To the extent that our own world is still “modern,” still defined by the political, economic, and social realities that first took shape in nineteenth-century Paris, Murger’s novel remains relevant. Today, big business coopts alternative art almost as soon as it is produced, and artists and corporate CEOs might shop in the same stores and listen to the same music. But this is only the latest manifestation of the ambivalent relation between bohemian and bourgeois that stretches back a century and a half. Long before David Brooks described the “bourgeois-bohemian” or “bobo,” Murger realized that these seeming opposites were in fact two sides of the same coin.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bourdieu, Pierre. The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field. Trans. Susan Emanuel. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996.
Brooks, David. Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There. New York: Touchstone, 2000.
Chotard, Loïc. Introduction to Scènes de la vie de bohème. Paris: Gallimard, 1988.
Seigel, Jerrold. Bohemian Paris: Culture, Politics, and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Life, 1830–1930. New York: Viking, 1986.
PREFACE
THE Bohemians described in this book have nothing in common with the Bohemians of boulevard playwrights, who have used the word as a synonym for pickpocket and murderer; nor are they recruited from the ranks of bear-leaders, sword-eaters, vendors of key-rings, inventors of “infallible systems,” stock-brokers of doubtful antecedents and the followers of the thousand and one vague and mysterious callings in which the principal occupation is to have none whatever and to be ready at any time to do anything save that which is right.
The Bohemians of this book are by no means a race of to-day; they have existed all over the world ever since time began, and can lay claim to an illustrious descent. In the time of the ancient Greeks (not to pursue their genealogy any further) there was once a famous Bohemian who wandered about the fertile land of Ionia trusting to luck for a living, eating the bread of charity, stopping of nights by hospitable firesides where he hung the musical lyre to which the “Loves of Helen” had been sung and the “Fall of Troy.”
As we descend the course of ages we find forerunners of the modern Bohemian in every epoch famous for art or letters. Bohemia continues the tradition of Homer through the Middle Ages by the means of minstrel, improvisatori, les enfants du gai savoir, and all the melodious vagabonds from the lowlands of Touraine; all the muses errant who wandered with a beggar’s wallet and a trouvère’s harp over the fair and level land where the eglantine of Clémence Isaure should still flourish.
In the transition period, between the Age of Chivalry and the dawn of the Renascence, the Bohemian still frequents the highways of the realm, and is even found in Paris streets. Witness Master Pierre Gringoire, for instance, friend of vagrants and sworn foe to fasting, hungry and lean as a man may well be when his life is but one long Lent; there he goes, prowling along, head in air like a dog after game, snuffing up the odours from cookshop and kitchen; staring so hard at the hams hanging from the pork-butcher’s hooks, that they visibly shrink and lose weight under the covetous gaze of his glutton’s eyes; while he jingles in imagination (not, alas! in his pockets) those ten crowns promised him by their worships the aldermen for a right pious and devout sotie composed by him for the stage of the Salle of the Palais de Justice. And the chronicles of Bohemia can place another profile beside the melancholy and rueful visage of Esmeralda’s lover—a companion portrait of jollier aspect and less ascetic humour. This is Master François Villon, lover of la belle qui fut heaulmière—poet and vagabond par excellence, with a breadth of imagination in his poetry. A strange obsession appears in in it, caused no doubt by a presentiment of a kind which the ancients attribute to their poets. Villon is haunted by the idea of the gibbet; and indeed one day nearly wore a hempen cravat because he looked a little too closely at the colour of the king’s coinage. And this same Villon, who more than once outstripped the posse comitatus at his heels, this roistering frequenter at the low haunts in the Rue Pierre Lescot, this smell-feast at the court of the Duke of Egypt, this Salvator Rosa of poetry, wrote verse with a ring of heart-broken sincerity in it that touches the hardest hearts, so that at sight of his muse, her face wet with streaming tears, we forget the rogue, the vagabond and the rake.
François Villon, besides, has been honoured above all those poets whose work is little known to folk for whom French literature only begins “when Malherbe came,” for he has been more plundered than any of them, and even by some of the greatest names of the modern Parnassus. There has been a rush for the poor man’s field; people have struck the coin of glory for themselves out of his little hoard of treasure. Such and such a ballade, written in the gutter under the drip of the eaves some bitter day by the Bohemian poet, or some love-song improvised in the den where la belle qui fut heaulmière unclasped her girdle for all-comers, now makes its appearance, transformed to suit polite society and scented with ambergris and musk, in albums adorned with the armorial bearings of some aristocratic Chloris.
But now begins the grand age of the Renascence. Michel Angelo mounts the scaffolding in the Sixtine Chapel and looks thoughtful as young Rafael goes up the staircase of the Vatican with the sketches of the Loggie under his arm. Benvenuto is planning his Perseus and Ghiberti carving the bronze gates of the Baptistery, while Donatello rears his marble on the bridge across Arno. The city of the Medici rivals the city of Leo X. and Julius II. in the possession of masterpieces, while Titian and Paul Veronese adorn the city of the Doges—St. Mark competing with St. Peter.
The fever of genius suddenly broke out with the violence of an epidemic in Italy, and the splendid contagion spread through Europe. Art, the Creator’s rival, became the equal of kings. Charles V. stoops to pick up Titian’s brush, and Francis I. waits on the printer Etienne Dolet, who is busy correcting the proofs (it may be) of Pantagruel.
In the midst of this resurrection of the intellect the Bohemian seeks, as heretofore, for the poorest shelter and pittance of food—la pâtée et la niche, to use Balzac’s expression. Clément Marot, a familiar figure in the ante-chambers of the Louvre, is favoured by the fair Diane, who one day would be the favourite of a king, and lights three reigns with her smile; then the poet’s faithless muse will pass from the boudoir of Diane de Poitiers to the chamber of Marguerite de Valois, a dangerous honour, which Marot must pay for by imprisonment. Almost at the same time another Bohemian goes to the court of Ferrara, as Marot went to the court of Francis I. This is Tasso, whose lips were kissed by the epic muse in his childhood on the shore at Sorrento. But, less fortunate than the lover of Diane and Marguerite, the author of Gerusalemme must pay for his audacious love of a daughter of the House of Este with the loss of his reason and his genius.
The religious wars and political storms that broke out in France with the arrival of the Medici did not stay the flight of Art. Jean Goujon, after discovering anew the pagan art of Pheidias, might be struck down by a bullet on the scaffolding of the Innocents; but Ronsard would find Pindar’s lyre, and with the help of the Plèiade found the great French school of lyric poets. To this school of revival succeeded the reaction, thanks to Malherbe and his followers. They drove out all the exotic graces introduced into the language by their predecessors’ efforts to acclimatise them in poetry. And a Bohemian, Mathurin Régnier, was one of the last to defend the bulwarks of lyric poetry against the assault of the band of rhetoricians and grammarians who pronounced Rabelais to be a barbarian and Montaigne