The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 74, December, 1863

Murger always attributed a great deal of influence upon his life to the accident which had given his father artists for tenants. Not only La Blache, but Garcia and his incomparable daughters, Marie Malibran and Pauline Viardot, and, after they left, Baroilhet, the opera-singer, had rooms in the house. The handsome boy was constantly with them, and this early and long and intimate association with Art gave him elegance and grace and vivacity. The seeds sown during such intercourse may for years lie buried beneath the cares and thoughts of a laborious life, and yet grow and bring forth fruit as soon as a more propitious atmosphere environs them. Comrades in the office where he wrote likewise had influence upon his career. He found among the clerks two brothers, Pierre and Emile Bisson, gentlemen who have now attained reputation by their admirable photographic landscapes, especially of Alpine scenery. They were then as poor and as uneducated as Henry Murger. They lived in a house inhabited by several painters, from whom they caught a love and some knowledge of Art. They communicated the contagion to their new comrade, and the moment office-hours were over all three hastened, as fast as they could go, to the nearest public drawing-school. All three aspired to the fame of Rubens and of Paul Veronese. Murger had no talent for painting. One day, after he had been guilty of some pictures which are said to be—for they are still in existence—enough to make the hair of a connoisseur of painting stand on end, Pierre Bisson said to him, "Throw away the pencil, Murger; you will never make a painter." Murger accepted the decree without appeal. He felt that painting was not in him.2 He took up the pen and wrote poetry. There is nothing equal to the foolhardiness of youth. It grapples with the most difficult subjects, and knows it can master them. As all of Murger's friends were painters, except his father and mother, and they were illiterate, his insane prose seemed as fine poetry as was ever written, because it turned somersets on feet. Nobody noticed whether it was on five or six or fifteen feet. His father, however, had heard what a dangerous disease of the purse poetry was, and forbade his son from trying to catch it,—vowing, that, if he heard again of its continued pursuit, he would immediately make a tailor of him. Of course, the threat did not deter Murger from the chase; but instead of pursuing it openly, he pursued it by stealth. The sportsman became a poacher. Pierre and Émile Bisson quitted the attorney's office and opened a studio: they were painters now. Henry Murger managed to filch an hour every day from the time allotted to the errands of the office about Paris to spend in the studio of his friends, where he would write his poetry and hide his manuscripts. Here he made the acquaintance of artists and literary young men as unfledged as himself, but who possessed the advantages of a regular scholastic education. They taught him the rules of prosody and the exercises proper to overcome the mere mechanical difficulties of versification. This society made Murger more than ever ambitious; a secret instinct told him that the pen was the arm with which he would win fame and fortune. He determined to abandon the law-office.

His father was furious enough at this resolution, and more than one painful scene took place between them. The boy was within an ace of bring kicked out of doors, when his troubles reached the ears of a literary tenant of the house: this was no other than Monsieur de Jouy, a member of the French Academy, and quite famous in his day for "L'Ermite de la Chaussée d'Antin," and a tragedy, "Sylla," which Talma's genius threw such beams upon as made it radiant, and for an imprisonment for political offences, a condiment without which French reputations seem to lack savor. Heaven knows what would have become of the poor boy but for this intervention, as his mother was dead and he was all friendless. Monsieur de Jouy procured him the place of private secretary to Count Tolstoy, a Russian nobleman established by the Czar in Paris as his political correspondent. The salary given was meagre enough, but in this world all things have a relative as well as an intrinsic value, and eight dollars a month seemed to the poor lad, who had never yet earned a cent, a fragment of El Dorado or of Peru. It gave him independence. His contemporaries have described him as gay, free, easy, and happy at this period. He had ceased to be dependent upon anybody; he lived upon his own earnings; he was in the full bloom of health and youth; and the horizon before him, even though clouded, wore all the colors of the rainbow. His father gave him a garret in the house, and continued to allow him a seat at the table, but he made young Murger give him six of the eight dollars earned. The rest of his salary was spent among the boxes of books which line the parapet of the Paris quays,—a sort of literary Morgue or dead-house, where the still-born and deceased children of the press are exhibited, to challenge the pity of passers-by, and so escape the corner grocer and the neighboring trunk-maker. Here Murger purchased all the volumes of new poems he could discover. When his friends jested him upon his wasteful extravagance in buying verse good for nothing but to cheapen the value of the paper on which it was printed, he replied, that a poet should keep himself informed of the progress of Art. He has since confessed that his object in buying this trash was simply to compare his efforts with those which had been deemed worthy to see print. His ambition then was to be pale, consumptive, to drink the dregs of poverty's poisoned chalice, and to toss on a hospital-bed. He found it hard work to gratify these desires. His plethoric person, his rubicund cheeks and high health, gave him much more the appearance of a jovial monk of Bolton Abbey than of a Werther or a Chatterton or a Lara. But as he was determined to look the poet of the Byron school, for a fortnight he followed a regimen "which would have given phthisis to Mount Atlas"; he studied in some medical treatise the symptoms of the consumption, and, after wading through thirty miles of the mud and mire to be found in the environs of Paris, drenched to the skin by an autumnal rain, he went to the hospital and was admitted. He was delighted. He instantly wrote an ode to "Hallowed Misery," dated from the "House of Woe," sent it off to the Atlantic Monthly of Paris, and lay in bed dreaming he should find himself famous next morning, and receive the visits of all Paris, from Monsieur Guizot, then Prime-Minister, to the most callous poetaster of the Latin Quarter, and be besieged by every publisher, armed with bags full of money. He woke the next morning to find himself in perfect health, and to hear the physician order him to clear out of the hospital. He had no news from the magazine nor from Monsieur Guizot.

'Tis ill playing with edge-tools! The hospital is not to be coquetted with. There is no such thing as romping with misery. One might as well amuse himself toying with the rattlesnake or playing with fluoric acid. Wait a moment, and the hospital will reappear in the story of his life, sombre, pitiless, fatal, as it is in reality. A little patience, and misery will come, in its gaunt, wolf-like shape, to harry and to harass. Play not with fire!

Distress soon came. The young poet fell into bad company. He came home late one night. His father scolded: 'tis a porter's infirmity to fret at late-comers. Another night he came home later. The scolding became a philippic. Again he did not come home at all. His father ordered him never more to darken his doors. Murger took him at his word, and went to share a friend's bed in another garret. The friend was little better off in worldly goods; he lived in a chamber for which he paid twenty dollars a year, and which was furnished "with one of those lots of furniture which are the terror of landlords, especially when quarter-day comes." Murger now began to know what it was to be poor, to go to bed without having tasted a morsel of food the whole day, to be dressed ludicrously shabby. He had never before known these horrors of poverty; for under his father's roof the meals, though humble, were always regularly served, and quarter-day never came. As eight dollars,—less by a great deal than an ordinary servant earns by sweeping rooms and washing dishes, besides being fed and lodged,—which Count Tolstoy gave his secretary, was not enough to enable Murger to live, he tried to add something to his income by his pen. He wrote petty tales for children's magazines, and exerted himself to gain admission into other and more profitable periodicals, but for a long time without success. Many and many a sheet must be blotted before the apprentice-writer can merit even the lowest honors of print: can it be called an honor to see printed lines forgotten before the book is closed? Yet even this dubious honor cannot be won until after days and nights have been given to literary composition.

Murger was for some time uncertain what course to adopt. His father sent him word that the best thing he could do would be to get the place of body-servant to some gentleman or of waiter in some café! He himself half determined, in his hours of depression, when despair was his only hope, to ship as a sailor on board some man-of-war. He would at other times return to his first love, and vow he would be a painter; then music would solicit him; medicine next, and then surgery would tangle his eyes. These excursions, which commonly lasted three months each, were not fruitless; they increased his stock of information, and supplied him with some of his most striking images. He became joyous about this period, and his hilarity broke out all at once. One night Count Tolstoy had ordered Murger to color several thousand strategic maps, and, after he had postponed the labor repeatedly, he asked several of his friends to aid him. They sat up all night. He suddenly became very gay, and told story after story in a most vivid and humorous manner. His friends roared with laughter, and one of them begged him to abandon poetry and become a prose-writer, predicting for him a most brilliant career. But poetry has its peculiar fascinations, and is not relinquished without painful throes. Murger refused to cease versifying.

He had pernicious habits of labor. He never rose until three o'clock in the afternoon, and never began to write until after the lamp was lighted. He wrote until daybreak. If sleep came, if inspiration lagged, he would resort to coffee, and drink it in enormous quantities. One may turn night into day without great danger, upon condition of leading a temperate and regular life; for Nature has wonderful power of adapting herself to all circumstances, upon condition that irregularity itself he regular in its irregularity. He fell into this habit from poverty. He was too poor to buy fuel and comfortable clothes, so he lay in bed to keep warm; he worked in bed,—reading, writing, correcting, buried under the comfortable bedclothes. He would sometimes drink "as many as six ounces of coffee." "I am literally killing myself," he said. "You must care me of drinking coffee; I reckon upon you." His room-mate suggested to him that they should close the windows, draw the curtains, and light the lamp in the daytime, to deceive habit by counterfeiting night. They made the attempt in vain. The roar of a great city penetrates through wall and curtain. They could not work. Inspiration ceased to flow. Murger returned to his protracted vigils, and to the stimulus of coffee, and never more attempted to break away from them. This sort of life, his frequent privations, his innumerable disappointments, drove him in good earnest to the hospital. He announces it in this way to a friend:—

"Hospital Saint Louis, 23 May, 1842.

"MY DEAR FRIEND,—Here I am again at the hospital. Two days after I sent you my last letter I woke up feeling as if my whole body were on fire. I felt as if I were enveloped in flames. I was literally burning. I lighted my candle, and was alarmed by the spectacle my poor self presented. I was red from my feet to my head,—as red as a boiled lobster, neither more nor less. So I went to the hospital this morning, as early as I could go, and here I am,—Henry IV.'s ward, bed No. 10. The doctors were astonished at my case; they say it is purpura. I should say it was! The purple of the Roman emperors was not, I am very sure, as purple as my envelope.... My disease is now in a stage of reaction, and the doctors do not know what to do, I cannot walk thirty paces without stumbling. I have thousands of trumpets blowing flourishes in my ears. I have been bled, re-bled, mustard-plastered, all in vain. I have swallowed down my poor throat more arsenic than any three melodramatists of the Boulevards. I do not know how all this is going to end. The physician tells me that he will cure me, but that it will take time. To-day they are going to put all sorts of things on my body, and among them leeches to remove my giddiness.... I am greatly fatigued by my life here, and I pass some; very gloomy days,—and they are the gloomier, because there is not a single day but I see in the ward next to mine men die thick as flies. A hospital may be very poetical, but it is, too, a sad, sad place."

Many and many a time afterwards did he return to the hospital, all sad as it was. His garret was sadder in purpura's hour. Want had taken up its abode with him. He wanted bread often. His clothes went and came with painful regularity from his back to the pawnbroker's. His father refused to do anything for him. "He saw me without bread to put in my mouth, and offered me not a crumb, although he had money belonging to me in his hands. He saw me in boots full of holes, and gave me to understand that I was not to come to see him in such plight." Such was the poor fellow's distress, that he was almost glad when the purpura, with its intolerable pains, returned, that he might crawl to the hospital, where he could say, that, "bad as the hospital-fare is, it is at least certain, and is, after all, ten times better than that I am able to earn. I can eat as many as two or three plates of soup, but then I am obliged to change my costume to do so, for it is only by cheating that one can get it." But all the time he was in the hospital he was tormented by the fear that he would lose during his absence his wretched place as Count Tolstoy's secretary, and which, wretched as it was, nevertheless was something,—was as a plank in the great ocean to one who, it gone, saw nothing but water around him, and he no swimmer. He did lose the situation, because one day he stayed at home to finish a poem, instead of appearing at his desk. The misfortune came at the worst possible time. It came when he owed two quarters' rent, fifteen dollars, to his landlord, and ten dollars to other people. "I am half dead of hunger. I am at the end of the rope. I must get a place somewhere, or blow my brains out." The mental anguish and physical privation brought back the purpura. He went to the hospital,—for the fifth time in eleven months and seven days,—all his furniture was sold for rent, and he knew not where he was to go when he quitted the hospital. Yet he did not give up in despair. "Notwithstanding all this, I declare to you, my dear friend," he wrote, "that, when I feel somewhat satisfied with what I have written, I am ready to clap my hands at life.... Everything is against me, and yet I shall none the less remain in the arena. The wild beasts may devour me: so be it!"

After leaving the hospital, he formed the acquaintance of Monsieur Jules Fleury, or, as he is better known to the world of letters, Monsieur Champfleury,—for, with that license the French take with their names, so this rising novelist styles himself. This acquaintance was of great advantage to Henry Murger. Monsieur Champfleury was a young man of energy and will, who took a practical view of life, and believed that a pen could in good hands earn bread as well as a yardstick, and command, what the latter cannot hope, fame. He believed that independence was the first duty of a literary man, and that true dignity consists in diligent labor rather than in indolent railing at fate and the scoffings of "uncomprehended" genius. Monsieur Champfleury was no poet. He detested poetry, and his accurate perception of the world showed him that poetry is a good deal like paper money, which depends for its current value rather upon the credit possessed by the issuer than upon its own intrinsic value. He pressed Murger to abandon poetry and take to prose. He was successful, and Murger labored to acquire bread and reputation by his prose-compositions. He practised his hand in writing vaudevilles, dramas, tales, and novels, and abandoned poetry until better days, when his life should have a little more silk and a little more gold woven into its woof. But the hours of literary apprenticeship even of prose-writers are long and arduous, especially to those whose only patrimony is their shadow in the sun. Monsieur Champfleury has given in one of his works an interesting picture of their life in common. We translate the painful narration:—

"T'other evening I was sitting in my chimney-corner looking over a mountain of papers, notes, unfinished articles, and fine novels begun, but which will never have an end. I discovered amid my landlords' receipts for house-rent (all of which I keep with great care, just to prove to myself that they are really and truly paid) a little copy-book, which was narrow and long, like some mediæval piece of sculpture. I opened this little blue-backed copy-book; it bore the title, ACCOUNT-BOOK. How many memories were contained in this little copy-book! What a happy life is literary life, seen after a lapse of five or six years! I could not sleep for thinking of that little copy-book, so I rose and sat down at my table to discharge on these sheets all the delightful blue-backed copy-book memories which haunted my head. Were any stranger to pick up this little copy-book in the street, he would think it belonged to some poor, honest family. I dare say you have forgotten the little copy-book, although three-fourths of its manuscript is in your hand-writing. I am going to recall its origin to you.

"Nine years ago we lived together, and we possessed between us fourteen dollars a month. Full of confidence in the future, we rented two rooms in the Rue de Vaugirard for sixty dollars a year. Youth reckons not. You spoke to the porter's wife of such a sumptuous set of furniture that she let the rooms to you on your honest face without asking references. Poor woman, what thrills of horror ran through her when she saw our furniture set down before her door! You had six plates, three of which were of porcelain, a Shakspeare, the works of Victor Hugo, a chest of drawers in its dotage, and a Phrygian cap. By some extraordinary chance, I had two mattresses, a hundred and fifty volumes, an arm-chair, two plain chairs, a table, and a skull. The idea of making a grand sofa belongs to you, I confess; but it was a deplorable idea. We sawed off the four feet of a cot-bedstead and made it rest on the floor; the consequence of which was, that the cot-bedstead proved to be utterly worthless. The porter's wife took pity upon us, and lent us a second cot-bedstead, which 'furnished' your chamber, which was likewise adorned with several dusty souvenirs you hung on the wall, such as a woman's glove, a velvet mask, and various other objects which love had hallowed.

"The first week passed away in the most delightful manner. We stayed at home, we worked hard, we smoked a great deal. I have found among this mountain of papers a blank sheet on which is written,—

Beatrix,A Drama in Five Acts,By Henry Murger,Played at the – Theatre on the – day of 18—

This sheet was torn out of an enormous blank copy-book; for you were guilty of the execrable habit of using all our paper to write nothing else but titles of dramas; you wrote 'Played' as seriously as could be, just to see what effect the title-page would produce. Our paper disappeared too fast in this way. Luckily, when all of it had disappeared, you discovered, Heaven knows where or how, some old atlas of geography whose alternate leaves were blank,—a discovery which enabled us to do without the stationer.

"Hard times began to press after the first week flew away. We had a long discussion, in which each hurled at the other reproaches on the spendthrift prodigality with which we threw away our money. The discussion ended in our agreeing, that, the moment the next instalment of our income should be received, I should keep a severe account of our expenses, in order that no more quarrels should disturb the harmony of our household, each of us taking care every day to examine the accounts. This is the little book I have found. How simple, how touching, how laconic, how full of souvenirs it is!

"We were wonderfully honest on the first of every month. I read at the date of November 1st, 1843, 'Paid Madame Bastien forty cents for tobacco due.' We paid, too, the grocer, the restaurant, (I declare there is 'restaurant' on the book!) the coal-dealer, etc. The first day of this month was a merry day, I see: 'Spent at the café seven cents'; a piece of extravagance for which I am sure you must have scolded me that evening. The same day you bought (the sight still makes me tremble!) thirteen cents' worth of pipes. The second of November we bought twenty-two cents' worth of ribbon: this enormous quantity of ribbon was purchased to give the last touches to our famous sofa. Our sofa's history would fill volumes. It did us yeoman's service. My pallet on the floor, formed of one single mattress and sheets without counterpane, made a poor show in our 'drawing-room,' especially as a restaurant-keeper lived in our house, and you pretended, that, if we made him bring our meals up to our 'drawing-room,' he would be so dazzled by our splendor he could not refuse us credit. I demurred, that the odd appearance of my pallet had nothing capable of fascinating a tradesman's eye; whereupon we agreed that we would spread over it a piece of violet silk which came, Heaven knows where from; but, unfortunately, the silk was not large enough by one-third. After long reflection we thought the library might be turned to some account: the quarto volumes of Shakspeare, thrown with cunning negligence on the pallet, hid the narrowness of the silk, and concealed the sheets from every eye. We managed in this way to contrive a sofa. I may add, that the keeper of the restaurant dedicated to the 'Guardian Angel,' who had no customers except hack-drivers and bricklayers, was caught by our innocent intrigues. On this same second of November we paid an immense sum of money to the laundress,—one whole dollar. I crossed the Pont des Arts, proud as a member of the Institute, and entered with a stiff upper-lip the Café Momus. You remember this beneficent establishment, which we discovered, gave half a cup of coffee for five cents, until bread rose, when the price went up to six cents, a measure which so discontented many of the frequenters that they carried their custom elsewhere. I passed the evening at Laurent's room. I must have been seized with vertigo,—for I actually lost ten cents at écarté, ten cents which we had appropriated to the purchase of roasted chestnuts. Poor Laurent, who was such a democrat, who used to go 'at the head of the schools' to see Béranger, is dead and gone now! His poems were too revolutionary for this world.

"You resolved on the third of November that we would cook our own victuals as long as the fourteen dollars lasted; so you bought a soup-pot which cost fifteen cents, some thyme and some laurel: being 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.