The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864

"I will tell you why," he replied, with melancholy sang-froid. "It is not a question of literature, it is a question of arithmetic. I owe eight hundred dollars to Madame Porcher, the wife of the 'authors'-tickets' dealer, who is always ready to advance money to dramatic authors, and to whom we are all constantly in debt. I owe four hundred dollars to the 'Moniteur,' and three hundred dollars to the 'Revue des Deux Mondes.' Follow my reasoning now: Were I to bring out a play, my excellent friend, Madame Porcher, would lay hands on all the proceeds, and I should receive nothing. Were I to give a novel to the 'Moniteur,' I should have to write twenty feuilletons (you know they pay twenty dollars a feuilleton there) before I cancelled my old debt. Were I to contribute to the 'Revue des Deux Mondes,' as soon as my six sheets (at fifty dollars a sheet, that would be three hundred dollars) were printed and published, the editor would say to me, 'We are even now.' So you see that it would be unpardonable prodigality on my part to publish anything; therefore I have determined not to work at all, in order to avoid spending my money, and I am lazy—from economy!"

His reply disarmed the little resentment I had left. I took his hand in mine, and said to him,—"See here, Murger, I must confess to you I was a little angry with you; but your arithmetic is more literary than you think it. You have given me a lesson of contemporary literature; and I say to you, as the 'Revue des Deux Mondes' would say, 'Murger, we are even!'"

I ran off without waiting for his reply, and whispered to myself, as I went, "And yet Henry Murger is the most talented and the most honest of them all!"

Let me continue the story of my misfortunes. The tempest was unchained against me. It is true, there were among my adversaries some persons under obligations to me,—some persons who were full of enthusiasm at my first manner, and who would have made wry faces enough, had I published their flattering letters to me,—other persons, to whom I had rendered pecuniary services,—others, again, who had come to me with hat in hand and supple knees, to beg my permission to allow them to dramatize my novels. But what were these miserable considerations, when the great interests of national literature, taste, and glory were at stake? I was the vile detractor, the impious scorner of these glories, and it was but justice that I should be put in the pillory and made the butt of rotten eggs. Voltaire blasphemed, Béranger insulted, Victor Hugo outraged, were offences which cried aloud for chastisement and for vengeance. Balzac's shade especially complained and clamored for justice. It is true, that, while Balzac was alive, he was not accustomed to anything like such admiration. He openly avowed that he detested newspaper-writers, and they returned the detestation with interest. Everybody, while he was alive, declared him to be odd, eccentric, half-crazy, absurd. His friends and his publishers, in fine, everybody who had anything to do with him, told rather disreputable stories about him. No matter for that. Balzac was dead, Balzac was a god, the god of all these livers-by-the-wits, who but for him would have been atheists. Monsieur Paulin Limayrac tore me to pieces in "La Presse." Monsieur Eugène Pelletan shot me in "Le Siècle." Monsieur Taxile Delord mauled me in "Le Charivari." To this episode of my exposition in the pillory belongs an anecdote which I cannot omit.

I was about to set off for the country, where I reckoned upon spending some weeks of the month of May, in order to recover somewhat from these incessant attacks made upon me. I had read in a café, while taking my beefsteak and cup of chocolate, the various details of the punishment I was about to undergo. One of my tormentors, who was a great deal more celebrated for his aversion to water and clean linen than for any article he had ever written, declared that I was about to be banished from everything like decent society; another vowed by all the deities of his Olympus that I was a mountebank and a skeptic, who had undertaken to defend sound doctrines and to tomahawk eminent writers simply by way of bringing myself into public notice; a third painted me as a poor wretch who had come from his provincial home with his pockets filled with manuscripts, and was going about Paris begging favorable notices as a means of touching publishers and booksellers; a fourth depicted me, on the other hand, as a wealthy fellow, who was so diseased with a mania for literature that I paid newspapers and reviews to publish my contributions, which no human being would have accepted gratuitously. As I left the café, one of my intimate friends ran up to me. His face expressed that mixture of cordial commiseration and desire to make a fuss about the matter which one's friends' faces always wear under these circumstances.

"Well," said he, "what do you think of the way they treat you?"

"Why, they are all at it,—Monsieur Edmond About, Monsieur Louis Ulbach, Monsieur Paulin Limayrac, Monsieur Henry Murger, Monsieur Taxile Delord,"–

"Ah! by the way, have you seen his article of yesterday?"

"No."

"You should have read that. Those in the morning's papers are nothing to it. Really, you ought not to leave town without seeing it." Looking very important, he added,—"In your position, you should know everything written against you."

I followed this friendly advice, and went to the Rue du Croissant, where the office of "Le Charivari" moulders. As the place is anything but attractive to well-bred persons, allow me to get there by the longest road, and to go through the Faubourg Saint Honoré. A month before the conversation above reported took place in front of a café-door, I had the pleasure of meeting the Count de –, an intellectual gentleman who occupies an influential place in some aristocratic drawing-rooms which still retain a partiality for literature. He said to me,—

"Do you know Monsieur Ernest Legouvé?"

"Assuredly! The most polite and most agreeable of all the generals of Alexander Scribe; the author of 'Adrienne Lecouvreur,' which Rachel played so well, of 'Médée,' in which Madame Ristori shines; a charming gentleman, who, in our age of clubs, cigars, stables, jockeys, and slang, has had the good taste to like feminine society. He has a considerable estate; he belongs to the French Academy; his house is agreeable; his manners delightful; his dinners unequalled. If in all happiness there is a dash of management, where is the harm in Monsieur Ernest Legouvé's case? Why should not gentlemen, too, be sometimes adroit? Rogues are so always! Besides, has not a little art always been necessary to effect an entrance into the French Academy?"

"Monsieur Ernest Legouvé and I were at college together, and he bids me bear you an invitation which I am sure you will not refuse. He has written a play upon the delicate and thorny subject on which Monsieur Jules Sandeau has written his admirable comedy, 'Le Gendre de Monsieur Poirier': with this difference, however: Monsieur Legouvé has taken, not a ruined and brilliant noble who marries the daughter of a plebeian, but a young man, the architect of his own fortunes, with a most vulgar name, who, on the score of talents, energy, delicacy of head and heart, is loved by a young lady of noble birth, is accepted by her family, and enters by right of conquest into that society from which his birth excluded him."

"That theme is rather more difficult: for, when Mademoiselle Poirier marries the Marquis de Presles, she becomes the Marquise de Presles; whereas, when Mademoiselle de Montmorency marries Monsieur Bernard, she becomes plain Madame Bernard."

"True enough! But Monsieur Legouvé is perplexed by a scruple which reflects the greatest honor upon him: he entertains sincere respect, great sympathy, for aristocratic distinctions; therefore he is anxious to assure himself, before his piece is brought out in public, that it does not contain a single scene or a single word which will be offensive or disagreeable to noble ears. To satisfy himself in this particular, he has asked me to allow him to read his comedy at my house. I shall invite the Duchess de –, the Marquis de –, the Countess de –, the General de –, the Duke de –, the Marquise de –, and the Baroness de –. I shall add to these two or three critics known in good society, among whom I reckon upon you. In fine, this preliminary Areopagus will be composed of sons of the Crusaders, who are almost as sprightly as sons of Voltaire. Now Monsieur Ernest Legouvé will not be satisfied with his comedy, unless these gentlefolk unanimously decide that he need not blot a single line of it. Will you come? Remember, Monsieur Ernest Legouvé invites you."

"My dear Count, I willingly accept your proposition. Monsieur Legouvé reads admirably, and his plays are all agreeable. Nevertheless, let me tell you that this trial will prove nothing. Our poor society is like Sganarelle's wife, who liked to be thrashed. It has borne smiling, and repaid with wealth and fame, much more ardent attacks than Monsieur Legouvé can make."

Count de – and I shook hands, and parted. A few evenings afterwards the reading took place. It was just what I expected. There were as many marquises and duchesses (real duchesses) as there were kings to applaud Talma in the Erfurt pit. The noble assembly listened to Monsieur Legouvés's comedy with that rather absent-minded urbanity and with those charming exclamations of admiration which have been constantly given to everybody who has read a piece in a drawing-room, from the days of the Viscount d'Arlincourt and his "Le Solitaire," to the days of Monsieur Viennet, of the French Academy, and his "Arbogaste." Monsieur Legouvé's play, which was then called "Le Nom du Mari," and which has since been played under the title of "Par Droit de Conquête," was pleasing. My ears were not so much offended by the antagonism of poor nobility and wealthy upstarts, which Monsieur Legouvé treated neither better nor worse than any other has done, as by the details of roads, bridges, marsh-draining, canals, railways, coal, coke, and the like, which were dead-weights on Thalia's light robe; and the improbability of the plot was not so much the marriage of a noble girl to the son of an apple-dealer as was the perfection given to the young engineer: every virtue and every grace were showered on him. The piece was unanimously pronounced successful. The aristocratic audience applauded Monsieur Legouvé with their little gloved hands, which never make much noise. He was complimented so delicately that he was sincerely touched. There was not the slightest objection, the lightest murmur made to the piece, and there trembled in my eye that little tear Madame de Sévigné speaks of.

But let us quit this drawing-room, and turn our steps towards the Rue du Croissant, where the office of "Le Charivari" is to be found. Balzac has described in "Les Illusions Perdues" the offices of these petty newspapers: the passage divided into two equal portions, one of which leads to the editor's room, and the other to the grated counter where the clerk sits to receive subscribers. Everybody knows the appearance of these old houses, these staircases, these flimsy partitions, with their bad light coming through a window whose panes are veiled with a triple coating of dust, smoke, and soot,—the whitewashed walls bearing innumerable traces of fingers covered with ink, mingled with pencil-caricatures and grotesque inscriptions. Although it was in the month of May that I made this visit, I shivered with cold as I entered this old house, and my gorge rose in disgust at the unaired smell and ignoble scenes which everywhere appeared. The clerk I applied to had the very face one might expect to find in such a place: one of those colorless, hard, sinister faces which are to be seen in nearly all the scenes of Paris reality. All things were in harmony in this shop: the air, and the light, and the house,—the letter as well as the spirit. I asked the clerk to give me the file for the month of April. I soon found and read Monsieur Taxile Delord's article. Monsieur Taxile Delord comes from some one of the southern departments of France. He made his first appearance in public in "Le Sémaphore," the well-known newspaper of Marseilles; but the twilight of a provincial life could not suit this eagle, and in the course of a few years he came up to Paris. Alas! Monsieur Taxile Delord was soon obliged to add the secret sorrows of disappointed ambition to the original gayety of his character. His deepest sorrow was to look upon himself for a grave and thoughtful statesman, and be condemned by fate to a chronic state of fun and to hard labor at pun-making for life. Imagine Junius damned to lead Touchstone's life! He became sourness itself. His puns were lugubrious. His fun grew heavy, and his gayety was funereal. The pretensions of this checked gravity which settled upon his factitious hilarity were enough to melt the hearts even of his enemies, if such a fellow could pretend to have enemies. Once this galley-slave of fun tried to make his escape from the galley. He wrote a play; and as the manager of one of the theatres was his friend, he had it played. The democratic opinions of Monsieur Taxile Delord raised favorable prejudices among the school-boys of the Latin Quarter; but who can escape his fate? The masterpiece was hissed. Its title was "The End of the Comedy"; and a wretched witling pretended that the piece was ill-named, since the pit refused to see the end of the comedy. Thereupon Monsieur Taxile Delord adopted the method of Gulliver's tailor, who measured for clothes according to the rules of arithmetic: he demonstrated that his piece was played three times from beginning to end,—that, as the manager was his particular friend, and as the Odeon was always empty, he might have had it played thirty times,—and therefore that we were all bound to be grateful to him for his moderation. This last argument met no person bold enough to contradict it, and the subscribers to "Le Charivari" (which is the "Punch" of Paris) were seized with holy horror, when they thought, that, but for Monsieur Taxile Delord's moderation, "The End of the Comedy" might have been played seven-and-twenty times more.

What had I done to excite his ire? I had not treated Béranger with sufficient respect, and Monsieur Taxile Delord, though a joker by trade, would not hear of any fun on this subject. His genius had shaped itself exactly on Béranger's, and he resented as a personal affront every insult offered to the songster. Of a truth, Béranger's fate was a hard one, and all my attacks on him were not half so bad as this treatment he received at the hands of Monsieur Taxile Delord. Poor Béranger! So Monsieur Taxile Delord took up the quarrel on his account, and relieved his gall by throwing it on me. When I read his article, I felt humiliated,—but not as the writer desired,—I felt humiliated for the press, and for literature, and for Béranger, who really did not deserve this hard fate. The humid office, full of dirt and dust and printing-ink, disgusted and depressed me, and I involuntarily thought of Count de –'s drawing-room, and that aristocratic society where everything was flowers, courtesy, perfumes, elegance, where people could not even feel hatred towards their enemies, and where the genial poet, Monsieur Ernest Legouvé, surrounded by the most charming and most sprightly women of Paris, recently obtained so delightful a triumph.

All at once a sympathetic and clear voice, a voice which I thought I had heard in better society than where I was, reached my ears. Hid in the dark corner where I sat, and where nobody could discover me, I saw the door of the editor's room open and Monsieur Taxile Delord appear and escort to the door a visitor. It was Monsieur Ernest Legouvé! They passed close to me, and I heard Monsieur Ernest Legouvé say to Monsieur Delord,—"My dear Sir, I recommend my play, 'Le Nom du Mari,' to you; I hope you will be pleased with it!"

This contrast annoyed me. I was then horribly out of humor from an irritating prelection, and I felt towards Monsieur Legouvé that sort of vexation the unlucky feel towards the lucky, the poor towards the rich, the hunchbacks towards handsome men, and the awkward towards the adroit. I said to myself,—"Armand, my poor Armand, you will never be aught but a most stupid fool!"

We add no commentary to this picture of literary life in Paris. We leave the reader to draw his own conclusions. He needs no assistance,—for the picture is painted in bright colors, and the light is thrown with no parsimonious hand upon every corner. It is a curious exhibition of a most unhealthy state of things. It explains a great many of those literary mysteries, which seem so unaccountable, in the most brilliant capital of the world.

THE MASKERS

Yesternight, as late I strayedThrough the orchard's mottled shade,—Coming to the moonlit alleys,Where the sweet Southwind, that dalliesAll day with the Queen of Roses,All night on her breast reposes,—Drinking from the dewy blooms,Silences, and scented gloomsOf the warm-breathed summer night,Long, deep draughts of pure delight,—Quick the shaken foliage parted,And from out its shadows dartedDwarf-like forms, with hideous faces,Cries, contortions, and grimaces.Still I stood beneath the lonely,Sighing lilacs, saying only,—"Little friends, you can't alarm me;Well I know you would not harm me!"Straightway dropped each painted mask,Sword of lath, and paper casque,And a troop of rosy girlsRan and kissed me through their curls.Caught within their net of graces,I looked round on shining faces.Sweetly through the moonlit alleysRang their laughter's silver sallies.Then along the pathway, lightWith the white bloom of the night,I went peaceful, pacing slow,Captive held in arms of snow.Happy maids! of you I learnHeavenly maskers to discern!So, when seeming griefs and harmsFill life's garden with alarms,Through its inner walks enchantedI will ever move undaunted.Love hath messengers that borrowTragic masks of fear and sorrow,When they come to do us kindness,—And but for our tears and blindness,We should see, through each disguise,Cherub cheeks and angel eyes.

CULLET

"Good morning! Is it really a rainy day?" asked Miselle, imploringly, as she seated herself at the breakfast-table, and glanced from Monsieur to the heavy sky and the vane upon the coach-house, steadily pointing west.

"Indeed, I hope not. Are you ready for Sandwich?" smilingly replied the host.

"More than ready,—eager. But the clouds."

"One learns here upon the coast to brave the clouds; we have, to be sure, a sea-turn just now, and perhaps there will be fog-showers by-and-by, but nothing that need prevent our excursion."

"Delightful!" exclaimed Optima, Miselle, and Madame, applying themselves to eggs and toast with that calm confidence in a masculine decision so sustaining to the feminine nature.

The early breakfast over, Monsieur, with a gentle hint to the ladies of haste in the matter of toilet, went to see that Gypsy and Fanny were properly harnessed, and that a due number of cushions, rugs, and water-proof wrappers were placed in the roomy carriage.

Surely, never were hats so hastily assumed, never did gloves condescend to be so easily found, never were fewer hasty returns for "something I have forgotten," and Monsieur had barely time to send two messages to the effect that all was ready, when the feminine trio descending upon him triumphantly disproved once and forever the hoary slander upon their sex of habitual unpunctuality.

With quiet self-sacrifice Optima placed herself beside Madame in the back of the carryall, leaving for Miselle the breezy seat in front, with all its facilities for seeing, hearing, smelling, breathing; and let us hope that the little banquet thus prepared for the conscience of that young woman gave her as much satisfaction as Miselle's feast of the senses did to her.

Arching their necks, tossing their manes, spattering the dewy sand with their little hoofs, Gypsy and Fanny rapidly whirled the carriage through the drowsy town, across the Pilgrim Brook, and so, by the pretty suburb of "T'other Side," (which no child of the Mayflower shall ever consent to call Wellingsley,) to the open road skirting the blue waters of the bay.

"Ah, this is fine!" cried Miselle, snatching from seaward deep breaths of the east wind laden with the wild life of ocean and the freedom of boundless space.

"Here we have it!" remarked Monsieur, somewhat irrelevantly, as he hastily unbuckled the apron and spread it over his own lap and Miselle's, just in time to catch a heavy dash of rain.

"I am afraid it is going to be stormy, after all," piteously murmured Miselle.

"I told you we should have fog-showers, you know," suggested Monsieur, with a quiet smile.

"But what must we do?—go home?"

"No, indeed!—we will go to Sandwich, let it rain twice, four times as hard as this,—unless, indeed, Madame gives orders to the contrary. What say you, Madame?"

"I say, let us go on for the present. We can turn round at any time, if it becomes necessary"; and Madame smiled benevolently at Miselle, down whose face the rain-drops streamed, but who stoutly asserted,—

"Oh, this is nothing. Only a fog-shower, you know. We shall have it fine directly."

"Not till we are out of Eel River. This valley gathers all the clouds, and they often get rain here when the sun is shining everywhere else."

"A regular vale of tears! Happy the remnant of the world that dwelleth not in Eel River!" murmured Miselle, surreptitiously pulling her water-proof cloak about her shoulders.

"Let me help you. Really, though, you are getting very wet, dear," remonstrated Optima.

"Not in the least. I enjoy it excessively. Besides, the shower is just over.—What church is that, Monsieur, with the very disproportionate steeple?" inquired Miselle, pointing to a square gray box, surmounted by a ludicrously short and obtuse spire, expressive of a certain dogged obstinacy of purpose.

"The church is an Orthodox meetinghouse, and the steeple is Orthodox too,—for the Cape. Anything else would blow down in the spring gales. Park-Street steeple, for instance, would stand a very poor chance here."

"Yes," said Miselle, vaguely, and she felt in her heart how this great ocean that dwarfs or prostrates the works of man replaces them by a temple builded in his own soul of proportions so lofty that God Himself may dwell visibly therein.

And now, having traversed the tearful valley, the road wound up the Delectable Mountains beyond, and so into the pine forest, through whose clashing needles glints of sunshine began to creep, while overhead the gray shaded softly into pearl and dazzling white and palest blue.

"There are deer in these Sandwich woods. See if we cannot find a pair of great brown eyes peering out at us from some of the thickets," suggested Madame.

"Charming! If only we might see one! How young this nation is, after all, when aboriginal deer roam the woods within fifty miles of Boston!"

"But without game-laws they will soon be exterminated. A great many are shot every winter, and the farmers complain bitterly of those that remain. Some of their crops are quite ruined by the deer, they say," remarked Monsieur.

"Never mind. There are plenty of crops, and but very few deer. I pronounce for the game-laws," recklessly declared Miselle.

But the impending battle of political economy was averted by Madame's exclamation of,—

"See, here is Sacrifice Rock. Let us stop and look at it a moment."

Gypsy and Fanny, wild with the sparkling upland air, were with difficulty persuaded to halt opposite a great flat granite boulder, sloping from the skirt of the forest toward the road, and nearly covered with pebbles and bits of decayed wood.

"It is Sacrifice Rock," explained Monsieur. "From the days of the Pilgrims to our own, no Indian passes this way without laying some offering upon it. It would have been buried long ago, but that the spring and autumn winds sweep away all the lighter deposits. You would find the hollow at its back half filled with them. Once there may have been human sacrifices,—tradition says so, at least; but now there is seldom anything more precious than what you see."

"But to what deity were the offerings made?"

"Some savage Manitou, no doubt, but no one can say with certainty anything about it. The degenerate half-breeds who live in this vicinity only keep up the custom from tradition. They are called Christians now, you know, and are quite above such idolatrous practices."