was ever written, because it turned somersets on feet. Nobody noticed whether it was on five or six or fifteen feet. His father, however, had heard what a dangerous disease of the purse poetry was, and forbade his son from trying to catch it,—vowing, that, if he heard again of its continued pursuit, he would immediately make a tailor of him. Of course, the threat did not deter Murger from the chase; but instead of pursuing it openly, he pursued it by stealth. The sportsman became a poacher. Pierre and Émile Bisson quitted the attorney's office and opened a studio: they were painters now. Henry Murger managed to filch an hour every day from the time allotted to the errands of the office about Paris to spend in the studio of his friends, where he would write his poetry and hide his manuscripts. Here he made the acquaintance of artists and literary young men as unfledged as himself, but who possessed the advantages of a regular scholastic education. They taught him the rules of prosody and the exercises proper to overcome the mere mechanical difficulties of versification. This society made Murger more than ever ambitious; a secret instinct told him that the pen was the arm with which he would win fame and fortune. He determined to abandon the law-office.
His father was furious enough at this resolution, and more than one painful scene took place between them. The boy was within an ace of bring kicked out of doors, when his troubles reached the ears of a literary tenant of the house: this was no other than Monsieur de Jouy, a member of the French Academy, and quite famous in his day for "L'Ermite de la Chaussée d'Antin," and a tragedy, "Sylla," which Talma's genius threw such beams upon as made it radiant, and for an imprisonment for political offences, a condiment without which French reputations seem to lack savor. Heaven knows what would have become of the poor boy but for this intervention, as his mother was dead and he was all friendless. Monsieur de Jouy procured him the place of private secretary to Count Tolstoy, a Russian nobleman established by the Czar in Paris as his political correspondent. The salary given was meagre enough, but in this world all things have a relative as well as an intrinsic value, and eight dollars a month seemed to the poor lad, who had never yet earned a cent, a fragment of El Dorado or of Peru. It gave him independence. His contemporaries have described him as gay, free, easy, and happy at this period. He had ceased to be dependent upon anybody; he lived upon his own earnings; he was in the full bloom of health and youth; and the horizon before him, even though clouded, wore all the colors of the rainbow. His father gave him a garret in the house, and continued to allow him a seat at the table, but he made young Murger give him six of the eight dollars earned. The rest of his salary was spent among the boxes of books which line the parapet of the Paris quays,—a sort of literary Morgue or dead-house, where the still-born and deceased children of the press are exhibited, to challenge the pity of passers-by, and so escape the corner grocer and the neighboring trunk-maker. Here Murger purchased all the volumes of new poems he could discover. When his friends jested him upon his wasteful extravagance in buying verse good for nothing but to cheapen the value of the paper on which it was printed, he replied, that a poet should keep himself informed of the progress of Art. He has since confessed that his object in buying this trash was simply to compare his efforts with those which had been deemed worthy to see print. His ambition then was to be pale, consumptive, to drink the dregs of poverty's poisoned chalice, and to toss on a hospital-bed. He found it hard work to gratify these desires. His plethoric person, his rubicund cheeks and high health, gave him much more the appearance of a jovial monk of Bolton Abbey than of a Werther or a Chatterton or a Lara. But as he was determined to look the poet of the Byron school, for a fortnight he followed a regimen "which would have given phthisis to Mount Atlas"; he studied in some medical treatise the symptoms of the consumption, and, after wading through thirty miles of the mud and mire to be found in the environs of Paris, drenched to the skin by an autumnal rain, he went to the hospital and was admitted. He was delighted. He instantly wrote an ode to "Hallowed Misery," dated from the "House of Woe," sent it off to the Atlantic Monthly of Paris, and lay in bed dreaming he should find himself famous next morning, and receive the visits of all Paris, from Monsieur Guizot, then Prime-Minister, to the most callous poetaster of the Latin Quarter, and be besieged by every publisher, armed with bags full of money. He woke the next morning to find himself in perfect health, and to hear the physician order him to clear out of the hospital. He had no news from the magazine nor from Monsieur Guizot.
'Tis ill playing with edge-tools! The hospital is not to be coquetted with. There is no such thing as romping with misery. One might as well amuse himself toying with the rattlesnake or playing with fluoric acid. Wait a moment, and the hospital will reappear in the story of his life, sombre, pitiless, fatal, as it is in reality. A little patience, and misery will come, in its gaunt, wolf-like shape, to harry and to harass. Play not with fire!
Distress soon came. The young poet fell into bad company. He came home late one night. His father scolded: 'tis a porter's infirmity to fret at late-comers. Another night he came home later. The scolding became a philippic. Again he did not come home at all. His father ordered him never more to darken his doors. Murger took him at his word, and went to share a friend's bed in another garret. The friend was little better off in worldly goods; he lived in a chamber for which he paid twenty dollars a year, and which was furnished "with one of those lots of furniture which are the terror of landlords, especially when quarter-day comes." Murger now began to know what it was to be poor, to go to bed without having tasted a morsel of food the whole day, to be dressed ludicrously shabby. He had never before known these horrors of poverty; for under his father's roof the meals, though humble, were always regularly served, and quarter-day never came. As eight dollars,—less by a great deal than an ordinary servant earns by sweeping rooms and washing dishes, besides being fed and lodged,—which Count Tolstoy gave his secretary, was not enough to enable Murger to live, he tried to add something to his income by his pen. He wrote petty tales for children's magazines, and exerted himself to gain admission into other and more profitable periodicals, but for a long time without success. Many and many a sheet must be blotted before the apprentice-writer can merit even the lowest honors of print: can it be called an honor to see printed lines forgotten before the book is closed? Yet even this dubious honor cannot be won until after days and nights have been given to literary composition.
Murger was for some time uncertain what course to adopt. His father sent him word that the best thing he could do would be to get the place of body-servant to some gentleman or of waiter in some café! He himself half determined, in his hours of depression, when despair was his only hope, to ship as a sailor on board some man-of-war. He would at other times return to his first love, and vow he would be a painter; then music would solicit him; medicine next, and then surgery would tangle his eyes. These excursions, which commonly lasted three months each, were not fruitless; they increased his stock of information, and supplied him with some of his most striking images. He became joyous about this period, and his hilarity broke out all at once. One night Count Tolstoy had ordered Murger to color several thousand strategic maps, and, after he had postponed the labor repeatedly, he asked several of his friends to aid him. They sat up all night. He suddenly became very gay, and told story after story in a most vivid and humorous manner. His friends roared with laughter, and one of them begged him to abandon poetry and become a prose-writer, predicting for him a most brilliant career. But poetry has its peculiar fascinations, and is not relinquished without painful throes. Murger refused to cease versifying.
He had pernicious habits of labor. He never rose until three o'clock in the afternoon, and never began to write until after the lamp was lighted. He wrote until daybreak. If sleep came, if inspiration lagged, he would resort to coffee, and drink it in enormous quantities. One may turn night into day without great danger, upon condition of leading a temperate and regular life; for Nature has wonderful power of adapting herself to all circumstances, upon condition that irregularity itself he regular in its irregularity. He fell into this habit from poverty. He was too poor to buy fuel and comfortable clothes, so he lay in bed to keep warm; he worked in bed,—reading, writing, correcting, buried under the comfortable bedclothes. He would sometimes drink "as many as six ounces of coffee." "I am literally killing myself," he said. "You must care me of drinking coffee; I reckon upon you." His room-mate suggested to him that they should close the windows, draw the curtains, and light the lamp in the daytime, to deceive habit by counterfeiting night. They made the attempt in vain. The roar of a great city penetrates through wall and curtain. They could not work. Inspiration ceased to flow. Murger
