The Bohemians of the Latin Quarter. Henri Murger
made up his mind beforehand to submit to the ruthless law: væ victis.
H. M.
THE LATIN QUARTER
(“Scènes de la Vie de Bohème”)
I
HOW THE BROTHERHOOD CAME TOGETHER
BEHOLD how Chance (styled by sceptics the business-agent of Providence) brought together in a single day every one of the individuals who afterwards met in the bonds of brotherly union, constituting an inner circle in that fraction of the country of Bohemia which the present author has endeavoured to make known to the public.
One morning (it was the 8th of April) Alexandre Schaunard, who cultivated the two liberal arts of music and painting, was suddenly startled out of his slumber by a lusty peal from the king of a neighbouring poultry-yard, who acted as his alarm clock.
“Good gracious!” cried Schaunard, “this feathered timepiece of mine is fast. Impossible! It cannot be to-day already!”
So saying he skipped nimbly out of a piece of furniture of his own industrious invention, a kind of Jack-of-all-trades, which played the rôle of a bedstead by night (and, without boasting, played it passably ill), while by day it represented everything else, the rest of the furniture having been absent ever since the previous winter—a remarkably rigorous season.
Schaunard proceeded next to wrap himself against the nipping breeze of morning in a pink spangled satin petticoat which he used as a dressing-gown. This piece of finery had been left behind in his room one night after a masked ball by a Folly, foolish to the extent of trusting to Schaunard’s specious promises, when the latter, as the Marquis de Mondor, jingled a dozen crowns seductively in his pockets. The said coins, having been cut out of a sheet of base metal with a punch, possessed a purely fancy value, and formed indeed a part of the accessories of a costume borrowed from the theatre.
His morning toilet thus completed, the artist flung open first the window, then the shutter. A ray of sunshine flashed in like an arrow, till he was fain to close a pair of eyes still veiled in the mists of slumber; and at that very moment a clock struck five from a neighbouring steeple.
“It is really the dawn,” muttered Schaunard. “An astonishing fact; but there is a mistake all the same,” he continued, going up to an almanack on the wall. “The indications of science affirm that at this season of the year the sun ought not to rise before half-past five. It is just five o’clock, and the sun is up already! Blameworthy zeal! The planet is in the wrong. I shall complain to the Astronomical Board. And yet,” he went on, “it is time I began to feel a little anxiety on my own account. To-day, no doubt, immediately succeeds to yesterday, and as yesterday was the 7th, to-day must be the 8th of April, unless Saturn has taken to walking backwards. From the tenor of this document,” he continued (scanning a formal notice to quit pinned to the wall), “I gather that this day I am bound to leave this room clear of all effects by noon precisely, after counting into the hands of M. Bernard, my landlord, the sum of seventy-five francs, representing three quarters’ rent, now due, which he claims in execrable handwriting. And I, as usual, hoped that Chance would take this matter in hand and settle it for me; but it rather looks as if Chance had not found time for it. In fact, I have six hours left, and by making good use of the time I may, perhaps——Oh, come, let us get to work!”
Schaunard was proceeding to dress himself in a great-coat of some once shaggy material, now irremediably bald, when suddenly, as if a tarantula had bitten him, he began to dance, executing a choregraphic composition of his own which had often won the honour of special attention from the police at public balls.
“Dear me! it is peculiar how the morning air gives one ideas! I am on the track of my tune, it seems to me! Let us see——” And Schaunard sat down half-dressed to the piano, roused the sleeping instrument with a tempestuous assortment of chords, and set off in quest of the melodious phrase which had eluded his pursuit so long.
“Do, sol, mi, do, la, si, do, ré. Boum! boum! Fa, ré, mi, ré. Eh! eh! That ré rings false, false as Judas!” cried Schaunard, thumping on the doubtful key. “Let us try the minor.
“A young person is pulling a daisy to pieces on a blue lake, and this thing ought to touch off her affliction neatly. ’Tis an idea that is past its first youth. But after all, since it’s the fashion, and as no publisher can be found bold enough to bring out a song without a blue lake in it, why you must conform. Do, sol, mi, do, la, si, do, ré. That is not so bad—it gives a good enough idea of a daisy, especially to people that are not very well up in botany. La, si, do, ré (there’s that rascally ré again!). Now to give a good idea of the blue lake you ought to have dampness, and azure, and moonlight (for there the moon is in it too). Stay now, it’s coming though; we must not forget the swan. Fa, mi, la, sol,” continued Schaunard, clinking the crystalline notes of the upper octave. “Now there is only the girl’s farewell, when she makes up her mind to take the plunge into the blue lake so as to rejoin her true love that lies buried under the snow. The ending is not very clear, but it is interesting. You want something tender and melancholy. There it comes; now for a dozen bars weeping like Magdalene, fit to split your heart in pieces. Brr! brr!” cried Schaunard, shivering in his spangled petticoat, “if it would only split a little firewood as well! There is a joist in the recess over the bed that gets very much in the way when I have company—to dinner. I might light a bit of fire with that (la, la. ré, mi)—for I feel inspiration coming on me with a cold in the head. Pooh! so much the worse! Let us get on with drowning the girl.”
Schaunard’s fingers tortured the quivering keyboard, as with gleaming eyes and straining ears he pursued the melody that seemed to hover nymph like above him, but declined to be caught in the maze of sounds that rose like a fog from the vibrating instrument.
“Now we will see how my music and the poet’s words hang together,” he continued, and in an unpleasant voice he began to try over some poetry of the order peculiar to comic opera and the lyric stage—
“The maid with the golden hair
Flings her mantilla by,
Then to the heavens so fair
Raises a tear-dimmed eye;
Then in the silvery wave
Rippling the lake so blue——
“What! what!” cried Schaunard, justly indignant. “A silvery wave in a blue lake. I never noticed that till now. Too romantic by half. After all, the poet is an idiot; he never saw silver nor yet a lake in his life. His ballad is stupid into the bargain; the length of his lines does not fit into my music. I shall compose my own words in future, which is to say that I mean to set about it, and that no later than at once. I feel I am in the vein. I will rough out some model couplets and adapt my tune to them afterwards.”
Schaunard, with his head between his hands, assumed the pensive attitude proper to a mortal in commerce with the Muse. Then, after a few moments of this divine intercourse, he brought into the world one of the misshapen conceptions known as dummy-verses, which librettists throw off with considerable facility, to serve as a provisional basis for the composer’s art. Schaunard’s dummy, however, was not devoid of common sense. It represented accurately enough the disturbance aroused in his brain by the brutal reality of the date—the 8th of April.
Here are the couplets—
Eight and eight make sixteen
(Six, and you carry the one);
Pleased and proud I had been
If, ere the quarter was done,
I had found some one to lend
(Somebody honest and poor)
Eight hundred francs to a friend;
I’d have paid up, I am sure.
REFRAIN.
Then, when a quarter to twelve
Sounds from the dial of Fate,
I’ll