The Book, Cat, & Cat Book Lovers Almanac

of historical trivia regarding books, cats, and other animals. Actually this blog has evolved so that it is described better as a blog about cats in history and culture. And we take as a theme the advice of Aldous Huxley: If you want to be a writer, get some cats. Don't forget to see the archived articles linked at the bottom of the page.

March 27, 2015

March 27, 1822

Scènes de la vie de bohème (1847–49) was a success for its author Henry Murger (March 27, 1822  to January 28, 1861) La vie was his own. And he described a newly recognized segment of society in this novel: the persevering impoverished cocky urban artistic creator. Here is one scene; as friends gather in an apartment, they are told:

.....the story of his marriage to ...[a] charming creature who had brought him as her marriage portion her eighteen years and six months, two porcelain cups, and a yellow cat, called Mimi, like herself. "And now, messieurs," said Rodolphe, "we propose to have a house-warming...


The English translation I used begins with a quite long preface defining this modern phenomena. I have trimmed it considerably, and rearranged the points a bit. Everybody knows this much told story, most recently in Rent. Few recall the preface Murger attached, and so we quote from it, which starts asserting Bohemians can be traced back to Homer, and:

....It was during the transition from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century that those two great geniuses appeared, whom their respective nations still oppose to each other in the struggles of their literary rivalry—Moliere and Shakespeare; those illustrious Bohemians whose destinies present only too many points of resemblance.

The most eminent names in the literature of the eighteenth century also are to be found in the archives of Bohemia, which can lay claim among the illustrious men of that epoch, to Jean-Jacques Rousseau and D'Alembert,....

We have now concluded this summary sketch of Bohemia in the different periods of its existence, a prelude strewn with illustrious names which we have designedly placed in the forefront of this book to put the reader on his guard against any false assumption that he might otherwise make, upon espying the name Bohemians, which has long been given to classes of persons whom those whose manners and language we have tried to sketch, deem it a point of honor not to resemble.

Today, as formerly, every man who enters upon an artistic career, without other means of subsistence than art itself, will be compelled to pass through the paths of Bohemia. The majority of our contemporaries who exhibit the finest blazonry of art are Bohemians; and in their tranquil and prosperous renown, they often remember, and perhaps regret the time when, as they climbed the green hill of youth, they had, in the sunshine of their twenty years, no other fortune than courage, which is the virtue of the young, and hope, which is the treasure of the poor.

For the benefit of the anxious reader, of the timorous bourgeois, of all those who can never have too many dots to the i's of a definition, we will repeat in the form of an axiom:

"Bohemia is the stage of artistic life; it is the preface to the Academy, the Hotel-Dieu or the Morgue."

We will add that Bohemia does not exist and is not possible, except in Paris.

Like every social stratum, Bohemia includes different varieties, diverse species which are themselves subdivided, and which it will be well to classify...

We will begin with unknown Bohemia, the most numerous subdivision. It is made up of the great family of poor artists, doomed to submit to the law of incognito, because they do not know or cannot find an entering wedge of publicity to attest their existence in the world of art, and to prove, by what they already are, what they may be some day. They are the race of persistent dreamers, to whom art has become a faith, not a trade; enthusiastic men of strong convictions, with whom the mere sight of a chef d'ceuvre is enough to bring on a fever, and whose loyal hearts beat high before whatever is beautiful, without asking the name of the master or the school. That portion of Bohemia finds its recruits amongst the young men of whom it is said that they are young men of promise, and among those who keep the promises they make, but who, from thoughtlessness, timidity or ignorance of practical life imagine that all is said when the work is finished, and wait for public admiration and wealth to enter their apartments by ... acts of burglary. They live, so to speak, on the edge of society, in isolation and indolence. Petrified in art, they take literally the symbolical language of the academic dithyramb concerning a halo about the brow of poets, and, being persuaded that they are emitting flames in the darkness, they wait for the public to come and seek them. ....

We will mention one other singular variety of Bohemians, who may be called amateurs. They are not the least interesting. They find life in Bohemia an existence full of charm: not to dine every dav, to sleep in the open air under the tears of rainy nights, and to dress in nankeen in the month of December seem to them the paradise of earthly felicity.....
......In very truth that sort of life is something that leads to nothing. It is brutish destitution, amid which the intellect goes out like a lamp in a vacuum; in which the heart turns to stone in savage misanthropy, and in which the best natures become the worst. If one has the misfortune to remain there too long and to penetrate too far into that blind-alley he either cannot find his way out or else he escapes through a dangerous breach in the wall, only to fall into an adjacent Bohemia, whose manners belong to another sphere than that of literary physiology....

It is good to recall Murger achieved acclaim during his life; sad that despite this, his end was one of poverty and early death, making some passages above prophetic. 

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