I
Théâtre des Variétés, Thursday, 22 November 1849
THE SHADOWS DREW IN, until only her lily-white hands and her pale face could be seen. Figures dressed in black stood around her: they might have been angelic undertakers, waiting to bear her flimsy body to the grave. The silence was almost complete. The only sounds were the hissing of the gas-jets and the murmur of a thousand people barely breathing. Then a voice cried out, ‘O my youth! It is you they are burying!’
Darkness engulfed the scene, and furious applause cascaded down from the upper circle and the amphithéâtre. As the shabby section of the audience rose to its feet, waving its hats and food-wrappers, a rich, stale smell wafted through the auditorium. It had something of the fog on the boulevard outside, where the pavements were sticky with rain, but also something more intimate: it suggested old stew and coarse tobacco, the coat-racks and bookshelves of a pawnshop, and damp straw mattresses impregnated with urine and patchouli. It was – as though the set-designer had intended some ironical epilogue – the smell of the real Latin Quarter.
A denizen of that world walked stiffly onto the stage to shouts of ‘Author!’ He went to stand between the lovely white creature, now back from the dead like a sheet from the laundress, and his ideal alter ego, the elegantly disconsolate Rodolphe. A few smiles broke out among the parterre, which was still savouring the novelty of seeing garret-room revolutionaries portrayed as considerate young men. Liberties had obviously been taken with the truth…Someone must have kidnapped M. Murger and delivered him to a tailor. His body was still making the acquaintance of a perfectly black jacket and an unventilated pair of shoes; the handkerchief he clutched was unmistakeably white. His ‘knee’, as he called his balding brow, looked almost distinguished, and a fearless barber had ventured into the virgin forest of his beard and turned it into a tidy hedge. No one would see the fear and the sarcasm in those big, gloomy eyes, but the footlights might catch the tear that ran endlessly down his cheek – for the master of pathos was blessed with a defective lachrymal gland.
Beyond the footlights, he could make out the faces of famous critics who were about to crown him King of Bohemia. They had shown him their reviews of La Vie de Bohème before the performance and implicated him in the conspiracy of praise: ‘It positively rains witticisms.’ ‘Never has the public been so moved…those penniless young men and women have won our hearts.’ ‘One can tell that this work was lived before it was written.’
He saw the new President, Louis-Napoléon, smiling approval from his box, the living assurance that the revolutions of 1848 – in which Henry Murger himself had played a small and only slightly shameful part – now belonged to history. The dishevelled originals of the stage Bohemians were hard to distinguish beyond the chandelier and the red velvet of the upper circle: they were a dark mass of heads and caps, just below the rotunda and the gilt cherubs made grubby by the gas-light. But he knew them well enough – the lank hair, the old men’s teeth, the humorous foibles that had hardened into vices. It should have been obvious to everyone that La Vie de Bohème was a highly selective version of the truth.
The actress who had incarnated Mimi placed her hand in his and curtsied to the critics; then his collaborator, the professional playwright, joined him on stage and the applause grew louder. He had imagined his moment of triumph a thousand times and was surprised to find himself thinking about furniture – a pair of matching chairs, a mattress with springs, and a full-length mirror. He thought of doors that filled the doorway and windowpanes that would not be shattered by a gust of wind. He pictured an apartment that would not have been out of place on the stage of the Variétés, with a boudoir in which to hide a beautiful new admirer and an antechamber in which to detain her beautiful predecessor.
It was an understandable distraction. Henry Murger, the tailor’s son and penniless scribbler, was about to leave that suffering land of debts and dreams where ‘bold adventurers hunt from dawn to dusk that savage beast known as the five-franc piece’. The success of La Vie de Bohème was his passport to the Right Bank. Most of his friends had forgiven him his sentimental depiction of Bohemia. Some of them had even begged him to expunge that last, calculatedly selfish line, ‘Omy youth! It is you they are burying!’ But the professional playwright had already turned his little tales into a sugary fantasy. Something had to remain of the bitterness and the wasted time. If ‘they’ had not buried his youth, he would have butchered it himself and danced on its grave.
As they left the stage, he squeezed Mimi’s tiny hand and looked forward to the sequel.
II
The Latin Quarter, 1843–46
IN THOSE DAYS, long before, a view over the rooftops of Paris was an unaffordable luxury. The apartment he had shared with a mousy young writer from Laon had a view of the Jardin du Luxembourg – if he stuck his head out of the window as far as it would go and twisted it to the left, a smudge of green foliage appeared in the corner of one eye. That had been his best apartment to date. They had decorated it in the ‘Bohemian’ style of the 1830s: a few volumes of Shakespeare and Victor Hugo, a Phrygian cap, an Algerian hookah, a skull on a broomstick handle (from the brother of a friend, Charles Toubin, who was an intern at one of the big hospitals) and, of course, a window box of geraniums, which was not only pretty but also illegal. (Death by falling window box was always high up the official list of fatalities.) For a proper view of Paris, they visited Henry’s painter friends who lived in a warren of attic rooms near the Barrière d’Enfer and called themselves the Water-Drinkers. When the weather was fine and the smell of their own squalor became unbearable, they clambered onto the roof and sat on the gutters and ridges, sketching chimneyscapes, and sending up more smoke from their pipes than the fireplaces below.
Three of the Water-Drinkers had since died of various illnesses known collectively as ‘lack of money’. When the last of the three was buried, in the spring of 1844, Henry and the others had found themselves at the graveside without a sou to give the gravedigger. ‘Never mind,’ said he, ‘you can pay me next time,’ and then, to his colleague: ‘It’s all right – these gentlemen are regular customers.’
Four times a year, when leases expired, half the population of Paris took to the streets in a mass, short-distance migration. Few people owned more furniture than would fit on a hand-cart, and few were so enamoured of their dwelling that they wanted to stay for more than a year. Henry’s migrations had left him almost as far down the residential ladder as it was possible to go. After his latest move, he was living in the Hôtel Merciol near Saint-Sulpice, in a dingy little room on the third floor (‘for the excellent reason that there isn’t a fourth’).
The Hôtel Merciol was one of those grudgingly furnished hotels where so many people came and went – hiding from creditors, borrowing a bed, staying drunk as long as their friends’ generosity allowed – that it could hardly be called home. Working girls in search of more congenial employment sometimes brightened the place with their chatter and their imitation of domestic respectability, until the police raided the hotel in the name of public morality and sent the girls to be hygienically inspected and registered as prostitutes.
Despite the boredom, the discomfort and the constant anxiety, Henry had decided to live by his pen. Since his mother’s death, his father had behaved like a typical bourgeois, which was particularly irritating in a man who earned his living as a tailor and a concierge. He refused to subsidize his son’s career as France’s future greatest poet. He scoffed at Henry’s ragged clothes and suggested that he find work as a domestic servant. Henry was forced, as he put it, to ‘prostitute his muse’. He wrote for a bath-house journal that was printed on waterproof paper, and for two children’s magazines, whose editors found his sentimental style well suited to the junior reader. He wrote verse for Le Palamède, which printed chess problems and gave the solutions in rhyming couplets. As ‘Viscountess X’, he wrote a fashion column for Le Moniteur de la Mode. (‘Everyone this season is wearing periwinkle blue’, he wrote, dressed in his mouse-brown overcoat.) He had even penned a few sarcastic editorials for the organ of his father’s trade, Le Coupeur:
The Tailor’s Art – that deplorable expression! Does a man who improves his stitching technique thereby acquire the right to stand proudly beside our artists and to claim, when he hears the names David, Girodet or Horace Vernet, ‘I, too, am an artist!…’ No, a thousand times no. He should say no such thing, or run the risk of bringing a smile to every lip.
At the age of twenty-three, he saw his dreams of poetic glory turn to dust. His longest poem had been written for Mr Rogers, whose name appeared on walls and buses all over Paris. Mr Rogers liked to advertise his product in Romantic verse and paid one franc per couplet. Henry’s ode was supposedly written by a countess to her friend, who could now face the world again thanks to a mouthful of hippopotamus ivory. It was by far his most widely read publication:
A dire calamity had come about –
There is none worse: – my teeth had fallen out.
ROGERS! My husband’s love I owe to thee,
Thou hast restor’d domestic harmony.
(Men love not the woman but the idol.)
Touch’d by thy hand, of Nature’s the rival,
By no gold thread, nor hook, nor tie oppress’d,
Our tender jaws become a treasure-chest!
I’d bade adieu to Youth’s sweet adventures,
When, my dear, you told me of His dentures.
May HIS name ever in my heart reside,
ROGERS! without thy skill I should have died,
Or ever lived a prisoner of my house,
The toothless widow of a living spouse!
Since the muse was beginning to lose her appetite for doggerel like this, it was just as well that her poet had another source of income. A certain Count Tolstoy employed him as a secretary on a small but regular wage. Though the young man was often ill and lying idle in a hospital bed, Count Tolstoy found that with his intimate knowledge of political clubs and underground journalism in the Latin Quarter, Henry Murger made an excellent informant for the Tsarist spy network.
AT THE TIME the great event occurred, Henry’s personal life was in a similarly wretched state. The Danish ‘sylph-in-velvet’ who had spent two nights sleeping in his chair had flown away, complaining to a mutual friend that he was physically unambitious (‘which only goes to show that I’m a fool’). The overweight soubrette (‘two hundred pounds, not including petticoats’) had frightened him off with talk of weddings and babies. The search for a ‘legitimate mistress’ who would marry him ‘in the thirteenth arrondissement’ – as they said when there were only twelve of them in Paris – had been long and fruitless. Even his most ingenious plan had come to naught: the principal of the girls’ orphanage at Saint-Étienne-du-Mont had not received his application for a wife with undisguised delight.
It was, therefore, with a mixture of ecstasy and relief that, in the spring of 1846, he discovered a creature sent from heaven via the Faubourg Saint-Denis who seemed destined to fill his heart with joy and his pockets with money.
III
A newspaper office, 1846
ON TUESDAY 5 MAY, slightly later than he had intended, Henry Murger crossed the river to the Right Bank and turned into a busy street between the Passage des Panoramas and the Stock Exchange. At no. 36, Rue Vivienne, the index finger of a disembodied hand pointed up a staircase to something called ‘Le Corsaire-Satan’.
His heart was pounding even before he began to climb the stairs. That Sunday, he had returned to Paris on a cloud, accompanied by his friends, who travelled more mundanely on the number 9 bus. They had been taking the air at Bougival by the Seine, where shop-girls and factory workers went to remind themselves of the sun, and where the riverbanks bristled with painters’ easels.
Champfleury – the mousy young writer with a cat’s-whiskers moustache – had brought along his girlfriend, Mariette. Their fellow Bohemian, Alexandre Schanne, who was known to a handful of fellow artists and several hundred exasperated neighbours as the composer of a symphony ‘On the Influence of Blue in the Arts’, had brought his mistress, Louisette. She was, according to Henry, a typical grisette (the name given to working girls because of the cheap grey cloth they wore). She got about the city by hanging on to the back of carriages and supplemented her wages as a flower-girl by attaching herself to cheerful young men until their money ran out. She was known to have seduced her married landlord in lieu of a month’s rent, and then to have blackmailed him for a further month. Like most girls at her factory, she had green hands – from the arsenic dye that was used on the artificial petals. It was monotonous work and poorly paid. Each girl performed a single task and never saw the finished flowers that adorned the tables and ball-gowns of the ladies whose husbands flirted with the flower-girls.
They were lying on the grass, discussing the delicate art of paying one’s debts without spending any money, when Louisette’s friend from the factory arrived on the arm of a young architect called Crampon. Henry removed the pipe from his mouth and turned to look.
She was wearing a blue polka-dot muslin dress, tied at the waist with a ribbon that matched her blue eyes. Her boots were laced tightly over white stockings. Her puff sleeves and white collar had been carefully stitched by candlelight in the few hours that remained after work. Like all flower-girls, she was deathly pale, but not pale enough to hide her scars. Her face had been ravaged by smallpox. A friend of Henry’s later compared it to a honey cake, because it was sweet and had a pitted surface.
Her chaperone that day, M. Crampon, had met her in the street by chance – so he thought – when she was trying to find the key to her apartment. In fact, at the time, Lucile Louvet had no permanent address. Five years before, she had left her father’s tripe shop in the Rue Saint-Denis, and married a cobbler in the same quartier, a M. Paulgaire, who beat her and bored her to tears. Since then, she had lived in garrets in the Latin Quarter, in hospitals for indigent women and sometimes in houses in the back streets where the charms of even the plainest flower-girl were appreciated to the full.
She never smiled. If she had ever had a sense of humour, she had lost it – or, as Henry might have said, had mislaid it or taken it to the pawnshop, hoping one day to redeem it. But at Bougival, the shadows of the leaves and the darting sun painted expressions on her face that would have charmed an artist. Henry’s eye, being bolder than the rest of him, explored her from top to toe, loosened the ribbon around her waist and entered the chestnut forest of her hair. Without saying a word, she made it obvious that the exploration did not offend her.
That evening, on the journey back to Paris, M. Crampon had somehow become detached from the rest of the party, and Henry had found himself alone with Lucile.
Now, two days later, as he climbed the stairs of no. 36 clutching a roll of paper, he was still in what he described as ‘a state of wild intoxication’. He passed the old soldier on the landing who repelled irate readers and welcomed actresses and politicians bearing bribes. He walked along a corridor where men in overalls were reading proofs and eating fried potatoes, and entered a large office that looked like a schoolroom several days after a pupils’ coup d’état. About twenty young men in varying states of dilapidation and dandification sat and sprawled around a table covered in green baize. On the far side was a bookcase devoid of books, and an illustrated wall-chart of world history on which all the cartouches bearing names and dates had been patiently obliterated with sealing-wax. A tall, elderly man wearing green-tinted spectacles was marching from one group to the next, shouting like an actor in a boulevard theatre and snatching up sheets of paper.
‘Let me see that…“My word!”, an actress with close ties to the Ministry was heard to say the other day… Rubbish! Into the basket…. What’s that? Say that again. Creditors are like women?…’
‘You can’t love them enough.’
‘That’s good. Write it down. It’s two o’clock. There’s nothing at the printers!…Oh, I forgot…Monsieur Baudelaire is a genius – we can’t expect him to soil his hands with ink…’
The chief-editor of the Corsaire-Satan was the man who, as he never tired of saying, had ‘discovered’ Balzac in 1821 and shown him how to write pornographic novels for money. Since then, Auguste Lepoitevin Saint-Alme had steered at least half a dozen newspapers to ruin but still harboured dreams of dominating the Parisian press. His latest venture – a scandal sheet called Satan – had taken over the old daily arts paper, Le Corsaire. He had sacked the salaried journalists and replaced them with the freelance geniuses who walked every morning from the Latin Quarter in the hope of seeing their names in print and to spend the day in a heated room. He paid them a niggardly six centimes a line (‘so they won’t get lazy’). But once they had produced ten articles that caused irreparable damage to the reputation of a public figure, they were allowed to puff each other’s books and praise the performances of any actress they happened to fancy. Saint-Alme called them his ‘little cretins’. (‘The future of literature, sir!’ he told his rivals.)
Until then, most of Henry’s work for the Corsaire-Satan had consisted of anecdotes of life in the Latin Quarter – that far-fetched world where mildly deranged young men discussed ‘hyperphysical philosophy’ until dawn, joked about squalor and starvation and paid the rent by immortalizing the landlord in oil. Saint-Alme took the paper from Henry’s hand, and read aloud to the assembled cretins.
It was a description of Henry’s meeting with Lucile. He had called the girl Louise and himself Rodolphe, and transposed their encounter to the Prado dance-hall on the Île de la Cité. Then, without changing any other detail, he recounted their return to Paris from Bougival on Sunday evening:
They stopped in front of a shop in the Rue Saint-Denis.
‘This is where I live,’ she said.
‘When shall I see you again, Louise, and where?’
‘Your place, tomorrow, eight o’clock.’
‘Really and truly?’
‘Here’s my promise,’ she said, offering her fresh cheeks to Rodolphe, who took a bite of those beautiful ripe fruits of youth and health.
He returned home, as they say, ‘in a state of wild intoxication’.
‘Oh!’ he exclaimed, striding about his room. ‘It can’t go on like this.
I must write some poetry.’
Saint-Alme guffawed his approval: Murger’s tale was just the sort of thing to titillate the middle-aged subscribers. The ‘little cretins’ listened as Saint-Alme read on:
After tidying up the temple that was to receive his idol, Rodolphe dressed for the occasion, bitterly regretting the absence of anything white from his wardrobe.
The ‘holy hour’ struck, and with it came two timid knocks at the door. He opened it. It was Louise.
‘You see, I kept my word.’
Rodolphe pulled the curtain across the window and lit a fresh candle.
The girl removed her bonnet and shawl, and placed them on the bed. She saw the dazzling whiteness of the sheets, and smiled. In fact, she almost blushed.
When she complained that her boots were rather tight, he knelt down and obligingly helped her to unlace them.
Suddenly, the light went out.
‘Oh!’ said Rodolphe. ‘Who can have blown out the candle?…’
The rest of the evening was left to the fertile imaginations of the little cretins, who congratulated Henry on his new acquisition and his literary style.
IV
The Latin Quarter, 1846–47
NEXT DAY, Henry left his female protagonist in bed and went to read the Corsaire-Satan at the café. His tale had been given the honours of the ‘rez-de-chaussée’. (The ‘ground floor’ was the bottom half of the front page, where the serial usually appeared.) More importantly, it ran to two hunded and seventy-four lines. At six centimes a line, it would pay the rent for two weeks. If he could keep up that tone of ironical gaiety, he and Lucile might even enjoy the luxury of a daily meal.
From that brief period of happiness – as it later seemed to Henry – only two letters have survived, both written by Lucile. They can hardly be counted among the great love letters of the nineteenth century, but at least they have the flavour of reality:
Since you’re not back, I’m going out to see my aunt.
I’m taking the money so I can take a cab.
Louise
(‘Aunt’ was a euphemism for the pawnshop.)
I’m going to have some boots made. You’ll have to find some money so I can pick them up the day after tomorrow.
(A pair of boots cost twenty francs, or, in the circumstances, three hundred and thirty-three lines of prose.)
Henry liked the letters so much that he quoted them in his next ‘Scene of Bohemian Life’: the hero’s friend, seeing a shiny new pair of women’s boots at his door, assumes that he has come to the wrong address. Afterwards, the Bohemians eat a lobster and drink a few bottles of wine to celebrate Rodolphe and Mimi’s ‘honeymoon’. (He had decided to rename his character ‘Mimi’.) The friend discourses on the origins of coffee (‘discovered in Arabia by a goat’), while Mimi goes off to fetch the pipes and to serve the coffee, saying to herself, ‘Good heavens! What a lot of things that gentleman knows!’
It was only after a month of blissful moments to treasure in his memory – the faint smile on her lips when he brought her back a blue scarf from the fashion magazine, or the morning when he kissed her hair a hundred times while she slept – that he began to notice certain things. Lucile spent ages dressing and arranging her hair, just to go to the market. She talked to the women who sat on the street corner. She spread out her second-hand tarot cards on his desk, examining them like a scholar of ancient languages, and on the days that were supposed to be lucky she was gone for hours. When he asked what she was doing, she said, ‘getting to know the neighbours’.
Henry sat at his desk, trying to be witty. Lucile was useless as a housewife, and since she had given up her job at the flower-factory, it was hard to satisfy her extravagant desire for cooked food and an occasional outing to the dance-hall. But at least, with Lucile as his mistress, there was no shortage of material. Without exactly spying on her, he found out about the gentleman from Brittany, and the precocious schoolboy who promised her a cashmere shawl and some mahogany furniture. From Lucile herself, he knew that Alexandre Schanne, who was probably envious, had called her ‘a little slut’. Another friend had been looking rather bashful, and Henry wondered how far the ‘neighbourhood’ extended. Sometimes, when she rested her head on his shoulder, he thought he could smell the men on her clothes. It was not surprising, after all, and the readers who were enjoying his ‘Scenes’ in the Corsaire-Satan would understand that this was quite normal in Bohemia – ‘those flighty birds of passage’, he had written, ‘who, out of a whim or more often out of need, one day (or rather, one night) make their nest in the garrets of the Latin Quarter and agree to stay for a few days if they can be lured with a caprice, or with ribbons.’
The little household had to live, and M. Saint-Alme was pestering him for copy. Henry served up ever more intimate slices of his life, still warm and saignant. He sold Lucile’s infidelities to the Corsaire-Satan, and became, in effect, her literary pimp. If ‘Mimi’ had stayed at home and darned his socks, the stories would have dried up. They would have been poor but happy, or, more likely, dying at the hospital. It had a curious effect on his writing. Behind the jolly scenes of garret life, he began to sketch that other world that was never mentioned in print – the world of disillusioned ‘artists’ with small, hungry imaginations, the provincial businessmen who sat alone in dance-halls, and the students who came to Paris armed with their parents’ money, wanting to while away the months of academic idleness with a housewife-prostitute-companion before returning home to impregnate the chosen virgin. He used Lucile’s ‘adventures’ to give some tactful, fleeting notion of a darker Latin Quarter, in which illegal pamphlets such as Bachelor Life in Furnished Rooms advertised cheap clinics where midwives learned their trade, ‘mechanical corsets’ guaranteed to flatten the evidence and, as a cheap alternative to infanticide, ‘breuvages avortifs’.
Of course, he could only hint at this in the newspaper, and some of the details had to be changed in the name of romantic fiction. In one of the Scenes, Mimi, having grown tired of starving in a garret, disappeared with a viscount, at about the time that the real Henry wrote to a friend, ‘My wife has gone off to get married to a big soldier who wants to slit my throat – something to which I am opposed.’ To his own surprise, he saw his flimsy heroine turning into a character of substance: ‘Her features were not without a certain delicacy and seemed to be lit gently by her clear blue eyes, but at certain moments of boredom or ill humour, they wore an expression of almost savage brutality, in which a physiognomist might have recognized the signs of deep egotism or great insensitivity.’ Rodolphe, too, was becoming alarmingly true to life: he hit his mistress when she left him and when she returned like an alley cat, purring and striking poses. In the absence of opium, violence was the drug that induced the tearful reconciliations and the long, greedy nights when Lucile was as eloquent in bed as Henry was on the page. In muted forms, he described their fights and his jealous agonies; he wrote about the rosy fingernails that lacerated his heart, and he wondered why Mimi kept returning to Rodolphe, and why he allowed her to return.
After eight months of hell, he drew up the balance sheet: six ‘Scenes of Bohemian Life’ amounting to one hundred francs, some broken ornaments and a smashed chair, a pawnshop pledge on the shelf where his poetry books had been, and a feeling that anger and jealousy were all that remained of his passionate youth.
They had said goodbye so many times that he could never remember who decided to end it once and for all. They discussed it for a day in a strange state of calm. Henry was to keep the ornaments and the chair, and Lucile would keep the ‘antique’ statuette of Homer that she had bought one day to prove that she was not entirely insensitive to literature.
They spent a last night together in bed. He turned away from her and bit his pillow. She heard him sobbing in his sleep. In the morning, she waited until he was awake. She told him that she had no plans, which he found hard to believe. When they parted, he kissed her hand and moistened it with tears. She might have let him kiss her properly if he had tried. Then she opened the door and walked down the stairs.
That evening, Champfleury took him to a restaurant, and he drank a bottle of her favourite wine. As he stared at the sweet red liquid through tear-filled eyes, he found to his surprise that her face was already beginning to merge with all the other faces he had loved.
ONE DAY AT THE end of November, sitting at the wooden table of a cabinet de lecture between a flea-ridden scholar and a concierge engrossed in a novel, she opened the Corsaire-Satan and saw the poem he had inserted in his latest ‘Scene of Bohemian Life’. He must have written it, she supposed, on the day they parted. (In fact, the poem was three years old and had been written for another woman, but it suited the occasion quite well.) By the time she left the cabinet de lecture, she knew the poem by heart.
I’ve run out of money, which means, my dear,
That we’re legally obliged to forget.
I’m so démodé, you won’t shed a tear,
Mimi, you’ll forget that we ever met.
Ah well, we had our days of happiness –
Never mind the nights. My darling, it’s true,
They didn’t last long, but that’s how it is:
The most beautiful days are the shortest too.
Let those whom God hath joined together part;
Ring down the curtain on our song and dance.
In no time at all, you’ll learn a new part,
And raise the curtain on a new romance.
THERE WAS NO new romance. Lucile would soon be turning twenty-five: it was the age at which a woman was thought to be past her prime. She posed in unheated studios for painters who needed a breast or a lower torso. She sat with her friends on the street corner; she shared their wine and sometimes their customers. She grew so desperate, she went back to the old quartier, to the smell of boiled tripe and the tapping of the cobbler’s hammer. At the flower factory, she pushed against the rubber pad that made the petals soft and lifelike. She drank a bottle of detergent and waited for the time to pass. But like a landlord with a bill for overdue rent, life refused to let her go.
Sometimes, she thought of the attic where they had sat and shivered over a last meal of bread and sardines. She remembered his jealous questions and his hand across her face. She thought of the gloves she had left in his drawer on purpose. Once, she ran into Alexandre Schanne in the street, and he told her about the new girl. Her name was Juliette: Henry apparently liked to kiss her hair, one strand at a time, until each one had been kissed. She thought that if she ever went back and found the new girl there, she’d lie down on the bed and loosen her hair, and that would be that. She pushed a hand through her thick brown mane, and said, ‘It’s lucky for him he didn’t try doing that with me or we’d have had to stay together for the rest of our lives.’
V
A garret and a hospital, 1848
EVEN IN SUMMER, the Rue Mazarine was dark and damp; in winter, it was like a crypt. Daylight was blotted out by the tenements and the dome of the Institut, which guarded the exit to the river. Henry’s new room, in the boarding house at no. 70, suited his increasingly venerable appearance: it had a straw chair that was going bald and a mirror that was going blind. The bed was not much wider than a bookshelf.
Juliette had left to find another Romeo. The price of bread was rising, and hungry peasants were trudging in from the countryside. As usual when people were queuing outside the pawnshops, there was talk of revolution. Henry’s neighbour at the boarding house, M. Proudhon, was visited at all hours by serious men with long beards and elegant, threadbare coats.
He was lying – or rather, balancing – on the bed, wondering how to spend the five hundred francs he had unexpectedly received from the benevolent fund of the Académie Française, when there was a knock at the door.
It was not quite the Lucile he had known. He moved aside to let her pass. In her post-suicidal state, she looked tremendously appealing, as though purified by the disinfectant. Her pockmarked face had a smooth, waxy complexion. Tuberculosis had widened her blue eyes and given them an expression of childish candour.
‘I’m disturbing you,’ she said.
She told him how to arrange the bed and sent him out to buy some food. When he returned with a loaf of bread, a bottle of wine and some firewood that was still recovering from its long journey down the river, she was fast asleep and snoring.
This time, there were no arguments. Death was a third person in the room, imposing a certain false courtesy and restraint. She lay in bed, coughing into a basin, while Henry busied himself with his column for the fashion magazine and then – while workers and Bohemians fought their revolution in the name of liberty, vanity and sloth – with his reports for Count Tolstoy. He sent copies of the anarchist paper that his friends, Baudelaire, Toubin and Champfleury, had been selling nearby on the Place Saint-André-des-Arts. He supplied some ‘unofficial information’ on those ‘conceited brutes’, the proletariat, who thought that hunger was a virtue and other people’s wealth a sin. Meanwhile, Lucile was becoming smaller and more angelic by the day.
It was Charles Toubin who arranged for the hospital bed. His brother, the intern, had obtained an admission card. Henry was out when he knocked at the door. Lucile saw the card in his hand and understood.
Later, when he came to write the ‘Epilogue of the Loves of Rodolphe and Mademoiselle Mimi’, Henry would describe the painful, jolting journey in a taxi, two miles along the quais to the hospital of La Pitié. ‘Amidst her sufferings, her fondness for pretty clothes – which is the last thing to die in women – survived. Two or three times she had the cab stopped in front of drapers’ shops to look at the window displays.’
The hospital register shows that ‘Lucile Louvet, florist, wife of François Paulgaire, native of Paris, aged about 24’, was admitted to La Pitié on Monday, 6 March 1848. It was the second anniversary of Mimi’s first appearance in the Corsaire-Satan. Unfortunately for Henry’s reputation as a historian, the bus drivers and cabbies were all on strike on Monday, 6 March. Lucile cannot possibly have taken a taxi; she must have reached the hospital on foot.
Henry did not go with her. Toubin assured her that her lover would visit the following Sunday, which was the normal visiting day, but she waited in vain. He knew the leprous walls, the steely nurses, the nightly concerto of coughs and groans. Before long, he would be back in hospital himself. And so he stayed at home, he told himself, out of fidelity to the past. He would preserve the precious memory of their love on paper.
TOUBIN WENT TO the hospital every day and found the girl delirious and in pain. He urged his friend to go and see her.
‘I haven’t even got two sous to buy her a little bouquet,’ he told Toubin. ‘But I know of some bushes down Vaugirard way that one day soon will be covered in violets.’
‘Just take her your heart,’ said Toubin, ‘but get a move on.’
He was sitting in the café when he heard the news from Toubin’s brother. Passing through the ward, Dr Toubin had found her bed empty and was told by the nurse that ‘Number 8 is dead’. Henry went and stood by the window, mopping his eye. Strangely, he felt nothing, as though his love had died with the woman who inspired it. Later that day, he went out to buy a mourner’s black felt hat.
In a hospital as large and busy as La Pitié, mistakes were inevitable. Lucile had been moved to another bed. She was calling out for Henry and disturbing the other patients. It took a while to find him and tell him the news. This time, he set off for the hospital without waiting for the violets to bloom.
Dr Toubin met him at the entrance and took his hand. Lucile had died – this time for real – on 8 April, and no one had claimed the body. Henry asked to see her, but the doctor simply pointed to a large wagon standing in front of a building marked ‘AMPHITHÉÂTRE’.
In his writer’s mind, he saw the students ranged in tiers, writing notes to their mistresses, telling jokes and peering down at the lifeless body of the flower-girl lying in a pool of light while the surgeon exposed the course of a nerve, galvanized a limb or laid bare the heart. A man climbed onto the seat, and the wagon trundled off with another load for the common grave. There would be no funeral. The hat would have to wait for another occasion.
The doctor offered to walk with him, but he felt a sudden craving for solitude. He turned away and retraced his steps along the river towards the forest of chimneys on the Montagne-Sainte-Geneviève. Ill-matched emotions swirled in his mind. The epilogue was already half-written; he wondered who might provide him with the sequel…A coal barge was moving slowly towards the Île de la Cité and the grey dome of the Panthéon. He turned up his collar against the fog. As he walked along, something welled up inside him like the swollen waters of the Seine and the Marne depositing their silt along the quais.
VI
Théâtre des Variétés, Thursday, 22 November 1849
THE AUDIENCE FLOWED through the marble foyer, spilling out through the iron gates of the Théâtre des Variétés and into the clutter of cab-horses and umbrellas. It was nine o’clock in the evening. Despite the rain, the pavements were crowded and the cafés were coming to life. The carriage lanterns and street-lamps sent strings of pearls dancing along the boulevard.
The King of Bohemia left the theatre with the young actress on his arm. ‘Mimi’ was wrapped in a dark cloak. As far as he could tell, she had removed her face paint, though she still looked to him like a coloured engraving in a keepsake. She seemed frail but full of life, like a convalescent leaving the house for the first time after a long illness. As she climbed into the cab, he heard the rustle of her petticoats. He smiled at her through his beard, crying with one eye, and wondered whether he might address her as Mimi. It was not beyond the bounds of possibility that an old theatrical tradition entitled the author to enjoy the favours of the leading lady on the first night…
As it turned the corner of the Rue Drouot, the carriage swayed and he felt her warmth against him. ‘Mimi’ shifted delicately towards her corner of the coach…It would take some time to find himself in this new world, and to acquire the necessary accoutrements. Mlle Thuillier’s heart was a fortress that would not be conquered without a long, expensive siege. He lit a cigar and savoured the moment. Lowering his window to blow out the smoke, he saw two lovers standing by the glow of a chestnut-seller’s brazier, and the pickpockets circling the crowd.
The actress said goodnight while Henry was paying the driver. He walked back past the theatre and the offices of the Corsaire-Satan, then across the river to a tiny room under the leaking roof of no. 9, Rue Touraine-Saint-Germain. The tingle of Mlle Thuillier’s gloved hand was still on his lips. He sat down at the worm-eaten desk on which he had immortalized Lucile and wrote to a friend: ‘You cannot imagine what it’s like to find yourself for the first time in your life sitting next to a woman who smells nice.’
A few days later, when La Vie de Bohème was still filling the Variétés, Henry Murger gathered up the mementos of his love affairs and ‘crossed the bridges’ to a plush apartment at no. 48, Rue Notre-Dame de Lorette. It was a new street with no history and a smooth asphalt surface, built on wasteground at the point where the Right Bank rises up towards Montmartre. Funeral processions used it as a quiet short-cut to the cemetery. It was particularly favoured by the deceptively elegant women known as demi-mondaines, whose carriages came and went at odd hours, and by wealthy artists who liked to think that they, too, had once lived the Bohemian life.