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

"Monsieur Credit made his reappearance on the fourteenth of November. He went to the grocer, to the tobacco-shop, to the fuel-dealer, and was received tolerably well; he was especially successful with the grocer's daughter when he appeared in your likeness. Did Monsieur Credit die on the seventeenth of November? I ask, because I see on the 'credit' side of our account-book, 'Frock-coat, sixty cents.' These sixty cents came from the pawnbroker's. How his clerks humiliated us! I could make a long and terrible history of our dealings with the pawnbroker; I shall make a short and simple story of it. When money failed us, you pointed out to me an old cashmere shawl which we used as a table-cover. I told you, 'They will give us nothing on that.' You replied, 'Oh, yes, they will, if we add pantaloons and waistcoats to it.' I added pantaloons and waistcoats to it, and you took the bundle and started for the den in Place de la Croix Rouge. You soon came back with the huge package, and you were sad enough as you said, 'They are disagreeable yonder; try in the Rue de Condé; the clerks, who are accustomed to deal with students, are not so hard-hearted as they are in the Place de la Croix Rouge.' I went to the Rue de Condé. The two pair of pantaloons, the famous shawl, and the waistcoats were closely examined; even their pockets were searched. 'We cannot lend anything on that,' said the pawnbroker's clerk, disdainfully pushing the things away from him. You had the excellent habit of never despairing. You said, 'We must wait until this evening; at night all clothes are new; and to take every precaution, I shall go to the pawnbroker's shop in the Rue du Fouare, where all the poor go; as they are accustomed there to see nothing pledged but rags and tatters, our clothes will glitter like barbaric pearl and gold.' Alas! the pawnbroker in the Rue du Fouare was as cruel as his brethren. So the next morning in sheer despair I went to pledge my only frock-coat, and I did this to lend half the sum to that incessant borrower, G–. Lastly, on the nineteenth of November, we sold some books. Fortune smiled on us; we had a chicken-soup with a superabundance of laurel. Do you remember an excellent shopkeeper of the Rue du Faubourg Saint Jacques, near the city-gate, who, we were told, not only sold thread, but kept a circulating library? What a circulating library it was! Plays, three odd volumes of Anne Radcliffe's novels,—and if the old lady had never made our acquaintance, the inhabitants of the Faubourg Saint Jacques would never have known of the existence of 'Letters upon Mythology' and 'De Profundis,' two books I was heartless enough to sell, notwithstanding all their titles to my respect. The authors were born in the same neighborhood which gave me birth: one is Desmoustiers, the other Alfred Mousse. Maybe Arsène Houssaye would not be pleased, were I to remind him of one of the crimes of his youth, where one sees for a frontispiece skeletons—'twas the heyday of the Romantic School—playing tenpins with skulls for balls! The sale of 'De Profundis' enabled us to visit Café Tabourey that evening. You sold soon afterwards eighty cents' worth of books. Allow me to record that they came from your library; my library remained constantly upon the shelves; notwithstanding all your appeals, I never sold any books, except the lamentable history of Alfred Mousse. Monsieur Credit contrived to go to the tradesmen's with imperturbable coolness; he went everywhere until the first of December, when he paid every cent of debt. I have but one regret, and this is, that the little account-book suddenly ceases after a month; it contains only the month of November. This is not enough! Had I continued it, Its pages would have been so many mementos to recall my past life to me."

Monsieur Champfleury introduced Henry Murger to Monsieur Arsène Houssaye, who was then chief editor of "L'Artiste," and it happened oddly enough that Murger wrote nothing but poetry for this journal. Monsieur Houssaye took a great fancy to Murger, and persuaded him, for the sake of "effect" on the title-pages of books and on the backs of magazines, to change Henri to Henry, and give Murger a German physiognomy by writing it Mürger. As Frenchmen treat their names with as much freedom as we use towards old gloves, Murger instantly adopted Monsieur Houssaye's suggestion, and clung as long as he lived to the new orthography of his name. He began to find it less difficult to procure each day his daily bread, but still the gaunt wolf, Poverty, continued to glare on him. "Our existence," he said, "is like a ballad which has several couplets; sometimes all goes well, at other times all goes badly, then worse, next worst, and so on; but the burden never changes; 'tis always the same,—Misery! Misery! Misery!" One day he became so absolutely and hopelessly poor, that he was undecided whether to enlist as a sailor or take a clerk's place in the Messrs. de Rothschilds' banking-house. He actually did make application to Madame de Rothschild. Here is the letter in which he records this application:—

"15th August, 1844.

"I am delighted to be at last able to write you without being obliged to describe wretchedness. Ill-fortune seems to begin to tire of pursuing me, and good-fortune appears about to make advances to me. Madame Rothschild, to whom I wrote begging her to get her husband to give me a situation, informed her correspondent of it, and told him to send for and talk with me. I could not obtain a place, but I was offered ten dollars rather delicately, and I took it. As soon as I received it, I went as fast as I could to put myself in condition to be able to go out in broad daylight."

We scarcely know which is the saddest to see: Henry Murger accepting ten dollars from Madame de Rothschild's generous privy purse,—for it is alms, soften it as you may,—or to observe the happiness this paltry sum gives him. How deeply he must have been steeped in poverty!

But now the very worst was over. In 1848 he sent a contribution to "Le Corsaire," a petty newspaper of odds and ends, of literature and of gossip. The contribution was published. He became attached to the paper. In 1849 he began the publication in "Le Corsaire" of the story which was to make him famous, "La Vie de Bohême," which was, like all his works, something in the nature of an autobiographical sketch. Its wit, its sprightly style, its odd images, its odd scenes, its strange mixture of gayety and sadness, attracted attention immediately. But who pays attention to newspaper-articles? However brilliant and profound they may be, they are forgotten quite as soon as read. The best newspaper-writer on his most successful day can only hope to be remembered from one morning to another; if he commands attention for so long a period, his utmost ambition should consider itself satisfied.

It was not until Murger had rescued his book from the columns of the newspaper that he obtained reputation. He was indebted to Monsieur Jules Janin, the eminent theatrical reporter of the "Journal des Débats," for great assistance at this critical hour of his life. One morning Henry Murger entered Monsieur Jules Janin's study, carrying under his arm an immense bundle of old newspapers, secured by a piece of old twine. He asked Monsieur Jules Janin to read the story contained in the old newspapers, and to advise him if it was worth republication, and what form of publication was best suited to it. As soon as Murger retired, Monsieur Jules Janin took up the newspapers. Few bibliopoles in Paris are more delicate than Monsieur Janin; it is positive pain to him to peruse any volume, unless the margin be broad, the type excellent, the printing executed by a famous printer, and the binding redolent of the rich perfume of Russian leather. These newspapers were torn and tattered, stained with wine and coffee and tobacco. They were not so much as in consecutive order. Conceive the irritation they must have produced on Monsieur Janin! But when he once got fairly into the story he forgot all his delicacy, and when Henry Murger returned, two days afterwards, he said to him,—"Sir, go home and write us a comedy with Rodolphe and Schaunard and Nini and Musette.4 It shall be played as soon as you have written it; in four-and-twenty hours it will be celebrated, and the dramatic reporters will see to the rest." The magnificent promises to the poverty-racked man fevered him almost to madness; he took up the packet, (which Monsieur Janin had elegantly bound with a rose-colored ribbon,) and off he went, without even thinking to thank Monsieur Janin for his kindness, or to close the door. Murger carried his story to a friend, Theodore Barrière, (since famous as a play-writer,) and in three months' time the piece was ready for the stage, was soon brought out at the "Variétés," and the names of Murger and Barrière were on every lip in Paris.

We have nothing like the French stage in the suddenness and extensiveness of the popularity it gives men. We have no means by which a gifted man can suddenly acquire universal fame,—can "go to bed unknown and wake famous." The most brilliant speech at the bar is heard within a narrow horizon. The most brilliant novel is slow in making its way; and before its author is famous beyond the shadow of the publisher's house, a later new novel pales the lustre of the rising star. The French stage occupies the position our Congress once held, when its halls were adorned by the great men, the Clays, Calhouns, Websters, of our fathers' days, or the Supreme Court occupied, when Marshall sat in the chief seat on its bench, and William Pinckney brought to its bar his elaborate eloquence, and William Wirt his ornate and touching oratory. The stage is to France what Parliament is to England. It is more: it is the mirror and the fool; it glasses society's form and pressure; it criticizes folly. Murger's success on the stage opened every door of publicity to him. His name was current, it had a known market-value. The success of the piece assured the success of the book. The "Revue des Deux Mondes" begged Murger to write for its pages. Murger's fortune seemed assured.

There was but one croak heard in all the applause. It came from Murger's father. He could not believe his eyes and his ears, when they avouched to him that his son's name and praises filled every paper and every mouth. It utterly confounded him. The day of the second performance of the piece Murger went to see his father.

"If you would like to see my piece again to-day, you may take these tickets."

His father replied,—

"Your piece? What! you don't mean to say that they are still playing it?"

He could not conceive it possible that his "vagabond" son should interest anybody's attention.

The very first use Murger made of his increased income was to fly Paris and to seek the country,—that rural life which Frenchmen abhor. Marlotte, a little village in the Forest of Fontainebleau, became his home; there he spent eight months of every year. Too poor, at first, to rent a cottage for himself, he lodged at the miserable village-inn, which, with its eccentric drunken landlord, he has sketched in one of his novels; and when fortune proved less unkind to him, he took a cottage which lay between the highway and the forest, and there the first happy years of his life were spent. They were few, and they were checkered. His chief petty annoyance was his want of skill as a sportsman. He could never bring down game with his gun, and he was passionately fond of shooting. On taking up his abode in the country, the first thing he had made was a full hunting-suit in the most approved fashion, and this costume he would wear upon all occasions, even when he came up to Paris. He never attained any nearer approximation to a sportsman's character. One day he went out shooting with a friend. A flock of partridges rose at their feet.

"Fire, Murger! fire!" exclaimed his friend.

"Why, great heavens, man, I can't shoot so! Wait until they light on yon fence, and then I'll take a crack at them."

He could no better shoot at stationary objects, however, than at game on the wing. Hard by his cottage a hare had burrowed in a potato-field. Every morning and every evening Murger fired at the hare, but with such little effect, that the hare soon took no notice either of Murger or his gun, and gambolled before them both as if they were simply a scarecrow. Murger bagged but one piece of game in the whole course of his life, and the way this was done happened in this wise. One day he was asleep at the foot of a tree in the Forest of Fontainebleau,—his gun by his side. He was suddenly awakened by the barking of a dog which he knew belonged to the most adroit poacher that levied illicit tribute on the imperial domain. The dog continued to bark and to look steadily up into the tree. Murger followed the dog's eyes, but could discover nothing. The poacher ran up, saying,—"Quick, Monsieur Murger! quick! Give me your gun. Don't you see it?"

Murger replied,—"See it? See what?"

"Why, a pheasant! a splendid cock! There he is on the top limb!"

The poacher aimed and fired; the pheasant fell at Murger's feet. "Take the bird and put it in your game-bag, Monsieur Murger, and tell everybody you killed it."

Murger gratefully accepted the present; and this was the first and only time that Murger ever bagged a bird.

But the cloud which darkened his sky now was the cloud which had lowered on all his life,—poverty. He was always fevered by the care and anxiety of procuring money. Life is expensive to a man occupying such a position as Murger filled, and French authors are ill paid. A French publisher thinks he has done wonders, if he sells all the copies of an edition of three thousand volumes; and if any work reaches a sale of sixteen or seventeen thousand volumes, the publisher is ready to cry, "Miracle!" Further, men who lead intellectual lives are almost necessarily extravagant of money. They know not its value. They know, indeed, that ten mills make one cent, and that ten cents make one dime, and that ten dimes make one dollar; but they are ignorant of the practical value of these denominations of the great medium of exchange. They cannot "jew," and know not that the slight percentage they would take off the price asked is a prize worth contending for. Again, the physical exhaustion or reaction which almost invariably follows mental exertion requires stimulants of some kind or other to remove the pain—it is an acute pain—which reaction brings upon the whole system. These stimulants, whether they be good dinners, or brilliant company, or generous wines, or parties of pleasure, are always costly. Besides, life in Paris is such an expensive mode of existence, the simplest pleasures there are so very costly, and there are so many microscopic issues through which money pours away in that undomestic life, in that career passed almost continually in public, that one must have a considerable fortune, or lead an extremely retired life. A fashionable author, whose books are in every book-shop window, and whose plays are posted for performance on every wall, cannot lead a secluded life; and all the circumstances we have hinted at conspire to make his life expensive. In vain Murger fled the great city. It pursued him even in the country. Admirers and parasites sought him out even in his retreat, and forced their way to his table. There is another reason for Murger's life-long poverty: he worked slowly, and this natural difficulty of intellectual travail was increased by his exquisite taste and desire of perfection. The novel was written and re-written time and again. The plot was changed; the characters were altered; each phrase was polished and repolished. Where ordinary writers threw off half a dozen volumes, Murger found it hard to fit a single volume for the press. Ordinary writers grew rich in writing speedily forgotten novels; he continued poor in writing novels which will live for many years. Then, Murger's vein of talent made him work for theatres which gave more reputation than ready money. He was too delicate a writer to construct those profitable dramas which run a hundred or a hundred and fifty nights and place ten or twenty thousand dollars in the writer's purse. His original poverty kept him poor. He could not afford to wait until the seed he had sown had grown and ripened for the sickle; so he fell into the hands of usurers, who purchased the crop while it was yet green, and made the harvest yield them profits of fifty or seventy-five per centum.

His distress during the last years of his life was as great as the distress of his youth. His published letters tell a sorrowful tale. They are filled with apprehensions of notes maturing only to be protested, or complaints of inability to go up to Paris one day because he has not a shirt to wear, another day because he cannot procure the seventy-five cents which are the railway-fare from Fontainebleau to Paris. Here is one of his letters, one of the gayest of them It is charming, but sad:—

"I send you my little stock. Carry it instantly to Monsieur Heugel, the music-publisher in the Rue Vivienne, next door to Michel Levy's. Go the day afterwards to Michel Levy's for the answer. Read it, and if it shows that Monsieur Heugel buys my songs, go to him with the blank receipt, herein inclosed, which you will fill up as he will point out, according to the usual conditions. It is ten dollars a song; but as there is a poor song among them, and money I must have, take whatever he gives you; but you must pretend as if you expected ten dollars for each song. This money must be used to take up Saccault's note, which is due the fifteenth. Take the address of the holder, and pay it before it is protested. You will be allowed till the next day to pay it. Be active in this matter, and let me hear how things turn out. I cannot, in reason, in my present situation, take a room at a rent of a hundred and twenty dollars a year.5 We have cares enough for the present; therefore let us not sow that seed of embarrassment which flowers every three months in the shape of quarterly rent. Do not give at the outside more than eighty dollars for the room, even though we be embarrassed by its smallness. I hope we may have means before long of being more delicate in our selection; but at present put a leaf to your patience, for the horizon is black enough to make ink withal. However, the little dialogue (which has been quite successful) I have just had with the muses has given me better spirits. I have a fever of working which is high enough to give me a real fever. I have shaken the box, and see that it is not empty. But I stood in need of this evidence, for in my own eyes I had fallen as low as the Public Funds in 1848. Return here before the money Michel Levy gave you is exhausted, for I cannot get any more for you. I am working half the day and half the night. I feel that the great flood-tide of 'copy' is at hand. My laundress and my pantaloons have both deserted me. I am obliged to use grape-vine leaves for my pocket-handkerchief.... There is nothing new here. The dogs are in good health, but they do not look fat; I am afraid they have fasted sometimes. Our chimney is again inhabited by a family of swallows; they say that is a good sign: maybe it means that we shall have fire all the winter long."

To this letter was added a postscript which one of the dogs was supposed to have written:—

"My dear lady,—They say here we are going to see mighty hard times. My master talks of suppressing my breakfast, and he wants to hire me to a shepherd in order that I may earn some money for a living. But as I have the reputation of loving mutton-chops, nobody will hire me to keep sheep. If you see anywhere in Paris a pretty diamond collar which does not cost more than five-and-twenty cents, bring it to

"DOG MIRZA."14th March, 1855."

Hope dawned upon him in 1856. He was promised a pension of three hundred dollars from the Government out of the literary fund of the Minister of Public Instruction's budget. It would have been, from its regularity of payment, a fortune to him. It would have saved him from the anxiety of quarter-day when rent fell due. But the pension never came. The Government gave him the decoration of the Legion of Honor, which certainly gratified him. But money for bread would have been of more service. When Rachel lay upon that invalid's chair which she was never to quit except for her coffin, she gazed one morning upon the breakfast of delicacies spread before her to tempt the return of absent appetite. After some moments of silence, she took up a piece of bread as white as the driven snow, and, sighing, said in that whisper which was all that remained to her of voice,—"Ay, me! Had the world given me a little more of this, and earlier in my life, I had not been here at three-and-thirty." Those early years of want which sapped Rachel's life undermined Murger's constitution. His rustic life repaired some of the damage wrought, and would probably have entirely retrieved it, had his life then been freer from care, less visited by privation. Had the money the Government and his friends lavished on his corpse been bestowed on him living, he had probably still been numbered among the writers militant of France. Some obscure parasite got the pension. He continued to work on still hounded by debt. "Five times a week," he wrote in 1858, "I dine at twelve or one o'clock at night. One thing is certain: if I am not forced to stop writing for three or four days, I shall fall sick." In 1860 we find him complaining that he is "sick in soul, and maybe in body too. I am, of a truth, fatigued, and a great deal more fatigued than people think me." Death's shadow was upon him. The world thought him in firmer health and in gayer spirits than ever. He knew better. He felt as the traveller feels towards the close of the day and the end of the journey. It was not strange that the world was deceived, for Murger's gayety had always been factitious. He often turned off grief with a smile, where other men relieve it with a tear. Sensitive natures shrink from letting the world see their exquisite sensibility. Besides, Murger's gayety was intellectual rather than physical. It consisted almost entirely in bright gleams of repartee. It was quickness, 'twas not mirth. No wonder, then, that the world was deceived; the mind retained its old activity amid all its fatigue; and besides, the world sees men only in their hours of full-dress, when the will lights up the leaden eyes and wreathes the drawn countenance in smiles. Tears are for our midnight pillow,—the hand-buried face for our solitary study.

So when the rumor flew over Paris, Murger is sick!—Murger is dying!—Murger is dead! it raised the greatest surprise. Everybody wondered how the stalwart man they saw yesterday could be brought low so soon. Where was his youth, that it came not to the rescue? The reader can answer the question. Of a truth, the last act of the drama we have sketched in these pages moved rapidly to the catastrophe. He awoke in the middle of one night with a violent pain in the thigh, which ached as if a red-hot ball had passed through it. The pain momentarily increased in violence, and became intolerable. The nearest physician was summoned. After diagnosis, he declared the case too grave for action until after consultation. Another medical attendant was called in. After consultation they decided that the most eminent surgeons of Paris must be consulted. It was a decomposition of the whole body, attended with symptoms rarely observed. The princes of medical science in Paris met at the bedside. They all confessed that their art was impotent to alleviate, much less to cure this dreadful disease. Murger's hours were numbered. The doctors insisted upon his being transported to the hospital. To the hospital he went: 'twas not for the first,—'twas for the last time. His agonies were distressing. They wrung from him screams which could be heard from the fifth floor, where he lay, to the street. Death made his approaches like some skilful engineer against some impregnable fortress: fibre by fibre, vein by vein, atom by atom, was mastered and destroyed.

During one of the rare intervals of freedom from torture, he turned to the sick-nurse who kept watch by his pillow, and, after vacantly gazing on her buxom form and ruddy cheek, he significantly asked,—"Mammy, do you find this world a happy place, and life an easy burden?" The well-fed woman understood not the bitterness of soul which prompted this question. "Keep quiet, and sleep," was her reply. He fell back upon his pillow, murmuring, "I haven't! I haven't!" Yet he was only eight-and-thirty years old, and men's sorrows commonly commence later in life. A friend came to see him. As the physicians had forbidden him all conversation, he wrote on a card this explanation of his situation:—"Ricord and the other doctors were of opinion that I should come to Dubois's Hospital. I should have preferred St. Louis's Hospital. I feel more at home there. Enfin!…" Is there in the martyrology of poets any passage sadder than these lines? Just think of a man so bereft of home and family, so accustomed to the common cot of the hospital, so familiar to hospital sights and sounds and odors, that he can associate home with the public ward! Poor Murger!