The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 74, December, 1863. Various
a poet, you had such a marked weakness for laurel, you used to poison all the soup with it. We laid in a supply of potatoes, and constantly bought tobacco, coffee, and sugar. There was gnashing of teeth and curses when the expenses of the fourth of November were written. Why did you let me go out with my pockets so full of money? And you went to Dagneaux's and spent five cents. What in the name of Heaven could you have gotten at Dagneaux's for five cents?3 Good me! how expensive are the least pleasures! Upon pretext of going with a free-ticket to see a drama by an inhabitant of Belleville, I bought two omnibus-tickets, one to go and the other to return. Two omnibus-tickets! I was severely punished for this prodigality. Seventy-four cents ran away from me, making their escape through a hole in my pocket. How could I dare to return home and confront your wrath? Two omnibus-tickets alone would have brought a severe admonition on my head; but seventy-four cents with them—! If I had not begun to disarm you by telling you the Belleville drama, I should have been a doomed man. Nevertheless, the next day, without thinking of these terrible losses, we lent G– money; he really seemed to look upon us as Messrs. Murger and Co., his bankers. I wonder by what insidious means this G–contrived to captivate our confidence, and the only solution I can discover is the inexperience of giddy youth; for two days afterwards G– was audacious enough to reappear and to ask for another loan. Nothing new appears on the pages of the book, except fifteen cents for wine: this must have been one of your ideas: I do not mean to say that you were ever a wine-bibber, but we were so accustomed to water, we drank so much water without getting tired of it, that this item, 'wine,' seems very extraordinary to me. We added up every page until the eighth of November, when the sum total reached eight dollars and twelve cents; here the additions ceased. We doubtless were averse to trembling at the sight of the total. The tenth of November, you purchased a thimble: some men have skill enough to mend their clothes at their leisure moments. A few days ago I paid a visit to a charming literary man, who writes articles full of life and wit for the newspapers. I opened the door so suddenly, he blushed as he threw a pair of pantaloons into the corner. He had a thimble on his finger. Ah! wretched cits, who refuse to give your daughters in marriage to literary men, you would be full of admiration for them, could you see them mending their clothes! Smoking-tobacco absorbed more than one-third of our money; we received too many friends, and then there was a celebrated artisan-poet who used to be brought to our rooms, and who used to bawl so many stanzas I would go to bed.
"Monsieur Credit made his reappearance on the fourteenth of November. He went to the grocer, to the tobacco-shop, to the fuel-dealer, and was received tolerably well; he was especially successful with the grocer's daughter when he appeared in your likeness. Did Monsieur Credit die on the seventeenth of November? I ask, because I see on the 'credit' side of our account-book, 'Frock-coat, sixty cents.' These sixty cents came from the pawnbroker's. How his clerks humiliated us! I could make a long and terrible history of our dealings with the pawnbroker; I shall make a short and simple story of it. When money failed us, you pointed out to me an old cashmere shawl which we used as a table-cover. I told you, 'They will give us nothing on that.' You replied, 'Oh, yes, they will, if we add pantaloons and waistcoats to it.' I added pantaloons and waistcoats to it, and you took the bundle and started for the den in Place de la Croix Rouge. You soon came back with the huge package, and you were sad enough as you said, 'They are disagreeable yonder; try in the Rue de Condé; the clerks, who are accustomed to deal with students, are not so hard-hearted as they are in the Place de la Croix Rouge.' I went to the Rue de Condé. The two pair of pantaloons, the famous shawl, and the waistcoats were closely examined; even their pockets were searched. 'We cannot lend anything on that,' said the pawnbroker's clerk, disdainfully pushing the things away from him. You had the excellent habit of never despairing. You said, 'We must wait until this evening; at night all clothes are new; and to take every precaution, I shall go to the pawnbroker's shop in the Rue du Fouare, where all the poor go; as they are accustomed there to see nothing pledged but rags and tatters, our clothes will glitter like barbaric pearl and gold.' Alas! the pawnbroker in the Rue du Fouare was as cruel as his brethren. So the next morning in sheer despair I went to pledge my only frock-coat, and I did this to lend half the sum to that incessant borrower, G–. Lastly, on the nineteenth of November, we sold some books. Fortune smiled on us; we had a chicken-soup with a superabundance of laurel. Do you remember an excellent shopkeeper of the Rue du Faubourg Saint Jacques, near the city-gate, who, we were told, not only sold thread, but kept a circulating library? What a circulating library it was! Plays, three odd volumes of Anne Radcliffe's novels,—and if the old lady had never made our acquaintance, the inhabitants of the Faubourg Saint Jacques would never have known of the existence of 'Letters upon Mythology' and 'De Profundis,' two books I was heartless enough to sell, notwithstanding all their titles to my respect. The authors were born in the same neighborhood which gave me birth: one is Desmoustiers, the other Alfred Mousse. Maybe Arsène Houssaye would not be pleased, were I to remind him of one of the crimes of his youth, where one sees for a frontispiece skeletons—'twas the heyday of the Romantic School—playing tenpins with skulls for balls! The sale of 'De Profundis' enabled us to visit Café Tabourey that evening. You sold soon afterwards eighty cents' worth of books. Allow me to record that they came from your library; my library remained constantly upon the shelves; notwithstanding all your appeals, I never sold any books, except the lamentable history of Alfred Mousse. Monsieur Credit contrived to go to the tradesmen's with imperturbable coolness; he went everywhere until the first of December, when he paid every cent of debt. I have but one regret, and this is, that the little account-book suddenly ceases after a month; it contains only the month of November. This is not enough! Had I continued it, Its pages would have been so many mementos to recall my past life to me."
Monsieur Champfleury introduced Henry Murger to Monsieur Arsène Houssaye, who was then chief editor of "L'Artiste," and it happened oddly enough that Murger wrote nothing but poetry for this journal. Monsieur Houssaye took a great fancy to Murger, and persuaded him, for the sake of "effect" on the title-pages of books and on the backs of magazines, to change Henri to Henry, and give Murger a German physiognomy by writing it Mürger. As Frenchmen treat their names with as much freedom as we use towards old gloves, Murger instantly adopted Monsieur Houssaye's suggestion, and clung as long as he lived to the new orthography of his name. He began to find it less difficult to procure each day his daily bread, but still the gaunt wolf, Poverty, continued to glare on him. "Our existence," he said, "is like a ballad which has several couplets; sometimes all goes well, at other times all goes badly, then worse, next worst, and so on; but the burden never changes; 'tis always the same,—Misery! Misery! Misery!" One day he became so absolutely and hopelessly poor, that he was undecided whether to enlist as a sailor or take a clerk's place in the Messrs. de Rothschilds' banking-house. He actually did make application to Madame de Rothschild. Here is the letter in which he records this application:—
"15th August, 1844.
"I am delighted to be at last able to write you without being obliged to describe wretchedness. Ill-fortune seems to begin to tire of pursuing me, and good-fortune appears about to make advances to me. Madame Rothschild, to whom I wrote begging her to get her husband to give me a situation, informed her correspondent of it, and told him to send for and talk with me. I could not obtain a place, but I was offered ten dollars rather delicately, and I took it. As soon as I received it, I went as fast as I could to put myself in condition to be able to go out in broad daylight."
We scarcely know which is the saddest to see: Henry Murger accepting ten dollars from Madame de Rothschild's generous privy purse,—for it is alms, soften it as you may,—or to observe the happiness this paltry sum gives him. How deeply he must have been steeped in poverty!
But now the very worst was over. In 1848 he sent a contribution to "Le Corsaire," a petty newspaper of odds and ends, of literature and of gossip. The contribution was published. He became attached to the paper. In 1849 he began the publication in "Le Corsaire" of the story which was to make him famous, "La Vie de Bohême," which was, like all his works, something in the nature of an autobiographical sketch. Its wit, its sprightly style, its odd images, its odd scenes, its strange mixture of gayety and sadness, attracted attention immediately. But who pays attention to newspaper-articles? However brilliant and profound they may be, they are forgotten quite as soon as read. The best newspaper-writer on his most successful day can only hope to be remembered from one morning to another; if he commands attention for so long a period,
Dagneaux's is the most expensive restaurant of the Latin Quarter.