Clearly, by the mid-century, the vie de bohème itself, that gift package of student-artist life rolled into one (and tied with a rather grubby, floppy bow), had become a recognised cliché. But had Murger created it? He was the first person to use ‘Bohemians’ as a general term for those leading an urban-gipsy way of life. His magazine series of the late 1840s, drawn at least in part from his own experiences, at first aroused not much interest. Only when the series was turned into a play in 1849, just when Paris was in the throes of yet another romanticised popular uprising, did the concept of a country of the heart called ‘Bohemia’ enter mass consciousness. Murger wrote: ‘Bohemia is a country in the Département of the Seine. It is bordered on the north by cold, on the west by hunger, on the south by love and on the east by hope.’ But he produced variant, less optimistic versions of the same geography. And only two or three years later his contemporary, lawyer and writer Alphonse de Calonne, wrote: ‘Bohemia is a sad country. It is bordered on the north by need, on the south by poverty, on the east by illusion and on the west by the infirmary.’
Our present view of Murger’s invented country as hyper-romantic derives from the version of it in Puccini’s opera La Bohème, which was not to make its appearance for another half-century. Murger himself, the son of a tailor and a concierge, had fewer illusions, as he eked out a living in a Left Bank garret with a handful of friends and a communal purse. ‘The Water-drinkers’ they called themselves. Ironically, he would have liked a more bourgeois lifestyle, but had no means of attaining it. His Mimi, long before the operatic frozen hand, was already a somewhat sentimentalised version of the original – or rather, two originals. One, a ‘platonic’ love, was the wife of a petty crook; she later became a rather successful prostitute. The other, like the fictional Mimi, was a maker of artificial flowers, who had left her cobbler husband for life in the Latin Quarter. She eventually left Murger too, for a soldier. He only caught up with her much later, when she was dying of tuberculosis in the Hôpital de la Pitié. He did not often visit her there, on the grounds that he had no money to bring her anything nice. When she died, her unclaimed body went, like so many others before, into the dissection halls.
Shortly afterwards, the play was produced, made money, and Murger’s work became well known. He found a new love, moved to the Right Bank and died twelve years later, probably of syphilis. He was only thirty-nine.
Yet the imaginary Mimi was not all Murger’s invention. Alfred de Musset, twelve years older, a dweller in the Latin Quarter from childhood and a student who had given up first on law and then on medicine, was a well-established writer and poet by the 1840s. In 1845 he published a short story called Mimi Pinson, and the Mimi poem included in it was set to music the year after by Frédéric Bérat. De Musset’s Mimi has only one dress and one bonnet to her name and likes to sing when a little tipsy after ‘a nice supper’, but she means to remain virginal and is quick to reprimand students who hope to take liberties with her. She serves in a café, but can also rely on her needle for an honest living. In other words, she is that classic Left Bank figure, the working-class grisette, named after the simple grey stuff of her dress, in those days before the mass production of brighter materials. Since sewing machines had not yet been invented either, she was usually a seamstress, for whom there was an almost inexhaustible demand, but the romantic eye transformed this grinding, ill-paid work into a pretty, dainty occupation, especially when conducted in an attic among students and tame sparrows. In real life, the grisette was not virginal; she offered love, or at any rate sex, to a jolly young student – just one at a time – in return for suppers and fun. Predictably, he abandoned her after a while to return to his own class (the paternal roast joints, the marriage with the petite cousine). At this point the grisette, it was hoped, did not die tragically of tuberculosis and a broken heart, but settled down herself with a local grocer.
The huge and rather pompous Tableau de Paris, compiled by Edmond Texier in the mid-1850s, described grisettes as belonging to what were by then being regarded as the Good Old Days, probably shortly after the Restoration, rather than to the time when he was writing – ‘Where are they now, Lisette2 and Mimi Pinson? Where are these excellent girls, so courageous in the face of work and poverty, always with love in their hearts, a joyful word on their lips and the frank smile which creates a pretty dimple in the cheek? You might as well ask, with the old French poet [Villon is meant] Where are the snows of yesteryear? … The old Latin Quarter is no more.’
Texier went on to evoke the simple pleasures of Sunday trips to the country, or to carnivals and to the small suburban pleasure gardens that were called guinguettes, a time of innocence when vulgar dances such as the cancan had not yet been invented. Modern grisettes, according to him, had ‘lost their most precious attribute – their selflessness’. They only entered relationships with students for what they could get: in short, they had become prostitutes.
Whether in fact the fabulous, loyal, golden-hearted but unencumbering Mimis had ever existed in old Paris, like unicorns they entered the public consciousness and remained there. Right at the end of the nineteenth century a Conservatoire Mimi Pinson was formed: its aim was to teach deserving working-class girls to play musical instruments.
The famed stereotype also crossed the Channel. The Anglo-Irish writer George Moore, from a well-to-do family in County Mayo (the same social world, that is, as the Jacob clan), came to Paris aged twenty-one in 1873, initially with the aim of becoming an artist. His notoriously ‘Bohemian’ novel, A Modern Lover (1883), was the eventual result, but during his seven-year stay he seems to have made few contacts with real-life artists or writers. He lived in relative comfort, first in the Hôtel Voltaire, on the quay opposite the Louvre, which was a big, respectable ‘family’ hotel (meals included), and later abandoned the Left Bank altogether for a hotel near the new Opera House. Back in Britain, he eventually achieved some success with Esther Waters, a novel about unmarried motherhood, but it was left to another writer in English, George du Maurier, to bring the classic country of Bohemia into more limpid focus for an Anglo-Saxon public. This was with his novel Trilby (1894), which took England by storm.
Du Maurier’s mother was English, but his grandfather had been a French émigré from the Revolution. His father had passed most of his childhood in England before 1814, after which the family moved back and forth between the two countries. There was a period spent on the western edge of Paris, near the then-wild Bois de Boulogne and its marshy, duck-haunted lake, and, later, several years in the Rue du Bac. Du Maurier returned to the Left Bank as a young art student in the 1850s, which is the time evoked in Trilby. He lived with two congenial British friends in a large, dilapidated old hotel between the Odéon theatre and the Luxembourg Gardens, frequented circles where people ‘were always talking about “art”’ but only ever seemed to draw on restaurant paper tablecloths, and where ‘there was too much singing and playing, too much fencing and boxing and idle and pleasant chatter’. His friends, like him, were busy escaping from conventional careers at home, and one has the impression that for them life in Paris was already being lived as a literary artefact, at one remove from reality. Certainly, any Bohemian poverty was only notional and relative: a sumptuous Christmas hamper of turkey, beef, mince pies, cheese and pudding was conveniently sent over by ‘friends in London’.
All this, many decades later, du Maurier placed at one further remove from real life by putting it into Trilby. He transformed himself and his friends into ‘three musketeers of the brush’, and added the imaginary Trilby herself – another golden-hearted, blade-straight girl, product of a Scottish-French union but an undoubted citizen of the land of Bohemia. Under the influence of the middle-aged Svengali (Jewish, a hypnotist, and conventionally sinister), Trilby, a tone-deaf artists’ model, becomes a famous singer – which one may regard as a sanitised version of becoming a famous courtesan. ‘Little Billie’, the du Maurier alter ego in the novel, gets brain fever from unrequited love of Tri
lby and nearly dies, but recovers and becomes a famous painter. Trilby herself eventually dies of ‘weakness’, is forgiven on her deathbed by Little Billie’s mother and is buried in Kensal Green Cemetery. The surviving friends meet in Paris many years later for a nostalgic middle-aged reunion.
This romantic fantasy enjoyed huge popularity in its time, and is now all but forgotten. Apparently very many people yearned to have a taste of Trilby’s world: ‘Trilby-style’ girls were soon to be seen in arty London circles. But, beyond that, the book crystallised for an English-speaking readership the idea of Paris as a place not just of romance and freedom from convention but as the location of a whole possible parallel life, an exciting alternative identity. (In fact George du Maurier’s younger brother, from the same cosmopolitan and bilingual upbringing, carried this potential to a self-defeating extreme by turning himself into a French army trooper.)
Written so long after the experiences that inspired it, Trilby’s overblown drama is redeemed to some extent by its perception of the ineradicable trace left on an individual’s life by intense feeling, and the conflict between this and the inevitable transience of life. Immortality, George du Maurier’s similarly gifted granddaughter, Daphne, was to write long after his death, is probably a myth, but ‘when we die, we leave something of ourselves, like the wake of a vessel, as a reminder that we passed this way. There are footprints in the sand, and the mark of a hand upon a wall …’3
George du Maurier died less than two years after his book’s success, his own footprint – and the family fortunes – now secure. The country of Bohemia in the Département of the Seine continued its posthumous existence in the Anglo-Saxon consciousness, surfacing again near the end of the 1920s in a coarsened version in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises.4 The American expatriates who populate the early chapters of this novel, with their unhurried days spent writing in comfortable cafés, their ‘modest’ meals of oysters, their trips to bet at the fashionable race-course and their drunken evenings, seem very far from the Water-drinkers, and Murger’s own experience of trying to live on forty francs a month by pawning his clothes. The same sort of café society, accompanied by the same claims of ‘poverty’, reappears in Hemingway’s much later memoir, A Moveable Feast. The fact that almost the only French citizens visible in either his novel or his memoir are waiters or concierges makes one feel that the footprints in the Latin Quarter of this band of professional outsiders can have left very little trace. The vie de bohème was thus reduced to an exotic brand, purchasable by those with sufficient money, no longer a means of getting in touch with the discomforts and challenges of life but a means of avoiding them. George Orwell wrote a few years later, in relation to another American escapee (Henry Miller) but making a general point:
‘leaving your native land … means transferring your roots into a shallower soil. Exile is probably more damaging to a novelist than to a painter or even a poet, for its effect is to take him out of contact with working life and narrow down his range to the streets, the café, the church, the brothel and the studio.’ (Inside the Whale, 1940)
The streets, the café, the brothel and the studio, if not the church, have so dominated the literature of the Left Bank in the twentieth century that readers might be forgiven for thinking that was what the Latin Quarter meant – ‘people drinking, talking, meditating and fornicating [rather than] working, marrying and bringing up children’ (Orwell again). However, throughout the great physical upheavals and myth-making of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the streets between Maubert and St Germain des Prés, innumerable citizens did indeed pass their lives working, marrying and bringing up children. There was a bourgeoisie of the Left Bank who, while never participating in the high style and wealth of the great western quarters of Paris, were distinguished in their own way and tended to pride themselves on being less philistine than the inhabitants of Avenue Kléber or the Parc Monceau. Meanwhile, even in the lean decades, the Faubourg St Germain managed to retain its class and its memory of aristocratic days.
And of course there were, as there had been for hundreds and hundreds of years, the tradesmen and artisans and labourers, the clerks and piece-workers, the housewives and street-hawkers, the young and the old: generation after generation growing up, claiming the intimately known streets as their own, following the tracks of all those who had come before them, climbing up and down worn staircases, sipping coffee at zinc counters, relieving themselves over dark holes in ill-lit closets, retreating at the last into high, hidden rooms behind net curtains or at the back of courtyards, and finally going to lie under the soil of Paris up the hill in Montparnasse, or in one of the other great Parisian cities of the dead, out beyond the line of the old fortifications.
Part III
THE TWO ALBERT ALFREDS: 1830–1917
Chapter XI
THE SELF-MADE MAN
To recreate the lives of people dead long before we were born is like looking through glass into a large, dim room that is illuminated only here and there. We can see, or half see, a number of things, but as we press closely against the pane, hoping to glimpse more, our own reflection gets in the way. We knock on the glass, but it is thick; those on the far side of it will never hear us. They do not know of our existence, and their living, preoccupied minds are not likely to probe into the future so far as to imagine us or care about us, who are so distant from them in time. They are insulated from us for ever.
But across this separation they appear as our equals. They do not seem to us old people. In glimpses, the images reach us: the child in his family home, the young man making his way along the high road, the dynamic adult, the intimidating father, the man in public life – but none of these versions blots out the others. Since all belong to an era remote from our own, paradoxically they are reborn for us as if they were our contemporaries, young and vigorous. ‘We meet the dead coming towards us.’
But the images become much more confusing when the darkened glass has not always been there – when the people who are behind it are of more recent date and have once shared our own world with us. It becomes harder to see the vulnerable child, the driven young man, the shy new husband, when one version of that individual is lodged in your own memory, and he is an irascible old gentleman with a bristly moustache who was always encountered in an atmosphere faintly imbued with family tensions. Chronology is here moving in two directions at once, as in a hall of mirrors. You want to trace the stages of this person’s long life in his own time-scale, beginning with his earliest years and progressing onwards, but instead you find yourself walking backwards into your own youth, which is his old age, because that is where your one authenticated image of him is to be found.
And then another paradox becomes apparent. Your own early memories may seem prosaic, yet you find that the simple passage of the decades has transformed this personal material into something more significant, concentrated and fixed as in a series of framed silhouettes. In my own childhood, people born under the reign of Queen Victoria, people who fought in the First World War, were still plentiful and unremarkable. Now, my commonplace recollections of these elders have become fabulous, even to me. Did I once really know, as part of my everyday life, people who had grown to adulthood before the nineteenth century ended, and some who would, if living today, be one hundred and fifty years old? Imagine having them back for a day to talk to, now. It seems extraordinary, the richness that was there and that has now just ebbed away, leaving only a silence and unanswered questions.
And yet, with another shift of view, I realise that some of these figures from my childhood are still as real and familiar to me today as they ever were. For a few moments it seems almost unbelievable that, to subsequent generations, they are but names on a family tree, known names perhaps but essentially and for ever strangers behind the glass.
In my childhood, occasional visits to the grandparents I did not know well, and was never encouraged to know better, offered to me no hint of the grandfather’s past that, lon
g after he was dead, would come to me as a gift, one piece of a complex pattern. Only when I was grown-up, and he was in his eighties, did he once, uncharacteristically, write to me in Paris: ‘How sensible of you to pick a petit quartier to stay in. As a young man, I lived on the Left Bank for a year, and worked in the same street where you are now. I wonder if there is still a tramway terminus in the Place St Germain?’
That was at the beginning of 1960. The trams had long gone, and St Germain des Prés, for that matter, had known the passage of Sartre and de Beauvoir and the caravanserai that followed them, and was no longer a district devoted to modest commerce. But, even in my youthful self-centredness, I must have been touched by this image of a young man in Paris I had never known existed, and this unsuspected precise link between us, across sixty-five years, as we trod the very same street … Certainly his letter, long lost now as a physical object, stayed in my mind.
But to find him properly I must go further back. Back to a picture or two in that classic window on the past: a gilt-clasped, late nineteenth-century photo album. The cover is ornate and leathery, the thick, double-cardboard pages each form two ready-made frames, but the total content of information is, for such a heavy object, rather meagre. Many of the frames are unfilled, or have lost their one-time occupant, and the stoic faces looking out from others – faces held motionless for the slow cameras of the era – are unnamed and now unknowable. When these likenesses were taken, in studios off high streets furnished like make-believe drawing rooms with palms and chenille tablecloths, it must have seemed unnecessary to write names beneath. Everyone knew Mother was Mother, and naturally the girls with her were May and Maud, and as for dominating, successful Father … Much later, when time and war and the shortening of skirts and hair had altered for ever the late-Victorian dream, one of the family must have scented oblivion lying in wait and so had the foresight to go through the album pencilling ‘Sophie T’ and ‘M’ and ‘B’ and ‘Grandma S’ beneath some of the photos; but even she (it is nearly always women who take on such tasks) did not foresee the need to be more explicit. Nor did she identify some of the faces at all, those that had perhaps already passed into the ranks of distant, dead cousinhood.
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