Vie de Bohème: A Patch of Romantic Paris. Orlo Williams
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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