Henri Murger, The Bohemians of the Latin
Quarter (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004)
For reasons I can't begin to explain, of late several publishers have been releasing translations of relatively obscure nineteenth century French fiction. In the last few months, I've reviewed a couple of these for Green Man: Balzac's The Wrong Side of Paris and Robida's The Twentieth Century. I've got George Sand's The Black City in my review queue and have seen Emile Zola's The Kill, in a fresh new edition, on the shelves at Borders. So I wasn't at all surprised to discover The Bohemians of the Latin Quarter in the University of Pennsylvania Press catalog last summer.
It's a relatively fast read by the standards of nineteenth century fiction. The Bohemians of the Latin Quarter is actually a set of short stories about a group of four young men, aspiring artists and intellectuals, living on the edges of poverty in the jumble that was Paris before Baron Hausmann built the boulevards and the sewers. Schaunard is primarily a composer of piano tunes. He becomes housemates with Marcel the painter after he is evicted from his apartment and discovers that Marcel, the new tenant, has no furniture. They meet Colline, a philosopher and avid collector of old books, and Rodolphe, a writer, at a favorite eating establishment, i.e., one where they can eat on credit. Finding themselves more compatible than not, they quickly become dependent on each other's company and money, and form a loose brotherhood that persists until, toward the end of the story cycle, they all find more steady means of employment. The stories recount several episodes in their friendship, their struggles to earn money and the ways they celebrate when they have it, their lady loves (mostly actresses) and their efforts to succeed at their trades.
Only one story in the collection deviates from this mode. Written entirely in the first person, 'Francine's Muff' seems to be a chapter from Murger's own experience, about the short and tragic life of a sculptor and his consumptive lover. Verging on the totally maudlin, Murger manages to hold this tale above a complete tear-soaked wallow by having readers make occasional comments about the sadder and more racy parts of the story, e.g., when the lovers have their first tryst, one reader announces, 'I certainly shall not let mey daughter read this story.'.
Many commentators credit Murger with originating the concept of a Bohemian lifestyle as we still use it. In fact, his author's preface does a fine job of providing a working definition of that lifestyle as a stage of any artist's career from which s/he might achieve success or decline into madness and ultimately death. He explains that the Bohemian lifestyle has been part of human existence for centuries, suggesting in fact that the Greek poet Homer could be counted among this number. He notes that, while the unheated garret, the occasional feasts, the unpaid bills and the worn shoes may be charming for a while, all the Bohemians desire to achieve a bourgeois status. What seems evident from these stories is that most of the young artists are members of relatively well-off families who can occasionally be called upon to lend a hand when times are especially difficult. Rodolphe, for example, earns money for a while by writing advertising copy for his uncle, a manufacturer of stoves.
The predominant themes of The Bohemians of the Latin Quarter are also evident in Balzac's Lost Illusions (about a poet) and Zola's The Masterpiece (about a painter). What these books offer that is lacking in Murger's work is complex plot and fine detail. Nonetheless, I found the stories of the Bohemians enormously poignant and entertaining. A comparison that comes to my mind is that of reading Dickens' A Christmas Carol versus one of his really long novels, like Bleak House or Great Expectations. Each has its charms.
Murger isn't nearly as well-known as his contemporaries Balzac, Sand, Stendhal and Zola. There's a very good reason for that -- he didn't write as much as any of them did. The short stories that became The Bohemians of the Latin Quarter initially appeared in an obscure Paris journal during the late 1840s. Murger later reworked them into a play -- which became the inspiration for Puccini's opera La Bohème -- and then strung them together into book form. A search on ABE Books suggests that the book version wasn't translated into English until the 1880s. Only a few copies of those early translations appear to be available, and they are relatively inexpensive, as antiques go.
Alas, the University of Pennsylvania Press didn't go to any great lengths to add value to this unassuming little book. This edition very obviously uses the plates from an English translation published in London by Greening in 1901. I find these old fonts charming, but not always terribly easy to read. This version has no illustrations, although it appears that at least some of the early English translations did. The book itself is a mere 4 1/4" wide by 6 11/16" tall -- tiny even by the standards of mass paperbacks. Given these limitations, I find the suggested retail price of $26.50 a bit steep -- and of course Pennsylvania's books are not discounted on Amazon.
