu vêtu, couchant dans un grenier,_
_Dont je déménageais dès qu'il fallait payer;_
_De taudis en taudis colportant ma misère,_
_Ruminant de Fourier le rêve humanitaire,_
_Empruntant çà et là le plus que je pouvais,_
_Dépensant un écu sitôt que je l'avais,_
_Délayant de grands mots en phrases insipides,_
_Sans chemise et sans bas, et les poches si vides,_
_Qu'il n'est que mon esprit au monde d'aussi creux,_
_Tel je vécus, râpé, sycophante, envieux._
With the aid of these lights we may descry some general features of the
Romantic Bohemian. He must be young; on this both Roqueplan and Balzac
are agreed, placing his proper age between twenty and thirty. The
Bohemians of 1830 were, as a matter of fact, nearer to the earlier than
the later limit. Most of them were born at the end of the first decade
of the nineteenth century, so that 1830 found them in, or not long past,
their twentieth year, a happy state of things which Arsène Houssaye
celebrated in his poem "Vingt Ans." We Englishmen can hardly understand
the magic of this joyous phrase, _vingt ans_; through French prose and
poetry it sounds again and again like a tinkling silver bell calling
those who have lived and loved in youth to hark back for a moment in
passionate regret, in an ecstasy of remembrance. To think of Bohemia
without that silver tinkle in one's ears is to do it a grave injustice,
for Bohemia throbbed with it then as with a tocsin, as with a summoning
bell to a joyous refectory in some transcendant Abbaye de Thélème. It
may be well for us that at twenty we are still hobbledehoys whom serious
persons are only too glad to get rid of for half the year in
universities as peacefully unmoved by our turmoil as their Gothic
buildings by the storms of winter; but these frenzied medievalists had
no Gothic university to be engulfed in save their own dear Paris, at a
time when the university of their own dear Paris was trying its hardest
to withstand the new ideas with which they were aflame. If juvenile
excesses and absurdities can be tolerated with easy smiles at Oxford and
Cambridge, how much more can those of the Romantic Bohemia be excused
when its denizens were Frenchmen, hardly more than schoolboys, yet
already victorious as champions of a revolution, with their livelihood
to gain, with no kind parents to pay their bills and no kind Dean to
regulate their mischief! As the college porter says, "Young gentlemen
will be young gentlemen," a proverb which condones the excesses of
tender, as it reprobates those of riper, years. Bohemia, in Roqueplan's
words, must be continually renewed, for the old Bohemian is nothing but
a legitimate object for ardent social reformers. So the Bohemians of
1830, some of whom made their names, while others remained obscure, were
all youthful nobodies in the eyes of the world, perching in their attics
like a colony of singing birds upon the topmost branches.
This youth of theirs, once it is properly grasped, explains a good many
of their qualities, amiable and otherwise. Poverty, for instance, was a
tradition of Bohemia. "They dine rarely," "the Bohemian has nothing and
lives on what he has," "they raised their poverty into a system and
laughed at their voluntary insolvency": so say Roqueplan, Balzac, and
Challamel. Most young men in this world are poor, in the sense they have
nothing of their own. So long as they follow the careers laid down for
them, or earn the prescribed salaries in the prescribed professions,
they are not without means indeed, but if they take a contradictory
line of their own which is not lucrative, especially if they dare to set
up as poets, it is considered better for them to knock their heads
against the hard corners of life without much extraneous assistance. On
the whole this is a wise point of view, and one can hardly follow some
of the less talented Romantics in making it an indictment against
society that superior soup-kitchens are not provided for the sustenance
of all who choose to embrace the arts. There were, of course, degrees of
poverty in Bohemia, just as there were degrees of economic adaptability.
Some were really, others only comparatively, destitute: some girded
their loins daily in search of pence, others waited for pence to drop
from heaven. Still, in spite of all degrees and differences, poverty was
very real. The market for art and letters was still extremely
restricted, processes were costly, the science of distribution still in
its infancy; a few celebrities took all the cream of the demand, leaving
only the thinnest trickle to satisfy the rest.
The Bohemians knew, or very soon found out, their prospects. Those who
were not scared back to their homes made up their minds that at best a
moderate income might be theirs in the future, while the present
entailed considerable privations to be endured cheerfully for the glory
of art. Poverty being their economic condition, it is not to be supposed
that the young men who _did_ happen to be rich in their own right
migrated to Bohemia for the mere pleasure of its society. It is easy
enough to find food for laughter in unavoidable discomforts and delight
in the makeshifts by which misery is cheated, but, when neither
discomfort nor makeshifts are necessary, the point of view inevitably
changes, and irritation takes the place of laughter. It is quite
contrary to human nature that a man with money to spare for regular
meals, decent clothes, and a comfortable room should enjoy hunger, rags,
and a bare garret. Between adversity cheerfully borne and a masquerade
of scanty means there is a gulf which no imagination is able to span. A
rich man, I admit, may stint himself in order to spend all his means on
a hobby or a philanthropic object, but in the Bohemian there was no
trace of this voluntary asceticism, which would have been entirely
contrary to the Romantic creed. A rich Bohemian was a paradox, for the
moment a Bohemian had any money he spent it in forgetting the sorrows of
Bohemia, a moral pointed by Murger's amusing chapter "Les Flots du
Pactole," where Rodolphe, having received a gift of £20, promptly agrees
with Marcel to live a regular life. He will work, he says, seriously,
sheltered from the material worries of life. "I renounce Bohemia, I
shall dress like the rest, I shall have a black coat and appear in
drawing-rooms." Unfortunately the preliminaries are so costly that the
sum is exhausted in a fortnight, the _coup de grâce_ being given to it
when the new servant pays without authorization the arrears of rent.
"Where shall we dine to-night?" says Rodolphe, once more a Bohemian. "We
shall know to-morrow," replies Marcel. Rodolphe and Marcel, and their
predecessors just as much, would have regarded a Bohemian with an income
as a madman or a monstrosity. With all the will in the world such a man
would have found it impossible to live in such a society without being
on its economic level. Its joys and pleasures would not have been his,
its amusements would have seemed paltry. To have shown his money would
have made him shunned by the proud and courted by the sycophants, in any
case a stranger. He could only have been a Bohemian at the price of
dissipating all his capital, and that he could more easily do among the
_viveurs_ upon the boulevard.
Bohemia, then, was poor, which had the one excellent result of banishing
from it all mercenary spirit. When there was so little money to be had
in any case and there were so many other more glorious things to think
about, there was no point in financial preoccupations. If one had a few
coins one spent them in common with those who had none; if one's pockets
were empty one went without and accepted the hospitality of others.
Money-grubbing was left to the virtuous _bourgeois_ beloved of a
_bourgeois_ king, to unscrupulous Nucingens and adventurous de
Girardins. And Bohemia never went to bed, because it was young and poor,
not from viciousness or an artistic pleasure in the sunrise. They were
incorrigible talkers, those young men--perhaps this was one of their
graver faults--they not only talked, but they shouted for hours
together, mixing declamations of Victor Hugo with extravagant tirades in
the Romantic fashion. It was not in them to disperse quietly after
"Hernani" or "Antony" had lashed them into fury. They had a plethora of
matter to discharge from their souls, but they had no comfortable little
Chelsea studio in which to perform this function. A cold attic, a straw
mattress, a fuelless stove, a dearth of chairs, which was all the
majority could boast of, was a poor setting for impassioned conversation
compared with the warmth of even a humble _cabaret_. The good M.
Challamel, of course, is justified in his strictures. Their morals were
lax, they were extravagant, they did not pay their bills. This was
partly due to what a humorous undergraduate once called the "generosity
of youth," and partly to the example of the "swells" upon the boulevard.
The Bohemian naturally yearned to enjoy himself, with his acute capacity
for enjoyment, as he saw his more fortunate fellow-men enjoying
themselves. They were luxurious at all times; it was impossible for him
to restrain occasionally the impulse to luxury, indulging in a superb
orgy at the Rocher de Caucale or the Trois Frères Provençaux, ordering
clothes which he _meant_ to pay for, and forgetting all the while the
just claims of a landlord. His vices, at any rate, were inseparable
from the conditions of his existence, and if he was disreputable, it
was more outwardly than within.
The talents of Bohemia were as diverse as the physiognomies of its
citizens. Genius, it might be said with truth, was not more common there
than in other walks of life. Real genius is a law and a life to itself;
it is no more Bohemian than it is aristocratic, democratic, liberal or
conservative. Social labels imply classes to bear them, and classes
imply a common factor of intelligence. Genius, being an uncommon factor,
is always severely individual. Moreover, so far as Bohemia is concerned,
genius, being one kind of wealth, unsuited its possessor for Bohemian
citizenship as much as a comfortable income. The trivialities and
futilities of some, the extravagant idleness of others, would have
estranged genius or forced it to pretend an acquiescence in much that
was repugnant to its nature. With the possible exception of Gautier, the
Bohemia of 1830 could really claim none of the greatest names of
Romanticism. Victor Hugo, Sainte-Beuve, and the other divinities of its
worship were, apart from all further possibilities, too old. Balzac was
a far too busy man to pay it more than momentary visits; Berlioz, before
he went to Rome, was too occupied in writing music which irritated
Cherubini; Delacroix, the acknowledged king of Romantic painters, is
revealed in his letters as the austerest of hard workers, scarcely
leaving his studio but for a walk when the shadows began to fall. Yet,
if Bohemia was denied genius, it was not denied a very high average of
ability, which was enhanced by its burning and disinterested enthusiasm
for art. Like all other societies, it had its fools, its knaves, its
dunces, and its awkward squad. The Romantic revolution had attracted
many scatterbrained fanatics to Paris, with as little artistic aptitude
as good sense in their heads. Out of those who survived the first
disappointments were fashioned failures like Alfred de Musset's
unfortunate in the verses quoted previously, "râpé, sycophante,
envieux." Probably, too, an impartial observer, listening to the
nocturnal conversations of a Bohemian group, would often have found the
ecstatic admiration of the listeners disproportionate to the turgid
periods of the speaker, for to every real artist in Bohemia there was a
wind-bag or two. Nevertheless there was a good deal of truth in Balzac's
eulogy. Bohemia numbered within its gates a good proportion of the best
among the younger generation. They were indeed an "immense force," which
might have been better utilized. Every kind of talent was represented
there abundantly, because the field of letters seemed to be the only
battlefield then left open to willing and eager soldiers. This very fact
gave the Romantic Bohemia its imperishable distinction, for after 1848,
when young blood again found other outlets, what had been a little world
was left no more than a decadent province.
The republic of Bohemia in general had all the follies and virtues, the
amiability and brutality of youth. It was generous, noisy, more often
hungry than drunk, often on the verge of despair, and always
fantastically clothed. It sprang up in Paris as rapidly as the iron
shanties of a Canadian township round a proposed extension of the
railway. The settlers, self-assured, fervid, rise on a tide of
increasing prosperity till some supreme moment when their venture, its
markets humming, its saloons crowded, its new town hall nearly built,
seems the very embodiment of all their hopes. But if the railway, after
all, take another route, the glory gradually dwindles, the workers throw
down the tools, and the host of speculators melts away, till only that
population is left which the soil will actually support, and what was
for a day a city resumes the existence of an ordinary village. Bohemia's
history is of a less commercial texture, but of a like pattern, as I
have already said. Its rise was swift, it had a brilliant apogee, its
decline was gradual. In a posthumous poem by Philothée O'Neddy, whose
place in the chronicles of Bohemia will be duly recorded, it is said:
_Il est depuis longtemps avéré que nous sommes,_
_Dans le siècle, six milles jeunes hommes_
_Qui du démon de l'Art nous croyant tourmentés,_
_Dépensons notre vie en excentricités;_
_Qui, du fatal Byron copiant des allures,_
_De solennels manteaux drapons nos encolures._
These six thousand copies of the "Fatal Byron," if they ever existed,
have, for the most part, died without leaving their names to posterity.
The historian can deal only with a few individuals, who embodied the
salient qualities of Bohemia.
VII
THE SECOND "CÉNACLE"
"People always forget," said Théophile Gautier in his old age, "that we
were the first Schaunards and Collines, a quarter of a century before
Murger. Only," he added with a smile, "we had talent and did not write
invertebrate verses like those of that feeble appendage to Alfred de
Musset." This saying, reported by his son-in-law, was made on a festive
occasion, so that it is unnecessary to regard with concern the
discrepancy between this view of Murger and the one which Gautier has
expressed in print. That kindest-hearted of writers would never
wittingly have hurt the reputation or memory of the humblest among his
fellows, and I only quote the passage because, when the malice is
discounted as largely as the "quarter of a century," it remains a true
reference to the origins of Bohemia by one who was, so to speak, one of
its pilgrim fathers. The first Schaunards and Collines, Rodolphes and
Marcels, the unknown poets and artists who first raised the standard of
common enthusiasm against a common enemy, the _bourgeois_, were the
young and lusty friends of a young and lusty Gautier. They were members
of a _cénacle_, albeit a less beatific _cénacle_ than the brotherhood
drawn in Balzac's "Illusions Perdues." In the _cénacle_ of the Rue des
Quatre Vents he evolved by sheer imagination a compensating mirage of
virtue to be contrasted with all the real depravity of society which his
eye so unerringly saw, just as Eugénie Grandet shines out impossibly
beside her miserly father, and Madame Firmiani in the corrupt circle of
his _femmes du monde_. Nevertheless there is a certain sublimity in the
_cénacle_ to which attention cannot be denied. It was Balzac's picture
of an ideal Bohemia in which alone such a nature as his could have found
a home. It is of little moment that he dates the action of "Illusions
Perdues" a few years before 1830, for the _cénacle_ itself is a timeless
creation, only limited by the fact that one of its members died in the
insurrection of 1832. The young men who composed the _cénacle_ bore upon
their brow the "seal of special genius." Daniel d'Arthez, upon whom
since the death of their leader, the great mystic, Louis Lambert, the
mantle had fallen, was a monarchist of noble family, destined to become
the greatest writer of the future; Horace Bianchon, the flower of
doctors, a materialist of perfect charity and profound science; Léon
Giraud, a humanitarian philosopher; Joseph Bridau, a great painter with
"the line of Rome and the colour of Venice"; Fulgence Ridal, a sceptic,
a cynic, and the wittiest playwright of his time; Meyraux, a scientist;
and Michel Chrestien, a red republican who was killed in the Cloître
Saint-Merri. They were not ascetics by profession: d'Arthez, for
instance, was the last lover of the Diane, the Princesse de Cadignan, in
the days of his later glory; Bridau's art was affected by his love
affairs; Chrestien was "plein d'illusions et d'amour." They were like
the "saints" of the early Christian Church, each going his own way, but
true helpers one of another, true champions and honest critics. They
were without vanity or envy, having a profound esteem for one another,
with a consciousness of their own worth. "Their great external misery
and the splendour of their intellectual wealth produced a singular
contrast. In their society nobody thought of the realities of life
except as subjects for friendly pleasantries.... The sufferings of
poverty, when they made themselves felt, were so gaily borne, accepted
with such ardour by all, that they did nothing to alter the particular
serenity which marks the faces of young men free from grave faults, who
have not lost part of themselves in any of those low traffickings which
are forced upon men by poverty ill supported, by the desire to get on
without any choice of means, and by the facile complacency with which
men of letters welcome or pardon betrayals.... These young men were sure
of themselves: the enemy of one became the enemy of all, and they would
have abandoned their most urgent interests to obey the sacred solidarity
of their hearts. All incapable of a mean action, they could oppose a
formidable 'no' to every accusation, and defend one another with
security. Equally high-minded and equally matched in matters of
sensibility, they could think and speak all their mind in the domain of
science and intelligence; thence came the innocence of their
intercourse, the gaiety of their talk. Sure of mutual understanding,
their minds digressed at their ease; and they stood on no ceremony among
themselves, confided in each other their sorrows and their joys,
pondered and suffered with open hearts." I need speak no further of this
imaginary _cénacle_, for "Illusions Perdues" is widely known. It is one
of those wonderful fantasies that one feels were lovingly cherished by
Balzac, at once his darling dreams and his disappointments. He had a
passionate desire to express the beautiful, and he was denied that gift.
The lights dance before his eyes, and his very language becomes confused
and turgid when he deserts reality. It may safely be said that in the
real _Bohème_ there was no such goodly company of industrious, gifted,
morally austere, intellectually gay, unselfish young men, and that there
never will be in any society till the coming of the Coquecigrues.
The Bohemia of artistic tradition began in what Théophile Gautier named
the "second _cénacle_." The first _cénacle_, as all the world knows, was
that of Victor Hugo, Sainte-Beuve, and the brothers Deschamps, who met
regularly at the _cabaret_ of Mère Saguet on Montparnasse in the days
when Hugo was still hatching the plot of the literary revolution. To
trace to them the origins of Bohemia would be an error, for they never
had any part or lot in Bohemianism. They were young, it is true, and
depended upon their art for a living, but the fact that they were
nothing but a small _coterie_ of earnest poets, more akin to the band of
d'Arthez than the friends of Rodolphe, depends upon two things, their
time and their outlook. The first _cénacle_ came into existence about
1822, when the throne of the Bourbons seemed solid and royalism went
hand in hand with classicism. No standard of insurrection, civic or
literary, had yet been raised; the victory was yet to come, and it would
have been madness, before the campaign was fully planned or the army
gathered, for the chiefs to have aped the style of victors. The
merciless ridicule of Paris would have killed them in a week, without
support as they were. Defiance of the _bourgeois_, an absolute essential
of the true Bohemian creed, was, therefore, not appropriate to the first
_cénacle_, who lived openly the life of ordinary, decent citizens, while
secretly preparing the proclamations, the standards, and the weapons by
which the cataclysmic victory of 1830 was to be won. In such a tense
moment Bohemia could not be born. Their outlook, in the second place,
was too lofty to comprehend the lower planes in which Bohemia made
itself conspicuous. To strike a more human note in poetry was their
chief aim: they were concerned with art rather than with life itself;
and though Hugo, in the privacy of his room, doffed with relief that
_bourgeois_ symbol, the high linen collar, he was like a general in his
tent drawing up that transcendental plan of operations, the preface to
"Cromwell," which was to inspire his troops in their pioneering and
shooting, in their whole bodily attack on the classic tradition. As the
classic tradition was embodied not only in literature, in contemporary
journalism, in professional lectures, but in the social life of all
staid citizens as well, the Romantic troops, passionate and fundamental
as their literary enthusiasm was, were forced to make social life the
field of their assault, all the more because, being poor, young, and
unknown, they were unable to inflict such palpable wounds with pen or
brush as they could by making a violent protest in every detail of the
ordinary way of living. By outraging the accepted standards of decency
in dress, in speech, and in demeanour, they made their presence daily
felt, and where their presence was felt their ideals were made
ostensible. Their tactics, after the event, may be blamed, the effect
they produced was, no doubt, smaller than they imagined, but the fact
remains that la _vie de Bohème_ began neither as a retreat for higher
souls nor as a means for reckless self-indulgence, but as a definite
method of drawing attention to a new and important artistic creed. For
the greater exponents of this creed, a Hugo or a Delacroix, such a
material protest would have been out of place; it would have detracted
even from the effect produced by their great works of art. Only the rank
and file, to whom supreme personal achievement was impossible, collected
and commonly inspired, as I have already pointed out, under special
historical and social conditions, were justified in adopting the
measures that were best suited to their purpose. Their purpose was as
temporary as their conditions; their device, _épater le bourgeois_, has
now become a hollow phrase, but it meant then the rousing of every
shopkeeper, every _garçon de café_, as well as the cultured reader of
current literature, to the sense that art was alive again. This was the
aim of the second _cénacle_, the first Bohemians. They were successful,
and they were necessary.
The second _cénacle_ was not a formal organization, so that no definite
date can be fixed for its institution. Its members probably came
together in the same haphazard way as the small bands of friends at a
public school or university, crystallizing so imperceptibly that the
moment of incorporation baffles memory, and often so firmly that death
alone is their solvent. Théophile Gautier, in his fragmentary "Histoire
du Romantisme," has given the fullest details of the _cénacle's_
existence, yet neither he nor his biographer, Maxime du Camp, make it
clear whether it was formed prior or posterior to the famous first night
of "Hernani" in February of 1830. Gautier, no doubt, had forgotten, but
it seems fairly safe to assume that if preliminary acquaintance was
already made between some of its members before that time, the stormy
nights of February strengthened the bond and made the association
compact. The story of "Hernani," with the red waistcoat, _vieil as de
pique_, and other trimmings, has so often been told, even in English,
that it may seem unnecessary to traverse such well-trodden ground; but a
historian has no business to take anything for granted, so that
"Hernani" can be no more justly omitted here than Waterloo from any work
upon Napoleon. It was part of Victor Hugo's agreement with the Théâtre
Français that a number of seats should be at his disposal each night,
and that the holders of the tickets should be admitted some time before
the ordinary public. These were the trenches into which his army of
young men were thrown. Minor officers were entrusted with the task of
bringing the men to the rendezvous, Jules Vabre, an architect, being
responsible for a hundred and fifty men, and Célestin Nanteuil for
almost as large a number. Gérard de Nerval, whose translation of
Goethe's "Faust," published in 1828 (when he was only nineteen), had
brought him considerable fame in Romantic circles, had known Gautier,
who was two years his junior, at the Collège Charlemagne. This amiable
essayist, whom Gautier likened more than once to a swallow, flitting
always in and out among his friends, was not forgetful of his young
friend in the days of recruiting. Gautier was at that time studying
painting in the studio of Rioult, whither Gérard de Nerval made one day
a swallow-like dart and produced six tickets marked with the single but
thrilling word _Hierro_, the Spanish for "iron." According to Maxime du
Camp he gave these to Gautier with the words:
"Tu réponds de tes hommes?"
To him replied Gautier: "Par le crâne dans lequel Byron buvait à
l'Abbaye de Newstead, j'en réponds. N'est-ce pas, vous autres?"
"Mort aux perruques!" resounded in answer through the studio, and Gérard
flitted away content.
Gautier, who was a little better provided with worldly goods than some
of the Romantic army, then set about devising a costume that should
strike death into the heart of the _perruques_. With extreme care he cut
out a pattern of a medieval _pourpoint_--a buttonless waistcoat coming
right up to the collar-bone, and fastening with laces behind like the
uniform of Saint-Simon's disciples, which symbolized mutual assistance,
because no Saint-Simonian could truss his own points. His Gascon
tailor's professional objections were overruled, even though the
material chosen was a gorgeous silk coloured a Chinese vermilion, and
the garment was made as desired: to it were added a pair of light
greenish-grey trousers with a broad stripe of black down each seam, a
black coat with ample _revers_ of velvet, and a flowing cravat. It was
indeed a devastating sight, and one that deservedly became famous. In
this fervent spirit was the battle waged over "Hernani"; for thirty
consecutive performances the trenches were manfully filled and a
fusillade of cheers poured forth at every touch of romantic colour,
every bold _enjambement_, every defiance of classic circumlocution, and,
above all, every sign of disapprobation on the part of those they rudely
styled "wigs" and "bald pates." The battlefield was often a pandemonium,
but the result was victory. The Théâtre Français, the very home of
Molière, was successfully carried by the Romantic assault. Gautier had
magnificently won his spurs, and shortly afterwards he was introduced by
Gérard de Nerval and Pétrus Borel to the great hero himself, an ordeal
which caused him so much trepidation that he sat for over an hour on the
stairs with his two sponsors before he could pluck up courage to
proceed. His fears, however, soon vanished after a cordial reception,
and as his parents were then living next door to Hugo in the splendid
old Place Royale, he soon became the most constant page and attendant of
the poet, for whom he preserved a lifelong devotion.
These were the days of the second _cénacle_, for "Hernani" was the
Hegira of _la vie de Bohème_. During the long waits in the empty
theatre, the passionate mornings of preparation, the fiery reunions
after the curtain had fallen, a set of the most ardent Hugo-worshippers
had found their affinities. They did not indeed live together--some
were dutifully under the parental roof, some had hardly a roof to their
heads, one at least was supporting a mother and sister by daily work in
a government office--but they formed the habit of meeting and spending
many hours of the day and night together and the meeting-place was
either the studio of a young sculptor, Jehan du Seigneur, or the sanded
parlour of the _Petit Moulin Rouge_, in the _rond-point_ of the Arc de
Triomphe. Their names were Pétrus Borel, Joseph Bouchardy, Philothée
O'Neddy, Alphonse Brot, Augustus Mackeat, Jules Vabre, Napoléon Thom,
Jehan du Seigneur, Léon Clopet, Célestin Nanteuil, Théophile Gautier,
and Gérard de Nerval. It is almost needless to say that some of the
names are Gothic transformations in the Romantic fashion. Pétrus Borel
was, of course, christened Pierre, as du Seigneur was christened Jean by
his parents; while Philothée O'Neddy and Augustus Mackeat conceal the
persons of Théophile Dondey and Auguste Maquet. But names in _-us_ or
Celtic patronymics were all the rage, and even Gautier was called
Albertus after his poem of that name published in 1832. A curious
feature about the group was that, though it existed to champion the
cause of Romantic poetry, the only pure man of letters was Gérard de
Nerval. Of the rest, Borel, formerly an architect, was learning to draw
in Dévéria's studio, Thom and Nanteuil were artists, Gautier and
Bouchardy studying art, du Seigneur a sculptor, Clopet and Vabre
architects; O'Neddy and Brot, indeed, were professed poets, but in no
less an embryonic stage than some of the others who afterwards found in
the pen their most successful tool. "This mixture of art in poetry,"
says Gautier, "was and has remained one of the characteristic signs of
the new school, and makes it clear why the first adepts were recruited
rather among the artists than among the men of letters. A multitude of
objects, images, and comparisons which were thought to be irreducible to
the written word were introduced into the language and have stayed
there."[17]
[Illustration: Pétrus Borel]
The one whom Gautier called the _individualité pivotale_ of the group,
though Philothée O'Neddy in after years denied that he had more
influence than Gautier, Gérard, or Bouchardy, was Pétrus Borel, Le
Lycanthrope as he subsequently named himself. His full name was Pierre
Borel d'Hauterive, and he was born in Lyons in 1809. His father,
captured by the revolutionaries in 1792 and then liberated, fled to
Switzerland, whence he returned to Paris, a ruined man, to earn what he
could by keeping a shop. At the age of fifteen Pierre was apprenticed to
an architect, and in 1829 he set up on his own account without much
success. He and Jules Vabre became associated, and so poor were they
that they used to use the cellars of the houses on which they were
engaged as their dwelling-place. Gautier recalled visiting them once in
the cellar of a house in the Rue Fontaine-du-Roi, where they were
preparing their frugal meal of potatoes baked in the ashes. "Ah," said
Vabre with pride, "but we have salt on Sundays." Borel's ideas were too
Gothically fantastic for his _bourgeois_ clients, and, after a violent
dispute over his fourth commission, he ordered the half-finished
building to be demolished, and gave up for ever an ungrateful
profession,[18] betaking himself for a season to the study of painting,
and writing the while those poems animated by a haughty bitterness which
were published under the title of "Rhapsodies." They are dedicated and
addressed to the members of the second _cénacle_, among whom he enjoyed
an enormous reputation. He was for them the poet of the future, before
whom Hugo would crumble to dust. Alas! for youthful predictions; thirty
years later Gautier, the most loyal of Romantics, was forced to exclaim:
"Dire que j'ai cru à Pétrus!"[19] He exercised over the group, in fact,
a kind of unconscious hypnotism. His slightly superior age, his strange,
rough, paradoxical eloquence, and, above all, his picturesque appearance
imposed on them all. Their ideal was to have an _allure fatale_, a
sombre complexion and haughty, Byronic mien. Borel realized it. He
looked like a Castilian nobleman out of a Velasquez picture, says
Gautier, with his "young and serious face, of perfect regularity, an
olive skin gilded with light shades of amber, lit up by great, shining
eyes, sad as those of Abencerrages thinking of Granada," his bright red
lip which shone under his moustache, "one spark of life in that mask of
Oriental immobility," and his fine, full, silky beard perfumed and
tended like that of a sultan, at a time when to wear a beard in Paris
was an outrage to public decency. He was clothed in black, wearing a
high Robespierre waistcoat and draping a long black cloak around him
with an air of studied mystery. How could the younger men, whose beards
refused to grow, not believe in such a perfect symbol, so magnificently
scornful, so profoundly fatal? He was the most republican, too, of them
all, the typical _Bousingot_ of the _bourgeois_ Press, though fanatical
republicanism was not, as Philothée O'Neddy afterwards protested in a
letter to Charles Asselineau, their representative opinion. Gérard had
no political opinions at all, Gautier was obstinately _Jeune-France_,
and the others only dreamt of a social Utopia in which æstheticism
should replace religion, or of some humanitarian millennium after the
manner of Saint-Simon and Fourier. Borel, however, held society in
complete disgust, as he showed when he left the gathering at Jehan du
Seigneur's, and proceeded one summer to live with some followers on the
slopes of Montmartre, all naked as savages, till the landlord drove them
out at the price of his porte
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