Vie de Bohème: A Patch of Romantic Paris

Innumerable stories are told of his practical jokes. Being an expert ventriloquist, he was wont to enter an omnibus and without moving a muscle utter in a feminine voice: "Je vous aime, monsieur le conducteur," at which there would be tremendous consternation among the petticoats. The dames swept the company with searching glares of outraged decency, the demoiselles blushed, and the embarrassed conductor looked in vain for his temptress. One evening he was burdened with a bore in some illuminated public garden. To escape the tedium of conversation he pretended to be greatly interested in some matter which necessitated his walking carefully all round the garden and gazing intently at all the gas-lamps. After half an hour of these mysterious peregrinations the bore, who had been forced to keep silence, asked with impatience what was the matter. "I bet you five francs," said Monnier, "that there are here seventy-nine becs de gaz (gas-jets)." The bore accepted the challenge with delight, and another half-hour was spent in silent perambulation and calculation. At length he announced triumphantly that he only counted seventy-eight. "Ah," said Monnier as he made his escape, and pointing to the orchestra, "vous avez oublié le bec de la clarinette."

Monnier, the great artist, the disappointed actor, was at the other end of the scale to Lord Seymour and his friends. They had a position without activity: his activity made his position. No great artist remains long in Bohemia. Some work their way out on foot: he rose from it, one might say, in a balloon, by which, after disporting himself for some years above the mists, he was landed for his later days in the obscurity of a province. Such a man, at home in all society, is restricted by none. As he was not the perfect Bohemian, so he was not the whole-hearted viveur, for whose complete picture I must return to Roger de Beauvoir and his set, some of whom are described in Roger's own little book, "Soupeurs de mon Temps." It is a melancholy epitaph of a brilliant company. The sparkling wit of their gatherings has vanished with the bubbles of the champagne they drank, and little is left on record but the capacity of their stomachs. They took an immense pride in their consumption of champagne. Briffaut, a clever journalist and a particular friend of Roger's, was the king of topers. To him was due the invention of "ingurgitation," which consisted in pouring a bottle of champagne into a bell-shaped glass cover, such as was used to protect cheese, and swallowing it at a draught. He once challenged a noted English toper and gave him a glass a bottle; the victory was easily his, for he disposed of a dozen. Among other champions who helped to make Veuve Clicquot's fortune were Armand Malitourne, a singularly gifted man, a journalist, and at one time secretary to the minister Montalivet; Béquet, whose good taste Roger himself extolled; and Bouffé, the director of the Vaudeville. Then there was Emile Cabanon, who lives in Romantic annals as the author of the extravagant "Roman pour les Cuisinières." Champfleury,[15] on the authority of Camille Rogier, the artist, says that he appeared one day upon the boulevard and won himself forthwith a place by his gifts as a story-teller, becoming a favourite with all from Prince Belgiojoso downwards. He is one of the reputed originals—there are two or three—of Balzac's Comte de la Palférine (in "Un Prince de la Bohème"), who, being struck with the appearance of a lady passing along the street, at once attached himself to her: in vain she tried to get rid of the importunate by saying she was going to visit a friend, for her cavalier came too and mixed with all urbanity in the conversation, rising to take his leave at the same time as the object of his sudden passion. This assiduity so captivated the besieged one's heart that she struck her colours. It is à propos of Cabanon that Champfleury refers with some contempt to "les gentilshommes de lettres du boulevard de Gand, qui nageaient comme des poissons dans le fleuve de la dette, se fiaient plus sur leurs relations que sur leur plume, dépensaient de l'esprit comptant en veux-tu en voilà." Alfred Tattet,[16] the rich son of an agent de change, who was introduced to the viveurs by Félix Arvers, the poet of one sonnet, was another of the crew. Alfred de Musset, Roger de Beauvoir, Romieu, and others made merry at his sumptuous entertainments till he varied the monotony by running over the frontier with a married woman, leaving Arvers to look after his affairs. In 1843 he returned to settle down at Fontainebleau with the wife of a German in Frankfort. Another young man, with the promising name of Chaudesaigues—a corruption of the Latin for "hot water"—came to Paris in 1835 with a fortune of 30,000 francs, which he squandered in a few years, and then struggled on as a journalist till he died of apoplexy.

I should wrong the viveurs if I allowed it to be implied that they were all purely pleasure-seekers. Some of them were successful business men besides. Lautour-Mézéray, for instance, who was distinguished by the white camellia in his buttonhole, laid the foundations of his fortune by starting a paper called Le Voleur, which was entirely composed of cuttings from other papers. Like Andoche Finot, he went on from small to great, founding La Mode and Le Journal des Enfants, the first children's paper. He helped to start La Presse with Emile de Girardin, who was another of the more solid among the viveurs. Doctor Véron, stout and self-important, his face half hidden in a huge cravat, held an important place among them. He began life as a medical practitioner, but made a fortune by exploiting a certain Pâte Regnault and took to political journalism. Between 1831 and 1835 he was an extremely successful director of the Opéra, and in 1838 bought Le Constitutionnel, which he sold fourteen years later for two million francs. To him, it is said, is due the invention of the tournedos. Certainly, he was a prominent gastronome, and the terror of head waiters, for he was no mere swiller of champagne, but one who insisted on perfect vintages combined with perfect cooking. In the thirties, when "Robert le Diable" was filling the Opéra and his own pocket, he was a constant diner at the restaurants, but in later years he never dined except at his own house, where Sophie, his cook and majordomo, alone preserved the proper traditions of gastronomy. Mæcenas-like, he made a certain literary set free of his table. Their places were always laid, they helped themselves, and they remained as long as they pleased, whether their host left them or no. Théodore de Banville and many others have celebrated the excellent "cuisine" and its accompaniment of wit, but a reader of Véron's "Souvenirs d'un bourgeois de Paris" will be inclined to suspect that the doctor himself was rather a prosy humbug, who only supplied the appropriate stimulus for the wit of his guests. The chief of these, another celebrated viveur, was Nestor Roqueplan, whose toilette was unsurpassed and whose wit inexhaustible. He was a Parisian to the marrow; a day from Paris was to him a day out of Paradise. Like most of his generation, he began as a journalist, but diverged to become a director of theatres. The Panthéon, Nouveautés, Saint-Antoine, Variétés, Opéra, Opéra Comique, and Châtelet passed successively under his sway, and he lost money at them all except at the Variétés, during his management of which he wrote those sparkling "Nouvelles à la main" which are perhaps the freshest examples of purely ephemeral contemporary wit.

The Revolution of 1848 dispersed the viveurs for ever. It was not that Paris diminished in gaiety during the Second Empire nor that the cafés ceased to be invaded by merry bands of fêtards, but simply that Paris became too gay, too large, and too cosmopolitan. The boulevard was no longer to be kept sacred for a chosen few, and a new generation was rising, which found other channels for its energies than ingurgitatory wit-combats. Under the new régime there was a court and a more exciting foreign policy. The aristocracy threw off its sulks, the prosperous industrial conquered his diffidence, the pleasure-loving stranger found that all railways led to Paris. The old guard was overwhelmed, or rather would have been overwhelmed if not already well-nigh crumbled away. Men with clear heads and practical aims, who had only devoted their leisure to enjoyment, like Véron, Roqueplan, de Girardin, survived to retire with all the honours of war, forming small coteries for the cultivation of wit and good cheer, but shunning, instead of affronting, the public eye. But the rest, the viveurs of every hour, where were they? Dead, worn-out, shattered in health, paying the dismal reckoning for the dissipation of their heyday, poor, neglected, forgotten. Misfortune overtook the gay Roger from the moment he married Mademoiselle Doze, the actress. For six years he was pestered with lawsuits for separation, till a divorce was finally procured. He had drunk, as he said, 150,000 francs worth of champagne and written 300 songs. The francs were gone, the songs lost, and nothing was left but the gout.

He could jest to the last, but in his last days he was a pathetic sight, fat, prematurely old, infirm, confined to a wretched chamber, and denied even the champagne which could charm away his regrets. The dapper figure that had once filled a frock-coat so jauntily was now a shapeless corpulence hidden in the loose folds of a greasy dressing-gown. He died of gout, as Alfred de Musset died of drink. Malitourne, after sinking lower and lower in drunkenness, died mad; apoplexy carried off Chaudesaigues and Charles Froment; Arvers died of spinal paralysis; Béquet ended in a hospital; gout killed Cabanon and Tattet; while Briffaut expired in a mad-house. The mental pronouncement of their funeral orations I leave to any moralist who chooses, bidding him remember that if they failed as individuals to fulfil the highest destinies of mankind they were victims of a strange fever in common with all the generation of 1830.

Of that generation they were a part, perhaps the most conspicuous part at the time. I might almost liken them to the set of "swells" in some public school, privileged themselves yet censorious of others, always in the eye of their small world, influential in their smallest acts, embodying conspicuously the current fashion and expressing the prevailing tone, shining inevitably as a pattern, envied by most, respected, outwardly, by all. In Louis Philippe's time Parisian society was as limited a corporation as a school. Its "swells" attained their position, as all "swells" do, by excelling in a pursuit in which excellence is universally admired. They excelled in tinging their life with a medieval splendour of colouring, they had some prowess in poetry and letters, they performed miracles of wit in the new spirit of busy, ever-bubbling, bruyant fun. As the "swells" of Romanticism they justified their position so long as the conditions allowed. Bohemia, in some respects, was like a "house" in the same school, with a smaller corporate life of its own, yet influenced by the powers outside it, the more so because some of its members had risen themselves to the company of "swells." In this not very exalted, but true, simile is my reason for devoting space to the viveurs. They were not Bohemians for the most part, but many Bohemians hoped to be viveurs as Etonians hope to be in "Pop." On them rested the high lights of the picture, but we can now peer into the background and discern the true Bohemia of 1830.

VI

LA BOHÈME ROMANTIQUE

THE Romantic Bohemia has been the theme of so many French writers, from the time when the first reminiscences appeared to the present day, when a Léon Séché and a Philibert Audebrand, following the lead of Charles Asselineau, the pious chiffonnier of Romanticism, industriously collect the very last scraps of authentic information, that a foreigner with all a foreigner's limitations may well hesitate to mar the pretty edifice erected to the memory of 1830 by some clumsy addition of his own. Yet I take heart from the consideration that even in France there is, at least to my knowledge, no complete account of this Bohemia. Those who would follow its annals in their original tongue must do so in a multitude of books, published at different times, some of which are rarities only to be found in museums and the largest libraries. Moreover, the French chronicler writes from a point of view which a foreigner cannot adopt, and makes assumptions which a foreigner cannot grant. All the historical and literary associations on which I have touched in a former chapter make it a subject which even to-day excites passionate enthusiasm and equally passionate reprobation across the Channel. The foreigner can approach in a cooler temper, though I postulate in my readers a general sympathy for Gautier's scarlet pourpoint and all that it symbolized. In this cooler temper, then, not seeing red, but with a tendency, at least, to see rosy, a foreigner may glance at a life, so essentially limited by its period and its nationality, without challenging unfavourable comparisons.

The Romantic Bohemia was part of Parisian society, a fact of which I have already tried to point out the implications. It might add to the general picture to know how society judged Bohemia. Contemporary record is scarce, not only because Bohemia itself so largely supplied the personal element in the journalism of its time, but also because the conception—indeed, the name—was so new. There is, however, something to be picked up from allusions here and there which is of some service in the definition of boundaries. Nestor Roqueplan, for instance, in his little book, "La Vie Parisienne," defines Bohemia as comprehending "all those in Paris who dine rarely and never go to bed." He distinguishes sloth and debt as the salient faults in the general disorder of its life, and he is not too appreciative of its abilities, though he admits that there is an inner Bohemia, "intelligente et spirituelle," composed of a certain number of young men with the makings of excellent ministers, irreproachable officials, and daring men of business. In conclusion he asserts the great truth that "Bohemia must be young; it must be continually renewed. If the Bohemian were more than thirty, he might be confused with the rogue." This is excellent testimony from a man who, himself no real Bohemian, had extensive relations with Bohemia as one on whom its young playwrights inflicted the reading of their plays. Balzac is the next witness, though it is remarkable that his only specific reference to Bohemia is in the short story, "Un Prince de la Bohème," which tells how the young Comte de la Palfèrine, a penniless son of a general who died after Wagram, satisfied his vanity in the person of his mistress, Madame du Bruel. He was debarred by his position from having a wife worthy of his aristocratic pride, but that at least his mistress might be worthy, Madame du Bruel, an actress married to a writer of vaudevilles, worries her husband into the acquisition of riches, political power, and a peerage. At the beginning of this story—one of Balzac's most curious—he gives a general definition of Bohemia:

The narrator of the story, the witty Nathan, goes on to give some particular traits of La Palférine, who would be King of Bohemia, if Bohemia could suffer a king. Some of these are rather vulgar pleasantries which display the bluntness of Balzac's sense of humour rather than La Palférine's wit, as when the Bohemian, angrily accosted by a bourgeois in whose face he had thrown the end of his cigar, calmly replied: "You have sustained your adversary's fire; the seconds declare that honour is satisfied." La Palférine was never solvent: once, when he owed his tailor a thousand francs, the latter's head clerk, sent to collect the debt, found the debtor in a wretched sixth-floor attic on the outskirts of Paris, furnished with a miserable bed and a rickety table; to the request for payment the count replied with a gesture worthy of Mirabeau: "Go tell your master of the state in which you have found me!" In affairs of love, though he was impetuous as a besieger, he was proud as a conqueror. After having passed a fortnight of unmixed happiness with a certain Antonia, he found that, as Balzac puts it, she was treating him with a want of frankness. He therefore wrote to her the following letter, which made her famous:

With the aid of these lights we may descry some general features of the Romantic Bohemian. He must be young; on this both Roqueplan and Balzac are agreed, placing his proper age between twenty and thirty. The Bohemians of 1830 were, as a matter of fact, nearer to the earlier than the later limit. Most of them were born at the end of the first decade of the nineteenth century, so that 1830 found them in, or not long past, their twentieth year, a happy state of things which Arsène Houssaye celebrated in his poem "Vingt Ans." We Englishmen can hardly understand the magic of this joyous phrase, vingt ans; through French prose and poetry it sounds again and again like a tinkling silver bell calling those who have lived and loved in youth to hark back for a moment in passionate regret, in an ecstasy of remembrance. To think of Bohemia without that silver tinkle in one's ears is to do it a grave injustice, for Bohemia throbbed with it then as with a tocsin, as with a summoning bell to a joyous refectory in some transcendant Abbaye de Thélème. It may be well for us that at twenty we are still hobbledehoys whom serious persons are only too glad to get rid of for half the year in universities as peacefully unmoved by our turmoil as their Gothic buildings by the storms of winter; but these frenzied medievalists had no Gothic university to be engulfed in save their own dear Paris, at a time when the university of their own dear Paris was trying its hardest to withstand the new ideas with which they were aflame. If juvenile excesses and absurdities can be tolerated with easy smiles at Oxford and Cambridge, how much more can those of the Romantic Bohemia be excused when its denizens were Frenchmen, hardly more than schoolboys, yet already victorious as champions of a revolution, with their livelihood to gain, with no kind parents to pay their bills and no kind Dean to regulate their mischief! As the college porter says, "Young gentlemen will be young gentlemen," a proverb which condones the excesses of tender, as it reprobates those of riper, years. Bohemia, in Roqueplan's words, must be continually renewed, for the old Bohemian is nothing but a legitimate object for ardent social reformers. So the Bohemians of 1830, some of whom made their names, while others remained obscure, were all youthful nobodies in the eyes of the world, perching in their attics like a colony of singing birds upon the topmost branches.

This youth of theirs, once it is properly grasped, explains a good many of their qualities, amiable and otherwise. Poverty, for instance, was a tradition of Bohemia. "They dine rarely," "the Bohemian has nothing and lives on what he has," "they raised their poverty into a system and laughed at their voluntary insolvency": so say Roqueplan, Balzac, and Challamel. Most young men in this world are poor, in the sense they have nothing of their own. So long as they follow the careers laid down for them, or earn the prescribed salaries in the prescribed professions, they are not without means indeed, but if they take a contradictory line of their own which is not lucrative, especially if they dare to set up as poets, it is considered better for them to knock their heads against the hard corners of life without much extraneous assistance. On the whole this is a wise point of view, and one can hardly follow some of the less talented Romantics in making it an indictment against society that superior soup-kitchens are not provided for the sustenance of all who choose to embrace the arts. There were, of course, degrees of poverty in Bohemia, just as there were degrees of economic adaptability. Some were really, others only comparatively, destitute: some girded their loins daily in search of pence, others waited for pence to drop from heaven. Still, in spite of all degrees and differences, poverty was very real. The market for art and letters was still extremely restricted, processes were costly, the science of distribution still in its infancy; a few celebrities took all the cream of the demand, leaving only the thinnest trickle to satisfy the rest.

The Bohemians knew, or very soon found out, their prospects. Those who were not scared back to their homes made up their minds that at best a moderate income might be theirs in the future, while the present entailed considerable privations to be endured cheerfully for the glory of art. Poverty being their economic condition, it is not to be supposed that the young men who did happen to be rich in their own right migrated to Bohemia for the mere pleasure of its society. It is easy enough to find food for laughter in unavoidable discomforts and delight in the makeshifts by which misery is cheated, but, when neither discomfort nor makeshifts are necessary, the point of view inevitably changes, and irritation takes the place of laughter. It is quite contrary to human nature that a man with money to spare for regular meals, decent clothes, and a comfortable room should enjoy hunger, rags, and a bare garret. Between adversity cheerfully borne and a masquerade of scanty means there is a gulf which no imagination is able to span. A rich man, I admit, may stint himself in order to spend all his means on a hobby or a philanthropic object, but in the Bohemian there was no trace of this voluntary asceticism, which would have been entirely contrary to the Romantic creed. A rich Bohemian was a paradox, for the moment a Bohemian had any money he spent it in forgetting the sorrows of Bohemia, a moral pointed by Murger's amusing chapter "Les Flots du Pactole," where Rodolphe, having received a gift of £20, promptly agrees with Marcel to live a regular life. He will work, he says, seriously, sheltered from the material worries of life. "I renounce Bohemia, I shall dress like the rest, I shall have a black coat and appear in drawing-rooms." Unfortunately the preliminaries are so costly that the sum is exhausted in a fortnight, the coup de grâce being given to it when the new servant pays without authorization the arrears of rent. "Where shall we dine to-night?" says Rodolphe, once more a Bohemian. "We shall know to-morrow," replies Marcel. Rodolphe and Marcel, and their predecessors just as much, would have regarded a Bohemian with an income as a madman or a monstrosity. With all the will in the world such a man would have found it impossible to live in such a society without being on its economic level. Its joys and pleasures would not have been his, its amusements would have seemed paltry. To have shown his money would have made him shunned by the proud and courted by the sycophants, in any case a stranger. He could only have been a Bohemian at the price of dissipating all his capital, and that he could more easily do among the viveurs upon the boulevard.

Bohemia, then, was poor, which had the one excellent result of banishing from it all mercenary spirit. When there was so little money to be had in any case and there were so many other more glorious things to think about, there was no point in financial preoccupations. If one had a few coins one spent them in common with those who had none; if one's pockets were empty one went without and accepted the hospitality of others. Money-grubbing was left to the virtuous bourgeois beloved of a bourgeois king, to unscrupulous Nucingens and adventurous de Girardins. And Bohemia never went to bed, because it was young and poor, not from viciousness or an artistic pleasure in the sunrise. They were incorrigible talkers, those young men—perhaps this was one of their graver faults—they not only talked, but they shouted for hours together, mixing declamations of Victor Hugo with extravagant tirades in the Romantic fashion. It was not in them to disperse quietly after "Hernani" or "Antony" had lashed them into fury. They had a plethora of matter to discharge from their souls, but they had no comfortable little Chelsea studio in which to perform this function. A cold attic, a straw mattress, a fuelless stove, a dearth of chairs, which was all the majority could boast of, was a poor setting for impassioned conversation compared with the warmth of even a humble cabaret. The good M. Challamel, of course, is justified in his strictures. Their morals were lax, they were extravagant, they did not pay their bills. This was partly due to what a humorous undergraduate once called the "generosity of youth," and partly to the example of the "swells" upon the boulevard. The Bohemian naturally yearned to enjoy himself, with his acute capacity for enjoyment, as he saw his more fortunate fellow-men enjoying themselves. They were luxurious at all times; it was impossible for him to restrain occasionally the impulse to luxury, indulging in a superb orgy at the Rocher de Caucale or the Trois Frères Provençaux, ordering clothes which he meant to pay for, and forgetting all the while the just claims of a landlord. His vices, at any rate, were inseparable from the conditions of his existence, and if he was disreputable, it was more outwardly than within.

The talents of Bohemia were as diverse as the physiognomies of its citizens. Genius, it might be said with truth, was not more common there than in other walks of life. Real genius is a law and a life to itself; it is no more Bohemian than it is aristocratic, democratic, liberal or conservative. Social labels imply classes to bear them, and classes imply a common factor of intelligence. Genius, being an uncommon factor, is always severely individual. Moreover, so far as Bohemia is concerned, genius, being one kind of wealth, unsuited its possessor for Bohemian citizenship as much as a comfortable income. The trivialities and futilities of some, the extravagant idleness of others, would have estranged genius or forced it to pretend an acquiescence in much that was repugnant to its nature. With the possible exception of Gautier, the Bohemia of 1830 could really claim none of the greatest names of Romanticism. Victor Hugo, Sainte-Beuve, and the other divinities of its worship were, apart from all further possibilities, too old. Balzac was a far too busy man to pay it more than momentary visits; Berlioz, before he went to Rome, was too occupied in writing music which irritated Cherubini; Delacroix, the acknowledged king of Romantic painters, is revealed in his letters as the austerest of hard workers, scarcely leaving his studio but for a walk when the shadows began to fall. Yet, if Bohemia was denied genius, it was not denied a very high average of ability, which was enhanced by its burning and disinterested enthusiasm for art. Like all other societies, it had its fools, its knaves, its dunces, and its awkward squad. The Romantic revolution had attracted many scatterbrained fanatics to Paris, with as little artistic aptitude as good sense in their heads. Out of those who survived the first disappointments were fashioned failures like Alfred de Musset's unfortunate in the verses quoted previously, "râpé, sycophante, envieux." Probably, too, an impartial observer, listening to the nocturnal conversations of a Bohemian group, would often have found the ecstatic admiration of the listeners disproportionate to the turgid periods of the speaker, for to every real artist in Bohemia there was a wind-bag or two. Nevertheless there was a good deal of truth in Balzac's eulogy. Bohemia numbered within its gates a good proportion of the best among the younger generation. They were indeed an "immense force," which might have been better utilized. Every kind of talent was represented there abundantly, because the field of letters seemed to be the only battlefield then left open to willing and eager soldiers. This very fact gave the Romantic Bohemia its imperishable distinction, for after 1848, when young blood again found other outlets, what had been a little world was left no more than a decadent province.

These six thousand copies of the "Fatal Byron," if they ever existed, have, for the most part, died without leaving their names to posterity. The historian can deal only with a few individuals, who embodied the salient qualities of Bohemia.

VII

THE SECOND "CÉNACLE"

"PEOPLE always forget," said Théophile Gautier in his old age, "that we were the first Schaunards and Collines, a quarter of a century before Murger. Only," he added with a smile, "we had talent and did not write invertebrate verses like those of that feeble appendage to Alfred de Musset." This saying, reported by his son-in-law, was made on a festive occasion, so that it is unnecessary to regard with concern the discrepancy between this view of Murger and the one which Gautier has expressed in print. That kindest-hearted of writers would never wittingly have hurt the reputation or memory of the humblest among his fellows, and I only quote the passage because, when the malice is discounted as largely as the "quarter of a century," it remains a true reference to the origins of Bohemia by one who was, so to speak, one of its pilgrim fathers. The first Schaunards and Collines, Rodolphes and Marcels, the unknown poets and artists who first raised the standard of common enthusiasm against a common enemy, the bourgeois, were the young and lusty friends of a young and lusty Gautier. They were members of a cénacle, albeit a less beatific cénacle than the brotherhood drawn in Balzac's "Illusions Perdues." In the cénacle of the Rue des Quatre Vents he evolved by sheer imagination a compensating mirage of virtue to be contrasted with all the real depravity of society which his eye so unerringly saw, just as Eugénie Grandet shines out impossibly beside her miserly father, and Madame Firmiani in the corrupt circle of his femmes du monde. Nevertheless there is a certain sublimity in the cénacle to which attention cannot be denied. It was Balzac's picture of an ideal Bohemia in which alone such a nature as his could have found a home. It is of little moment that he dates the action of "Illusions Perdues" a few years before 1830, for the cénacle itself is a timeless creation, only limited by the fact that one of its members died in the insurrection of 1832. The young men who composed the cénacle bore upon their brow the "seal of special genius." Daniel d'Arthez, upon whom since the death of their leader, the great mystic, Louis Lambert, the mantle had fallen, was a monarchist of noble family, destined to become the greatest writer of the future; Horace Bianchon, the flower of doctors, a materialist of perfect charity and profound science; Léon Giraud, a humanitarian philosopher; Joseph Bridau, a great painter with "the line of Rome and the colour of Venice"; Fulgence Ridal, a sceptic, a cynic, and the wittiest playwright of his time; Meyraux, a scientist; and Michel Chrestien, a red republican who was killed in the Cloître Saint-Merri. They were not ascetics by profession: d'Arthez, for instance, was the last lover of the Diane, the Princesse de Cadignan, in the days of his later glory; Bridau's art was affected by his love affairs; Chrestien was "plein d'illusions et d'amour." They were like the "saints" of the early Christian Church, each going his own way, but true helpers one of another, true champions and honest critics. They were without vanity or envy, having a profound esteem for one another, with a consciousness of their own worth. "Their great external misery and the splendour of their intellectual wealth produced a singular contrast. In their society nobody thought of the realities of life except as subjects for friendly pleasantries.... The sufferings of poverty, when they made themselves felt, were so gaily borne, accepted with such ardour by all, that they did nothing to alter the particular serenity which marks the faces of young men free from grave faults, who have not lost part of themselves in any of those low traffickings which are forced upon men by poverty ill supported, by the desire to get on without any choice of means, and by the facile complacency with which men of letters welcome or pardon betrayals.... These young men were sure of themselves: the enemy of one became the enemy of all, and they would have abandoned their most urgent interests to obey the sacred solidarity of their hearts. All incapable of a mean action, they could oppose a formidable 'no' to every accusation, and defend one another with security. Equally high-minded and equally matched in matters of sensibility, they could think and speak all their mind in the domain of science and intelligence; thence came the innocence of their intercourse, the gaiety of their talk. Sure of mutual understanding, their minds digressed at their ease; and they stood on no ceremony among themselves, confided in each other their sorrows and their joys, pondered and suffered with open hearts." I need speak no further of this imaginary cénacle, for "Illusions Perdues" is widely known. It is one of those wonderful fantasies that one feels were lovingly cherished by Balzac, at once his darling dreams and his disappointments. He had a passionate desire to express the beautiful, and he was denied that gift. The lights dance before his eyes, and his very language becomes confused and turgid when he deserts reality. It may safely be said that in the real Bohème there was no such goodly company of industrious, gifted, morally austere, intellectually gay, unselfish young men, and that there never will be in any society till the coming of the Coquecigrues.

The Bohemia of artistic tradition began in what Théophile Gautier named the "second cénacle." The first cénacle, as all the world knows, was that of Victor Hugo, Sainte-Beuve, and the brothers Deschamps, who met regularly at the cabaret of Mère Saguet on Montparnasse in the days when Hugo was still hatching the plot of the literary revolution. To trace to them the origins of Bohemia would be an error, for they never had any part or lot in Bohemianism. They were young, it is true, and depended upon their art for a living, but the fact that they were nothing but a small coterie of earnest poets, more akin to the band of d'Arthez than the friends of Rodolphe, depends upon two things, their time and their outlook. The first cénacle came into existence about 1822, when the throne of the Bourbons seemed solid and royalism went hand in hand with classicism. No standard of insurrection, civic or literary, had yet been raised; the victory was yet to come, and it would have been madness, before the campaign was fully planned or the army gathered, for the chiefs to have aped the style of victors. The merciless ridicule of Paris would have killed them in a week, without support as they were. Defiance of the bourgeois, an absolute essential of the true Bohemian creed, was, therefore, not appropriate to the first cénacle, who lived openly the life of ordinary, decent citizens, while secretly preparing the proclamations, the standards, and the weapons by which the cataclysmic victory of 1830 was to be won. In such a tense moment Bohemia could not be born. Their outlook, in the second place, was too lofty to comprehend the lower planes in which Bohemia made itself conspicuous. To strike a more human note in poetry was their chief aim: they were concerned with art rather than with life itself; and though Hugo, in the privacy of his room, doffed with relief that bourgeois symbol, the high linen collar, he was like a general in his tent drawing up that transcendental plan of operations, the preface to "Cromwell," which was to inspire his troops in their pioneering and shooting, in their whole bodily attack on the classic tradition. As the classic tradition was embodied not only in literature, in contemporary journalism, in professional lectures, but in the social life of all staid citizens as well, the Romantic troops, passionate and fundamental as their literary enthusiasm was, were forced to make social life the field of their assault, all the more because, being poor, young, and unknown, they were unable to inflict such palpable wounds with pen or brush as they could by making a violent protest in every detail of the ordinary way of living. By outraging the accepted standards of decency in dress, in speech, and in demeanour, they made their presence daily felt, and where their presence was felt their ideals were made ostensible. Their tactics, after the event, may be blamed, the effect they produced was, no doubt, smaller than they imagined, but the fact remains that la vie de Bohème began neither as a retreat for higher souls nor as a means for reckless self-indulgence, but as a definite method of drawing attention to a new and important artistic creed. For the greater exponents of this creed, a Hugo or a Delacroix, such a material protest would have been out of place; it would have detracted even from the effect produced by their great works of art. Only the rank and file, to whom supreme personal achievement was impossible, collected and commonly inspired, as I have already pointed out, under special historical and social conditions, were justified in adopting the measures that were best suited to their purpose. Their purpose was as temporary as their conditions; their device, épater le bourgeois, has now become a hollow phrase, but it meant then the rousing of every shopkeeper, every garçon de café, as well as the cultured reader of current literature, to the sense that art was alive again. This was the aim of the second cénacle, the first Bohemians. They were successful, and they were necessary.

The second cénacle was not a formal organization, so that no definite date can be fixed for its institution. Its members probably came together in the same haphazard way as the small bands of friends at a public school or university, crystallizing so imperceptibly that the moment of incorporation baffles memory, and often so firmly that death alone is their solvent. Théophile Gautier, in his fragmentary "Histoire du Romantisme," has given the fullest details of the cénacle's existence, yet neither he nor his biographer, Maxime du Camp, make it clear whether it was formed prior or posterior to the famous first night of "Hernani" in February of 1830. Gautier, no doubt, had forgotten, but it seems fairly safe to assume that if preliminary acquaintance was already made between some of its members before that time, the stormy nights of February strengthened the bond and made the association compact. The story of "Hernani," with the red waistcoat, vieil as de pique, and other trimmings, has so often been told, even in English, that it may seem unnecessary to traverse such well-trodden ground; but a historian has no business to take anything for granted, so that "Hernani" can be no more justly omitted here than Waterloo from any work upon Napoleon. It was part of Victor Hugo's agreement with the Théâtre Français that a number of seats should be at his disposal each night, and that the holders of the tickets should be admitted some time before the ordinary public. These were the trenches into which his army of young men were thrown. Minor officers were entrusted with the task of bringing the men to the rendezvous, Jules Vabre, an architect, being responsible for a hundred and fifty men, and Célestin Nanteuil for almost as large a number. Gérard de Nerval, whose translation of Goethe's "Faust," published in 1828 (when he was only nineteen), had brought him considerable fame in Romantic circles, had known Gautier, who was two years his junior, at the Collège Charlemagne. This amiable essayist, whom Gautier likened more than once to a swallow, flitting always in and out among his friends, was not forgetful of his young friend in the days of recruiting. Gautier was at that time studying painting in the studio of Rioult, whither Gérard de Nerval made one day a swallow-like dart and produced six tickets marked with the single but thrilling word Hierro, the Spanish for "iron." According to Maxime du Camp he gave these to Gautier with the words:

Gautier, who was a little better provided with worldly goods than some of the Romantic army, then set about devising a costume that should strike death into the heart of the perruques. With extreme care he cut out a pattern of a medieval pourpoint—a buttonless waistcoat coming right up to the collar-bone, and fastening with laces behind like the uniform of Saint-Simon's disciples, which symbolized mutual assistance, because no Saint-Simonian could truss his own points. His Gascon tailor's professional objections were overruled, even though the material chosen was a gorgeous silk coloured a Chinese vermilion, and the garment was made as desired: to it were added a pair of light greenish-grey trousers with a broad stripe of black down each seam, a black coat with ample revers of velvet, and a flowing cravat. It was indeed a devastating sight, and one that deservedly became famous. In this fervent spirit was the battle waged over "Hernani"; for thirty consecutive performances the trenches were manfully filled and a fusillade of cheers poured forth at every touch of romantic colour, every bold enjambement, every defiance of classic circumlocution, and, above all, every sign of disapprobation on the part of those they rudely styled "wigs" and "bald pates." The battlefield was often a pandemonium, but the result was victory. The Théâtre Français, the very home of Molière, was successfully carried by the Romantic assault. Gautier had magnificently won his spurs, and shortly afterwards he was introduced by Gérard de Nerval and Pétrus Borel to the great hero himself, an ordeal which caused him so much trepidation that he sat for over an hour on the stairs with his two sponsors before he could pluck up courage to proceed. His fears, however, soon vanished after a cordial reception, and as his parents were then living next door to Hugo in the splendid old Place Royale, he soon became the most constant page and attendant of the poet, for whom he preserved a lifelong devotion.

These were the days of the second cénacle, for "Hernani" was the Hegira of la vie de Bohème. During the long waits in the empty theatre, the passionate mornings of preparation, the fiery reunions after the curtain had fallen, a set of the most ardent Hugo-worshippers had found their affinities. They did not indeed live together—some were dutifully under the parental roof, some had hardly a roof to their heads, one at least was supporting a mother and sister by daily work in a government office—but they formed the habit of meeting and spending many hours of the day and night together and the meeting-place was either the studio of a young sculptor, Jehan du Seigneur, or the sanded parlour of the Petit Moulin Rouge, in the rond-point of the Arc de Triomphe. Their names were Pétrus Borel, Joseph Bouchardy, Philothée O'Neddy, Alphonse Brot, Augustus Mackeat, Jules Vabre, Napoléon Thom, Jehan du Seigneur, Léon Clopet, Célestin Nanteuil, Théophile Gautier, and Gérard de Nerval. It is almost needless to say that some of the names are Gothic transformations in the Romantic fashion. Pétrus Borel was, of course, christened Pierre, as du Seigneur was christened Jean by his parents; while Philothée O'Neddy and Augustus Mackeat conceal the persons of Théophile Dondey and Auguste Maquet. But names in -us or Celtic patronymics were all the rage, and even Gautier was called Albertus after his poem of that name published in 1832. A curious feature about the group was that, though it existed to champion the cause of Romantic poetry, the only pure man of letters was Gérard de Nerval. Of the rest, Borel, formerly an architect, was learning to draw in Dévéria's studio, Thom and Nanteuil were artists, Gautier and Bouchardy studying art, du Seigneur a sculptor, Clopet and Vabre architects; O'Neddy and Brot, indeed, were professed poets, but in no less an embryonic stage than some of the others who afterwards found in the pen their most successful tool. "This mixture of art in poetry," says Gautier, "was and has remained one of the characteristic signs of the new school, and makes it clear why the first adepts were recruited rather among the artists than among the men of letters. A multitude of objects, images, and comparisons which were thought to be irreducible to the written word were introduced into the language and have stayed there."[17]

Pétrus Borel

The one whom Gautier called the individualité pivotale of the group, though Philothée O'Neddy in after years denied that he had more influence than Gautier, Gérard, or Bouchardy, was Pétrus Borel, Le Lycanthrope as he subsequently named himself. His full name was Pierre Borel d'Hauterive, and he was born in Lyons in 1809. His father, captured by the revolutionaries in 1792 and then liberated, fled to Switzerland, whence he returned to Paris, a ruined man, to earn what he could by keeping a shop. At the age of fifteen Pierre was apprenticed to an architect, and in 1829 he set up on his own account without much success. He and Jules Vabre became associated, and so poor were they that they used to use the cellars of the houses on which they were engaged as their dwelling-place. Gautier recalled visiting them once in the cellar of a house in the Rue Fontaine-du-Roi, where they were preparing their frugal meal of potatoes baked in the ashes. "Ah," said Vabre with pride, "but we have salt on Sundays." Borel's ideas were too Gothically fantastic for his bourgeois clients, and, after a violent dispute over his fourth commission, he ordered the half-finished building to be demolished, and gave up for ever an ungrateful profession,[18] betaking himself for a season to the study of painting, and writing the while those poems animated by a haughty bitterness which were published under the title of "Rhapsodies." They are dedicated and addressed to the members of the second cénacle, among whom he enjoyed an enormous reputation. He was for them the poet of the future, before whom Hugo would crumble to dust. Alas! for youthful predictions; thirty years later Gautier, the most loyal of Romantics, was forced to exclaim: "Dire que j'ai cru à Pétrus!"[19] He exercised over the group, in fact, a kind of unconscious hypnotism. His slightly superior age, his strange, rough, paradoxical eloquence, and, above all, his picturesque appearance imposed on them all. Their ideal was to have an allure fatale, a sombre complexion and haughty, Byronic mien. Borel realized it. He looked like a Castilian nobleman out of a Velasquez picture, says Gautier, with his "young and serious face, of perfect regularity, an olive skin gilded with light shades of amber, lit up by great, shining eyes, sad as those of Abencerrages thinking of Granada," his bright red lip which shone under his moustache, "one spark of life in that mask of Oriental immobility," and his fine, full, silky beard perfumed and tended like that of a sultan, at a time when to wear a beard in Paris was an outrage to public decency. He was clothed in black, wearing a high Robespierre waistcoat and draping a long black cloak around him with an air of studied mystery. How could the younger men, whose beards refused to grow, not believe in such a perfect symbol, so magnificently scornful, so profoundly fatal? He was the most republican, too, of them all, the typical Bousingot of the bourgeois Press, though fanatical republicanism was not, as Philothée O'Neddy afterwards protested in a letter to Charles Asselineau, their representative opinion. Gérard had no political opinions at all, Gautier was obstinately Jeune-France, and the others only dreamt of a social Utopia in which æstheticism should replace religion, or of some humanitarian millennium after the manner of Saint-Simon and Fourier. Borel, however, held society in complete disgust, as he showed when he left the gathering at Jehan du Seigneur's, and proceeded one summer to live with some followers on the slopes of Montmartre, all naked as savages, till the landlord drove them out at the price of his porter's lodge, which they burnt down in revenge.

None of the others were quite so remarkably individual as Pétrus Borel, whose character may be described as Jules Claretie describes his book of extravagant stories, "Champavert": "doubt, negation, bitterness, anger, something at the same time furious and comic." Vabre, his partner in architecture, had fair hair and moustaches, without any extravagance in his bearing, but his face twinkled all over with malice and his conversation was madly Rabelaisian. He projected a famous book that was never written, "Sur l'Incommodité des Commodes." An intense love for Shakespeare was his chief Romantic asset. According to Gautier he gave up his later life to studying our language in England that he might make the perfect translation, a task which was never completed. Joseph Bouchardy, who afterwards became a very successful writer of melodrama, was then learning engraving. He, too, was dark, so dark that with the soft, sparse beard that just fringed his face he looked an Indian, and was nicknamed the Maharajah of Lahore. He was less poetry-mad than the rest, but eternally occupied with dramatic scenarios in which all the secret passages, trap-doors, and sliding panels of a novel by Mrs. Radcliffe were brought into play. Jehan du Seigneur, who made medallions of all his friends, was a gentle, modest youth with a very pink-and-white complexion which was his everlasting despair. To atone for this unavoidable defection from Romantic ideals, he wore a black velvet pourpoint, a black jacket with broad velvet revers, and a voluminous necktie, so that not a speck of white linen was shown, a "suprème élégance romantique," as Gautier remarks. Augustus Mackeat was chiefly conspicuous for the happy transformation of his name, though he returned to the orthodox Maquet when he became a successful playwright. His disguise, however, was nothing to the tremendous anagram which turned Théophile Dondey into Philothée O'Neddy. He, says Gautier, was dark as a mulatto with fair, curly hair. Though he was helping to support a mother and sister by working in a government office, this Philistine occupation did not prevent him from being one of the most frenzied of the gang, a "paroxyst" ruisselant d'inouïsme. In 1833 he published a collection of ultra-romantic poems called "Feu et Flamme," which reek with passion, despair, scorn, suicide, and contempt for Christianity. Yet he lived till 1872, and though he published nothing more, he left a collection of posthumous poems all of which breathe an extreme melancholy. In the letter written to Asselineau ten years before his death he admitted that in the days of the cénacle he had "une bonne grosse somme d'extravagance et de mauvais goût," but protested warmly against the application to them of the epithet "ridiculous." "Risible" they might have been, but only the bourgeois were "ridiculous." Célestin Nanteuil was big, fair, gentle, and so perfectly medieval that Gautier caricatured him as Elie Wildman-stadius, the hero of one of his Jeune-France stories, who lived in a Gothic manor on medieval fare, read nothing but medieval illuminated manuscripts, and was killed when the Gothic cathedral, his sole external joy, was struck by lightning. Gautier describes him personally as having the appearance of "one of those long angels bearing censers or playing sambucs that live in the gables of cathedrals, who has come down into the city in the midst of the busy burgesses, keeping his nimbus all the while at the back of his head like a hat, but without the least suspicion that it is not natural to wear one's aureole in the street." He was a furious Hernanist in 1830 (he was then only seventeen), and called "the Captain," for leading the army to the fray. In 1843, when he was asked to bring three hundred young men to support "Les Burgraves" in the same manner, he sadly said: "Tell the master there are no more young men." He might, says Maxime du Camp, have been a great painter, but he was compelled to live by illustrating. Whenever he had made a little money in this way he returned to his colours and his easel till it was exhausted. He ended in the obscurity of Dijon, becoming the director of its school of art.

Célestin Nanteuil

Maxime du Camp compares Nanteuil's fate to that of Gautier, who was forced by circumstances to waste so much of his talent in mere journalism; but in 1830 Gautier, a young man of nineteen, who made long hair serve instead of a beard, was still free as air. In that year he brought out a little volume of poems, and a year or two later produced the fantastic "Albertus," which he followed with "Les Jeune-France." His art studies had soon ceased because he discovered that he suffered from short sight, and we may regard him in the days of the cénacle as a poet pure and simple. One figure remains to be filled in, the most pathetic of all the Romantic band, Gérard de Nerval. He was born in 1808, the son of a Doctor Labrunie—the family name of de Nerval was only assumed by him when he began to write. His youth was spent in the pleasant country of the Valois, and he received a very careful education from his father, who taught him not only Latin and Greek, but German, Italian, and the rudiments of Arabic and Persian. Even in his early days he was an eager reader of mystics and utopists, which gave that first fantastical turn to his brain which ended later in complete madness. His development was normal at first. At the Collège Charlemagne he was the snapper-up of every prize, and produced some quite worthless poetry in praise of Napoleon that won high approval from his professors. He followed this by a satire on the Academy, which appeared in 1826, and in 1828 he produced an ode to Béranger of a style to which his Romantic friends could only have applied the new epithet poncif. The translation of "Faust," which earned a very high compliment from the great Goethe himself, turned him into his appropriate path and gave him a serious literary reputation which he never lost. He translated other fragments of German poetry, and wrote for the Mercure de France, of which Pierre Lacroix, the "Bibliophile Jacob," was then the editor. His adoption of a literary career was a grave disappointment to his father, who had hoped to make a good official of him, and it is probable that parental coldness first caused him to find a congenial asylum in the new Bohemia, of which he was never a typical inhabitant. When he came of age he inherited his mother's dowry, which made the actual earning of money immaterial to him. His success with "Faust" had brought him into touch with Hugo, so that after the days of "Hernani" he held in the cénacle the most distinguished, if not the most influential, position as a lieutenant of their demi-god, with notable achievements in the field of letters already to his credit.

Gérard threw in his lot with the cénacle, but, though he even wrote some revolutionary poems in 1830, for which he was imprisoned in Sainte Pélagie, he was never quite at ease with Borel and the Bousingot faction. The flamboyant side of Romanticism and its noisy gatherings had little appeal for him. He was an eccentric and a solitary by nature, as his writings, with their strong reminiscence of Heine, show. In the time of the cénacle he was, according to Gautier, a gentle and modest young man, who blushed like a girl, with a pink-and-white complexion and soft, grey eyes. Under his fine, light golden hair his forehead, beautifully shaped, shone like polished ivory. He was usually dressed in a black frock-coat with enormous pockets, in which, like Murger's Colline, he buried a whole library of books picked up on the quais, five or six notebooks, and a large collection of scraps of paper on which he wrote down the ideas that occurred to him on his long walks. He was the perfect peripatetic: as he once said, he would have liked to walk through life unrolling an endless roll of paper on which he could jot his reflections. He lived at this time with Camille Rogier, the artist, in the Rue des Beaux Arts, but his friends could never be sure where to find him. For him no hour was sacred to rest. He wandered about Paris at all times of the day and night, dropping in on a friend for an hour or two, ready to ride a hobby-horse with him in any direction, then darting off again, his thoughts in the clouds, nobody knew whither, and returning in the small hours, only to flit from his bed at the dawn. Of all the gay companions of Bohemia he was the best loved, for his childlike simplicity and his gentle manners won all hearts. He went through life to his terrible death with complete unworldliness, almost like a ghost, unconscious of the material side of existence, directing his feet only by the light of his spirit. Gautier, writing after his death, protested vehemently that his was no ordinary tragedy of neglected genius; he had money enough, but money was nothing to him, so he spent it without a thought; his work was always accepted by editors, and his plays, though not successful, were all produced. But success was the last of his preoccupations. He was a wanderer living in a world of his own fantasies. As he will appear again in these pages, we may bid him farewell for the moment, with the conviction that it would be pleasant to be transported for a season back to that turbulent vie de Bohème if only to find the kindly Gérard's arm passed through one's own and to hear his gentle murmur: "Tu as une fantaisie; je la promènerai avec toi."

I ought, perhaps, to apologize for allowing the persons of the cénacle to take up so much space before coming to their life, yet I imagine, on the whole, that I have said too little rather than too much. To go back to a past of which one has no experience is a matter of such extreme difficulty that a historian must often despair at the impossibility of reproducing the whole congeries of scattered detail from which alone his own mental picture could have taken shape. The first Bohemia, that of the second cénacle, was less a common life than a common recreation. It was an incomplete vie de Bohème in so far as its members were united, not by a desire to share all the joys and difficulties of life, but by a particular artistic enthusiasm. There is no record that any of them worked or dwelt together, that they took part in joint expeditions of amusement, or that the mutual acquaintance of those female divinities for whom they plied so "fatally" their emotional bellows is to be presumed—and these are marked characteristics of Murger's vie de Bohème. When they ate together it was at the obscure cabaret kept by the Neapolitan Graziano for the needs of his compatriots who worked in Paris. Here, in a plain whitewashed room with a sanded floor, a dresser covered with violently coloured faience and plain wooden benches, they were initiated by their host—a man of senatorial presence, with an immense but perfectly correct nose and big black beard, who seemed to dream all the while of his beloved Italy—into the delights of spaghetti, stufato, tagliarini, and gnocchi. They were delicious meals, seasoned with good spirits, and—to use the delightful French phrase—"bedewed" with sound wine of Argenteuil or Suresnes christened magnificently with the names of the most exclusive vineyards in Médoc or Burgundy. Still, they were felt at times to be a trifle wanting in Romantic glamour. It was all very well, the grumblers remarked, to be enjoying incomparable macaroni, but when all was said and done there was little that an impartial observer could descry in these banquets to differentiate them from the prosaic meals of a Joseph Prudhomme. Something was wanting, some tincture of the Newstead spirit, some infernal joy in the food, some shudder in the drinking. The macaroni remained obstinately matter-of-fact, but a brilliant idea was mooted that would give a charnel flavour to the wine. Graziano's glasses were only glasses of quite modern exiguousness; the true brotherhood should drink out of a skull. A skull was accordingly procured by Gérard from his father, the doctor, and ingeniously mounted by Gautier, who screwed to its side an old brass handle from a chest of drawers. In truth it was a noble bowl, and the pious company drank from it with bravado, each concealing with more or less ill-success his natural repugnance. Familiarity, however, bred contempt, till one uncompromising youth surprised his companions by noisily commanding the waiter to fill with sea-water.

Yes, the Petit Moulin Rouge, for all its good cheer and its death's-head mounted with a drawer-handle, was too workaday for these eclectics. They reached their true glory only in the gatherings which took place in Jehan du Seigneur's studio. It was a room over a little fruiterer's shop that the cénacle sanctified as their conventicle. "In a little chamber," wrote an older Gautier, "which had not seats enough for all its occupants, gathered the young men, really young and different in that respect from the young men of to-day, who are all more or less quinquagenarians. The hammock in which the master of the dwelling took his siesta, the narrow couchlet in which the dawn often surprised him at the last page of a book of verses, eked out the insufficiency of conveniences for conversation. One really talked better standing up, and the gestures of the orator or declaimer only gained a more ample scope. Still, it was extremely unwise to make too free with your arms for fear of knocking your knuckles against the sloping ceiling." It was a poor man's room, but not without ornament, for it contained sketches by the two Dévérias, a head after Titian or Giorgione by Boulanger, two earthenware vases full of flowers on the chimneypiece, the inevitable death's-head instead of a clock, a looking-glass, and a small shelf of books. On either side of the glass and in the embrasures of the windows were hung the portrait medallions which Jehan made of his friends. They had no money to get them cast in bronze, so the world has lost in them a valuable appendix to the well-known busts of his contemporaries executed by the more distinguished Romantic sculptor, David d'Angers. Here they would all gather of an evening: Gérard if he happened to be passing in his amiable wanderings, Bouchardy the Maharajah, Gautier—not yet the burly critic of La Presse, but a thin youth of nineteen—Nanteuil with his Gothic nimbus, Vabre bursting with some new joke, Borel swinging off his long cloak with a scowl, O'Neddy shedding Dondey in the street, Mackeat and the rest, each bursting with eloquence or roaring the "Chasse du Burgrave" at the top of his voice. When Maxime du Camp once asked Gautier what they talked about, he answered: "About everything, but I haven't the least idea what they said, because everybody talked at once." However, a very good idea of a typical evening in the cénacle is given in Philothée O'Neddy's "Feu et Flamme," the first poem in which, called "Pandæmonium," is a gorgeous description of their cave of harmony. It is freely decorated with "local colour," which on a Romantic's lips meant the borrowing of all he could carry away from the medieval stage-property room, but it was drawn from life with all seriousness and sincerity. The poem opens by depicting them all seated round the punch-bowl—punch, it must be stated, was the only really respectable drink for a thorough-paced Romantic. He mixed it in a large bowl and set light to the fumes, as the students are supposed to do in the first act of the "Contes d'Hoffmann," and derived enormous satisfaction from sitting in an obscurity only lit by this bluish flame. Thus to recall the witches' cauldron and the fires of the Inferno had an unfailing success as a stimulant to eloquence. The scene, then, opens thus powerfully: