TO follow the heroes into exile would be depressing as well as unprofitable. It is better to stand respectfully aside from the GÖtterdÄmmerung and wait till Bohemia emerges again from the mists, when a lapse of years has wrought some patent changes, for it is easier to contemplate a result than to trace a process. By leaping forward some ten years from the dispersal of the brotherhood that sanctified by its presence the Impasse du DoyennÉ it is possible to steal a march on Time and anticipate with a rapid glance his changing hand. Yet to catch this later view it is necessary for the nonce to abandon the world of flesh and blood and to turn from the acts and reminiscences of actual mortals to the imaginary scenes and fictitious characters of a book of stories. The tide of life was too strong upon ThÉophile Gautier and ArsÈne Houssaye for them to pause and stamp out firmly the features of those precious days in la BohÈme galante; they only caught fugitive impressions in retrospect. Henry Murger, less prodigal because less endowed, crystallized as it passed a moment of Bohemia, the Bohemia of common mortality, in "ScÈnes de la Vie de BohÈme." As a confectioner encloses a fresh grape in a transparent coat of candied sugar, so he, even while he tasted, sour and sweet, the fruit of his days, caught stray berries in a light film of art and presented them as dessert to the readers of the Corsaire, a small but amusing journal. Sharp and savoury as they were, Time would have destroyed them, as he destroyed the ambrosial lusciousness of the DoyennÉ feasts, but for that light film. Nobody remembers reminiscences, but a well-told story preserves even the most trivial events.

Murger's "ScÈnes de la Vie de BohÈme" is a book which has now lived for nearly seventy years and does not seem likely as yet to pass into the lumber-room. At the same time, it is to be wished that more people in England knew it, if only because the presupposition of such knowledge would make this chapter easier to write. It is not, of course, difficult to criticize the "ScÈnes de la Vie de BohÈme"; many of Murger's countrymen, indeed, have done so. Its ethics, its humour, and its style have been attacked. M. Boucher, an estimable civil servant interested in literature, in his "Souvenirs d'un Parisien" calls it an effort to depict the life of low-class students, accuses Murger of insipidity and repetition, and denies any wit to his "Étudiants demi-escrocs, demi-canailles." M. Pelloquet, who was good enough to pronounce a discourse over Murger's grave, said: "It is an unhealthy book, in which vice grimaces, youth paints its cheeks like a superannuated coquette, and a fictitious insouciance conceals, not a laziness that is sometimes poetic, but the cowardly indolence of men without courage and without talent." He was also rash enough to predict that it would not live. Jules Janin, the critic, in a wiser appreciation, asserted that with a little more art and a little more poetry Murger might have created more pardonable heroes and no less charming heroines. Gautier's dictum about the invertebrate verses of "that feeble appendage to Alfred de Musset" has already been quoted, and the opinion of Verlaine's biographer appears at the head of this chapter. Murger's gravest fault, however, in the eyes of French people is that he wrote bad French. To them the mishandling of that difficult, elusive, and withal limited tongue is a crime of which we can hardly comprehend the enormity. It is perfectly true that Murger was culpable in this respect; he was deficient in scholarship and in rhythmic sense, so that his poems are weak and his prose, even where he tried to give it an air of respectability, betrays its imperfections no less manifestly than M. Jourdain betrayed his birth. We in England, fastidious as our critics are in the matter of language, have not our ears tuned to this painful degree of precision. So long as a style effectively harmonizes with its environment we are content to let it stand: the Gothic grandeur of English can suffer without disfigurement the intrusion of the quaint. To sympathies so trained Murger's style in "ScÈnes de la Vie de BohÈme" should make a particular appeal, since in that book, for the most part, he makes no attempt to ape the academician, but writes in the extravagant jargon of the very Bohemians he is describing—a language full of comic inversions, extravagances, and lapses from grammar, which are an essential part of the book's gaiety and charm. Though his matter is unmistakably Parisian, his humour is, in some respects, remarkably English, delighting in broad and bustling effects rather than subtle strokes and sudden flashes. As for the life and the characters that he depicts, criticism of them will be implicit in the remainder of this chapter; of the book as a whole no more need be said than that it has survived when all the rest of Murger's work has been forgotten. It is not a book to be placed unwarily in the hands of the young and tender; parts of it are exaggerated, parts may be wished away, but, when all has been said, it remains, not the picture of la vie de BohÈme at its best and brightest, but the classic expression of the Bohemian spirit—a frank confession, not the pseudo-pathetic souvenir of a prosperous greybeard. Its pages are among those rare ones in the world's library that have caught and held for a moment the intangible freshness, the poetry, and the gaiety of youth. For this alone it deserves never to grow old.

Murger's Bohemia is described in a series of scenes taken from the life of four young men, a quartet as fascinating to read of as Dumas' Musketeers, though possibly less comfortable companions. They were Rodolphe, the sentimental poet; Marcel, the painter; Colline, the peripatetic philosopher and bookworm; and Schaunard, painter and musician, incomparable rogue whose masterpiece was a symphony "Sur l'influence du bleu dans la musique"—a sly hit at debased Romanticism. Chance brought them together. Schaunard, unable to pay his arrears of rent, was forced to leave his lodging with his furniture in pawn. A day's peregrination in search of a loan brought him three francs in cash, which he spent in dinner, together with the less tangible benefit of Colline's and Rodolphe's acquaintance. He swore brotherhood with Colline over a dish of stewed rabbit in a little eating-house, and the pair collected Rodolphe in the CafÉ Momus, where, at Colline's expense, they passed the rest of a not too abstemious evening. Meanwhile Marcel, the painter, who had taken Schaunard's room unfurnished in advance, though having no furniture of his own but a second-hand scenic interior from the stock of a bankrupt theatre, had been persuaded to take the lodging furnished with Schaunard's furniture, and had duly moved in. Late in the evening, when a sharp shower of rain was falling, Schaunard, in bacchic absence of mind, offered asylum to his two new comrades. Hastily buying the elements of a supper, they gaily invaded the apartment of Marcel. Explanations were difficult, but were accomplished during supper, and next day Marcel and Schaunard agreed to live together. A dinner and a magnificent supper inaugurated the foundation of the new clan, which was united, so long as their Bohemian days continued, by an unbroken bond of friendship. It is these young men whom Murger's readers follow through their straits and shifts, their love affairs, their extravagances, their boisterous jokes, and their naÏve pleasures—the poet, the artist, the savant, and the musician, characters drawn from Murger himself and his living friends, whose coats were ragged and whose pockets almost always empty, who were the bane of respectable concierges and proprietors of cafÉs, who bore short commons with cheerful bravado and succumbed to innocent gluttony in times of unexpected prosperity, who were really funny even if they were sometimes vulgar, whose expedients for catching the elusive piÈce de cent sous were as amazing as their puns, who made life, even in a garret, a sentimental poem and a rollicking ballad, and who had the sense to become prosaic before the sentiment grew threadbare or the ballad grew stale. It is a great temptation to follow some of their adventures in greater detail from the day when Marcel went out to dine in the sugar-merchant's coat while Schaunard painted the latter's portrait in his own colour-stained dressing-gown, to the day when Rodolphe by composing a didactic poem at fifteen sous a dozen lines for a celebrated dentist, Marcel by painting the portraits of eighteen grenadiers at six francs a head, and Schaunard by playing the same scale all day and every day for a month to revenge a rich Englishman on an actress's parrot, earned enough to give their mistresses new dresses and take them for a holiday in the fields of Fontenay-aux-Roses. Yet the impulse to discursive commentary must be checked, for plucking flowers is a distraction from comparative botany. Murger, after all, tells his own story infinitely better than any translator could do, and the purpose which is proper to the present book is to inquire what kind of a Bohemia appears in Murger's light-hearted pages.

So far as Bohemia was concerned, the generation of 1830 had entirely passed away by 1846, when Murger's sketches actually appeared, and the young men of whom Bohemia was composed were formed under less violent influences. The last flashes of Napoleon's glory had not illuminated their early days, they knew little of the stifling reign of Charles X, and the Revolution of 1830 took place when they had only a little while outgrown the nursery. By the time they grew up the complexion of affairs in Paris wore a more even tone. Assisted by Guizot, Louis Philippe had found the juste-milieu to his people's satisfaction, revolutionary tendencies had been checked or diverted into harmless channels of humanitarian reform, the bourgeois had firmly grasped his power and built up an already solid bulwark of commercial interest. In the artistic world, too, things were quieter. "Hernani," once a scandal, had become a classic, and there was no further need of red waistcoats and furious claques. Romanticism, indeed, had become so workaday that a successful little excitement was aroused by a reaction against it in what was called "l'École de bon sens," whose chief poet, Ponsard, gained quite a celebrity for a short time with his classic drama "LucrÈce." Beyond the gadfly of artistic impulse and the natural fermentation of the adolescent mind, there was little to rouse a young man's passions or send his blood coursing faster through his veins; there was no particular idol to worship, no hobby-horse to ride, as a Gautier or a Borel had worshipped Hugo and mounted the gallant steed called Middle Ages. The creed of Romanticism was so thoroughly established that there was nothing left to make any fuss about, with the natural consequence that its early extravagances had fallen out of fashion and there was no further need to be satanic or profess excessive sensibility. Literature was feeling its way to the austerer Romanticism of Flaubert and the Goncourts, as painting towards the "realism" of Courbet, but the growth was still below ground and the surface as yet seemed undisturbed. The generation of Rodolphe and Schaunard found, therefore, in Paris no eager band to whom they could ally themselves and to whose educative influence they could submit. Driven by their impulses towards the arts, with souls naturally romantic, as most young men's souls are, they found no cause which they could immediately embrace in the manner of the second cÉnacle. They missed that valuable education which is the idolization of a great man, and were confined instead to fighting their own battle, a very much less distinguished affair, which allowed many little dishonourable compromises with indolence and in which victory meant no more than individual success. This explains, to some extent, the absence of intellectual fecundity in Murger's heroes, which even their most devoted admirers cannot deny. Rodolphe's poems are indeed only pale imitations of Alfred de Musset, who was an almost inevitable model for any lyric youngster of the day; his more serious effort, a drama called "Le Vengeur," good enough to burn for warmth in a draughty garret, is not vouchsafed to us in quotation by Rodolphe's creator. Marcel was obviously not a very gifted painter, in spite of his famous Passage de la Mer Rouge, which was sent up in a different guise to each Salon and inevitably rejected, and when this great work was sold to become a shop-sign the artist's pride was not in the least revolted. Schaunard never gives any signs of musical inspiration till at the close he publishes a successful album of songs, and Colline, polyglot philosopher as he is dubbed, abandoned his career before anything tangible had been achieved to make an advantageous marriage and give musical evenings. It would, of course, be pedantic to insist upon these considerations in the case of a book of short stories which aims chiefly at amusing, but it is impossible not to be struck in reading the "ScÈnes de la Vie de BohÈme" by the absence from the conversation of the characters of any indication of their artistic ideals. Save when Schaunard tells the sugar-merchant that he was a pupil of Horace Vernet, murmuring to himself, "Horreur, je renie mes dieux," and Marcel makes a scornful allusion to the "École de bon sens," the only proof that they are true artists lies in their creator's own assertion, of which he is not entirely mindful in the dÉnouement. The worst sinner of all is Colline, for this mine of knowledge, throughout the book, is made chiefly remarkable for the composition of dreadful puns. This may be partly due to that want of "a little more art and a little more poetry" of which Janin accused Murger, but the fault was not only personal. The second cÉnacle and the brotherhood of the Impasse du DoyennÉ were, without doubt, just as commonplace in their ordinary conversation, but what lifted them off the ground was the enthusiasm of a hotly waged artistic struggle, which by Murger's day had died down. His four heroes are Romantics in general, but in no sense champions of any cause.

Another unmistakable fact about Rodolphe and his friends is that they were inconspicuous. True, they made the CafÉ Momus unbearable to its more peaceful customers, and were not unknown at the ChaumiÈre, but the CafÉ Momus was in a back street, and the ChaumiÈre was certainly not the Bal de l'OpÉra. They were miles away from the viveurs upon the boulevard, and their connexion with the prominent writers and artists of the day was extremely remote. They made no public appearance, they were not a force to be reckoned with. They kept up the form of defying convention, but it was now no more than a convenient form for the impecunious. Art and the bourgeoisie were beginning to play into one another's hands; the former had gained its liberty to a great degree, while the latter by the gilded pill of commercial success had purged artistic demonstration of its crudities. The time when eccentricity was a symbol had passed; now it was only a skin to be sloughed, as Marcel saw when in a very sensible lecture delivered to Rodolphe he said:

Their Bohemia, in fact, was a kind of undergraduate existence, in which all sorts of disorder and youthful folly might be excused on the plea that youth must be served, but which could in no sense be regarded as a part of civic life, much less as the best part, the most truly disinterested and artistic. This is a significant change of attitude from the days of la BohÈme galante, which was one of the centres of Paris. That, indeed, was transitory and presupposed youth, but it was not obscure and its inhabitants had no misgivings. It was not they who gave it up as the writer of Ecclesiastes put away childish things, for they gloried in it all their days as the best part of their life; it was that the world claimed them for its business in spite of themselves. In their disinterested love of art they had made themselves valuable, and when the command went forth "Come and be paid" they were forced to go. To guard against any accusation of misunderstanding Murger, it may be admitted that he calls his heroes only a small section of Bohemia—they moved, to use his phrase, in the troisiÈmes dessous of literature and art—but there is no indication that Murger conceived a Bohemia which had its part in any higher sphere. When Rodolphe gets a lucky present of five hundred francs the determination he avows is not to suffuse his little corner of Bohemia with a more worthy splendour, but to become, like every other successful man, a bourgeois. "These are my projects," he cries to an astonished Marcel. "Sheltered from the material embarrassments of life, I am going to work seriously; I shall finish my great work, and gain a settled place in public opinion. To begin with, I renounce Bohemia, I shall dress like everybody else, I shall have a black coat, and I shall frequent drawing-rooms." Such a speech would have fallen like a thunderbolt in Camille Rogier's Pompadour salon, and its author considered charitably to be in the first stages of lunacy. Marcel, however, falls in at once with the ambitious scheme, and they are only saved by their Bohemianism being stronger than their resolution. Both in the stories and the preface to the "ScÈnes de la Vie de BohÈme"—where Murger speaks with a picturesque seriousness—there is no sign of that former joy in Bohemian life as the life which was alone worth living by poets and artists. Throughout he regards it as a necessity conditioned by the artistic impulse combined with poverty, to be borne with the courage and gaiety of youth, to be regretted "perhaps" from the vantage-point of subsequent prosperity. The true Bohemia—as distinct from the Bohemia of mere idealists, incapables, and amateurs—he regards as a narrow, stony path leading up the sides of an arduous mountain, beset by the chasms of doubt and misery, but making for a possible goal, the goal of a sufficient income. Divested of all its agrÉments—resourcefulness, humour, courage, extravagance, which are properly attributes of youth, the real illuminant—Murger's Bohemia is laid bare as a merely economic state. The true Bohemians, he says, are known upon the literary and artistic market-place, where their wares are saleable, but at moderate prices; "their existence each day is a work of genius"—"preceded by a pack of ruses, poaching in all the industries connected with the arts, they hunt from morn till eve that ferocious animal which is called the five-franc piece." To Murger, who wrote of what he knew, the man who had the means to live a stable existence, howsoever retired, was a fool if he remained in Bohemia: to the inhabitants of la BohÈme galante it was the not being entirely destitute which made their life peculiarly worth living. If Colline ever speculated with any profundity he may have seen that his friends and he lived really in a prison of which poverty, prodigality, and idleness were warders. The Bohemia of Gautier, GÉrard de Nerval, and Houssaye had all the glory of a voluntary protest, a passionate assertion of liberty, a revivifying of life in accordance with new artistic ideas.

The difference is not simply one of degree. The brotherhood of the Impasse du DoyennÉ were less destitute and more talented than Rodolphe and his friends, but that is not a point that at this moment requires stress. The important fact is that in a few years Bohemia had undergone a great change; that, whereas a few years after 1830 young men with a little money and some talent deliberately chose to make their life more picturesque than that of ordinary citizens and to escape from the suffocating atmosphere of commerce and officialdom, a few years after 1840 the ideal of struggling artists was to become as soon as possible successful merchants and to escape from the possibility of that picturesqueness which they welcomed as an alleviation of a state of transitory discomfort. It would be quite beside the mark to regard Bohemia as guilty in this of self-degradation; so far, indeed, as the change was conscious, the majority of mankind must logically find it praiseworthy, for all human effort is judged by its tendency to well-being. The change, however, was none of Bohemia's doing, but was due mainly to the fact that art was beginning, in the modern sense, to pay. The beginnings were small, but they were quite evident, especially in the increased profits from journalism and illustration. The old Bohemia of the golden age rested on the supposition that the artist worked primarily to please himself, and that money, source of enjoyment as it was, remained a secondary consideration. The supposition, in the first forward rush of commercial prosperity, was bound to become untenable. Writers and artists of obvious talent were too valuable commercial assets to be left to their careless selves; they had to be tempted into the cage—an easy task, for, if money be regarded as a means of more enjoyment, why should a Bohemian resist it? It was unimportant if individuals held out, or were too uncompromising to suit the market; the fact remained that there was a market and a list of quotations, and this fact was the disruption of Bohemia. Whereas it had been a true fraternity in which art was all-important and individual celebrity a thing of so little moment that there was complete equality of intercourse, it now included the last two sections of a trisected world of artists—the well-paid, the ill-paid, and the not paid at all—and where money intervenes all equality ceases. The majority of the well-paid were kept too busy even to see they had lost the old freedom; they were tempted to live as other people in decent rooms and decent coats, and as their vanity kept them from complaining, the ill-paid and the not paid at all naturally envied their state, striving and jostling for an equally happy captivity, or at least intending to do so as soon as their irrepressible blood took a staider course through their veins. The charm of Murger's merry crew is that their blood was too strong for their business instincts; the Bohemian spirit snatched them along in spite of Mammon, for Mammon, incomplete as his hold has always been over youth, was in those days but just learning his strength. Where youth and art combine the Bohemian spirit is always there; only the possibilities of Bohemia have in the course of time been crowded out. But in Murger's Paris Bohemia, shorn of earthly glory as it was, without lot in the brilliance of the boulevard, cut off from the more thriving traders in the artistic market-place, was still a possibility because the Bohemian tradition was still fairly strong, and because Paris was still a small city, its life little disturbed by a floating population of aliens and its interests completely self-centred.

The Bohemia described by Murger certainly corresponded in one respect with the general conception of Bohemianism to-day in that it was devoid of any material splendour. Neither Rodolphe nor Marcel indicates any desire for the old furniture, damasks, and other decorations which so glittered in the eyes of the early Romantics, but at any rate such things would have been beyond the capacity of their purses. They were unequivocally poor. When Rodolphe was in funds he could afford a hundred francs a year for a garret in the Rue de la Tour d'Auvergne; when Providence was less kind he lived "in the Avenue de Saint-Cloud, on the fifth branch of the third tree on the left as you leave the Bois de Boulogne." As for entertainments, they came a long way behind the costume ball of the Impasse du DoyennÉ. At Rodolphe's Wednesdays in the Rue de la Tour d'Auvergne, it was said, one could only sit down morally and was forced to drink badly filtered water in eclectic earthenware. Even the grand soirÉe given by Rodolphe and Marcel, which began with a literary and musical entertainment and ended with a dance prolonged till sunrise, only cost the hosts fifteen francs—miraculously acquired at the last moment—in addition to a set of chairs which fed the stove from midnight onwards, though, as these belonged to a neighbour, they were probably not paid for. Their wardrobes were not conspicuous for any particularly Romantic or medieval effect, but simply, except in times of exceptional windfalls, for extreme dilapidation. Schaunard's chief garment was an overcoat worn to a state of utter baldness; Colline's ulster, crammed with books and papers, had the surface of a file; Marcel's coat was called "Mathusalem," but he must have acquired it subsequent to the sugar-merchant's momentous visit, for at that time, after an hour's search to discover a costume fit to dine out in, the net results were a pair of plaid trousers, a grey hat, a red tie, a (once) white glove and a black glove. To dine sufficiently at a small restaurant was for them no ordinary luxury, and as for entering the Rocher de Caucale, they might as well have aspired to membership of the Jockey Club. Why, Schaunard had never seen a lobster till the old Jew gave them all a feast after buying Marcel's Passage de la Mer Rouge. Some days they dispensed with dining altogether, on others the staple dish was pickled herrings; so it is hardly surprising that on the proceeds of Marcel's picture they remained at table for five days, the room filled with a Pantagruelic atmosphere and a whole bed of oyster-shells covering the floor. It was not that they took up any quixotic attitude of art for art's sake, like the society called Les Buveurs d'Eau, whom Murger describes in one of his stories and whose principle was not to make the slightest concession to necessity. They were imperfect journeymen, indolent, careless, too easily distracted, but they were among those who were ill-paid rather than those who never tried to be paid. Rodolphe edited a small fashion paper, L'Écharpe d'Iris; Marcel painted ruined manors for a Jew dealer and portraits of the lowliest possessor of a few spare francs; Colline gave lessons in the same range of subjects as Pico di Mirandola professed to discuss; and Schaunard, besides exhibiting a special ability as a borrower, put music to bad poetry for hard-hearted music-publishers.

In comparing this Bohemia with that of Gautier and GÉrard de Nerval, it is easy to see the justification of Lepelletier's epithet "carottiÈre." The graceful adjuncts and by no means contemptible achievements of a former day had vanished as completely as its enthusiasms. The presence of Roger de Beauvoir and Nestor Roqueplan in the Rue de la Tour d'Auvergne is as difficult to imagine as the composition of "Mademoiselle de Maupin." Yet Rodolphe and his friends were at least as well off in one respect, that is, in their affairs of the heart, if, indeed, they had not some advantage. The divinities of the Impasse du DoyennÉ, Cydalise excepted, seem to have had their home in the corps de ballet, a body not notable for the tenderness or constancy of their attachments. Murger, who, like his Rodolphe, was an amorous sentimentalist, gave some poetic value, if not as much as he intended, to the figures of Mimi and Musette, the idols of Rodolphe and Marcel, who play such a prominent part in the "ScÈnes de la Vie de BohÈme," that it would be an affectation not to speak of them, although an Englishman must always do so with some reserve. In spite of all that may be said against them—indeed, is said by their very creator—there is a charm about Mimi and Musette which must always hold the reader of these stories, a charm which includes Francine, who died holding the muff bought for her by her lover, and the vulgar PhÉmie TeinturiÈre, who shared the lot of a no more refined Schaunard. Without sympathizing, at least temporarily, with all the blend of mystery and frankness which a Frenchman breathes into the word "amour," it is useless to read French literature. To him love is the highest emotional value—emotion being in its turn the highest value in life—so that a union, whether it be celebrated in the Madeleine or in the mairie of the notorious thirteenth arrondissement, is equally sacred and equally interesting. We in England look at love differently and, as we naturally think, better, but we are not hindered, nevertheless, from abandoning our view occasionally. We do so implicitly when we shed tears over "La Dame aux CamÉlias," over "Madame Butterfly," and over Mimi herself in Puccini's "La BohÈme." To be honest, then, we must accept Murger's view, if we enjoy his book, as there is very little doubt that we do. We applaud Musette when she surreptitiously waters the flowers whose duration is to measure that of her love for Marcel; we forgive her fickleness because she follows her fancy without calculation, even though on leaving the rich young nobleman to visit Marcel she takes six days on the road; we warm to Mimi because Rodolphe really loved her and she him, though his jealousy and her love of luxury made their days a burden and their rupture certain; and if we join heartily in Marcel's ironical tirade against Mimi the fine lady, we cannot restrain our sadness at Mimi returning to her old love to die. The life of the Impasse du DoyennÉ was so joyous, strong, and full that its amours passagers can be taken for granted, happy fantasies without regrets; but Murger's Bohemia, with its frequent moments of despondency and hardship, was forced to rely upon its heart to supply that relieving colour which its surroundings could not give. Mimi and Musette, PhÉmie and Francine, even the little giletiÈre who corrected Colline's proofs and never appeared, meant so much more than Lorry or Victorine. So long as their attachment lasted they made a home out of the barest garret, doing for their men those thousand little things which men are too lazy or preoccupied to do for themselves. Besides, they opened a field for the exercise of unselfishness—a valuable service in itself. In this connexion I need only cite one delightful little story, to which I have already referred, entitled "La Toilette des GrÂces," an idyll which no afterthought can spoil. It tells how Rodolphe, Marcel, and Schaunard, having earned a little money by making their respective arts serve the humblest of commercial purposes, decided to surprise their mistresses by giving them new dresses. One fine morning Mimi, Musette, and PhÉmie were awakened by the entry of a procession headed by Schaunard, in a new coat of golden nankeen, playing a horn, and close behind him a shopman bringing samples. They nearly went mad with joy. Mimi jumped like a young kid, waving a pretty scarf; Musette, with each hand in a little green boot, threw her arms round Marcel's neck and clapped the boots like cymbals; as for PhÉmie, she could only sob "Ah, mon Alexandre, mon Alexandre!" The choice was made, the bills discharged, and it was announced to the dames that they must have their new dresses ready for a day in the country on the morrow. That was a trifle; for sixteen hours they cut and stitched, and when next day the Angelus sounded from the neighbouring church they were already taking their last look into the looking-glass. Only PhÉmie had a little sorrow. "I like the green grass and the little birds," she said, "but one meets nobody in the country. Suppose we made our excursion on the boulevard." But they went to Fontenay-aux-Roses instead, and when they returned late at night there were only six francs left. "What shall we do with it?" asked Marcel. "Invest it in the funds," said Schaunard.

There are, doubtless, artistic coteries to-day in whose existence parallels may be found to the "ScÈnes de la Vie de BohÈme," but reproduction is impossible, for Murger's Bohemia, no less than la BohÈme galante, was conditioned by its time. The conditions include a Paris of provincial narrowness, greater simplicity together with less conspicuous uniformity in ordinary life, less elaborate amusements, no Montmartre cafÉs, no swamping proletariat beside whose moeurs d'Apaches the eccentricities of Bohemia seem mild and unimportant, a tiny fraction of the present opportunities for advertisement and publicity, and a lower standard, perhaps, of general education. To these one other condition may be added—the existence of Musette and Mimi, who were the last of the grisettes. Murger himself, in a passage which I cannot do better than quote in the original, points out clearly their transitoriness:

A Grisette
A Grisette

The grisette made love for love: like a wild rose, she had to be plucked, and when men came to prefer buying bouquets in shops, she naturally died away. Money already tainted Bohemia, even here, in its heart. The opportunity of luxury tempted both Mimi and Musette to be unfaithful, but since caprice was ever stronger with them than self-interest they were not undeserving to be called the last of the grisettes. They were necessary adjuncts to Bohemia, and satisfactory adjuncts, in spite of their caprices, for the last thing which Bohemian man required was the Bohemian or—to use an obsolete phrase—the "emancipated" woman. Too ignorant to meet their lovers, even had they wished, upon their own ground, they held their place by keeping to their natural advantage, the woman's desire to please. So they passed through life, making the feast more festive and the fast less desolate, filling a void and mending a sorrow as light-heartedly as they darned a sock or patched a ragged coat. Mimi and Musette were the true counterparts of Rodolphe and Marcel, and it is with regret that we see them disappear into an epilogue of prosperity and propriety. Yet it was all they could do, for what I have called the Bohemia of common mortality became dangerous long before the age of thirty years. Rodolphe could not have written in middle age to Marcel as Bouchardy did to ThÉophile Gautier; only hypocritically could he have said "nous Étions ivres du beau." Murger escapes any false effect of that kind in his conclusion: