Chapter III: Part 3

"Hard times began to press after the first week flew away. We had
a long discussion, in which each hurled at the other reproaches on
the spendthrift prodigality with which we threw away our money.
The discussion ended in our agreeing, that, the moment the next
instalment of our income should be received, I should keep a
severe account of our expenses, in order that no more quarrels
should disturb the harmony of our household, each of us taking
care every day to examine the accounts. This is the little book I
have found. How simple, how touching, how laconic, how full of
souvenirs it is!

"We were wonderfully honest on the first of every month. I read at
the date of November 1st, 1843, 'Paid Madame Bastien forty cents
for tobacco due.' We paid, too, the grocer, the restaurant, (I
declare there is 'restaurant' on the book!) the coal-dealer, etc.
The first day of this month was a merry day, I see: 'Spent at the
_café_ seven cents'; a piece of extravagance for which I am sure
you must have scolded me that evening. The same day you bought
(the sight still makes me tremble!) thirteen cents' worth of
pipes. The second of November we bought twenty-two cents' worth of
ribbon: this enormous quantity of ribbon was purchased to give the
last touches to our famous sofa. Our sofa's history would fill
volumes. It did us yeoman's service. My pallet on the floor,
formed of one single mattress and sheets without counterpane, made
a poor show in our 'drawing-room,' especially as a
restaurant-keeper lived in our house, and you pretended, that, if
we made him bring our meals up to our 'drawing-room,' he would be
so dazzled by our splendor he could not refuse us credit. I
demurred, that the odd appearance of my pallet had nothing capable
of fascinating a tradesman's eye; whereupon we agreed that we
would spread over it a piece of violet silk which came, Heaven
knows where from; but, unfortunately, the silk was not large
enough by one-third. After long reflection we thought the library
might be turned to some account: the quarto volumes of Shakspeare,
thrown with cunning negligence on the pallet, hid the narrowness
of the silk, and concealed the sheets from every eye. We managed
in this way to contrive a sofa. I may add, that the keeper of the
restaurant dedicated to the 'Guardian Angel,' who had no customers
except hack-drivers and bricklayers, was caught by our innocent
intrigues. On this same second of November we paid an immense sum
of money to the laundress,--one whole dollar. I crossed the Pont
des Arts, proud as a member of the Institute, and entered with a
stiff upper-lip the Café Momus. You remember this beneficent
establishment, which we discovered, gave half a cup of coffee for
five cents, until bread rose, when the price went up to six cents,
a measure which so discontented many of the frequenters that they
carried their custom elsewhere. I passed the evening at Laurent's
room. I must have been seized with vertigo,--for I actually lost
ten cents at _écarté_, ten cents which we had appropriated to the
purchase of roasted chestnuts. Poor Laurent, who was such a
democrat, who used to go 'at the head of the schools' to see
Béranger, is dead and gone now! His poems were too revolutionary
for this world.

"You resolved on the third of November that we would cook our own
victuals as long as the fourteen dollars lasted; so you bought a
soup-pot which cost fifteen cents, some thyme and some laurel:
being a poet, you had such a marked weakness for laurel, you used
to poison all the soup with it. We laid in a supply of potatoes,
and constantly bought tobacco, coffee, and sugar. There was
gnashing of teeth and curses when the expenses of the fourth of
November were written. Why did you let me go out with my pockets
so full of money? And you went to Dagneaux's and spent five cents.
What in the name of Heaven could you have gotten at Dagneaux's for
five cents?[C] Good me! how expensive are the least pleasures!
Upon pretext of going with a free-ticket to see a drama by an
inhabitant of Belleville, I bought two omnibus-tickets, one to go
and the other to return. Two omnibus-tickets! I was severely
punished for this prodigality. Seventy-four cents ran away from
me, making their escape through a hole in my pocket. How could I
dare to return home and confront your wrath? Two omnibus-tickets
alone would have brought a severe admonition on my head; but
seventy-four cents with them--! If I had not begun to disarm you
by telling you the Belleville drama, I should have been a doomed
man. Nevertheless, the next day, without thinking of these
terrible losses, we lent G---- money; he really seemed to look
upon us as Messrs. Murger and Co., his bankers. I wonder by what
insidious means this G---- contrived to captivate our confidence,
and the only solution I can discover is the inexperience of giddy
youth; for two days afterwards G---- was audacious enough to
reappear and to ask for another loan. Nothing new appears on the
pages of the book, except fifteen cents for wine: this must have
been one of your ideas: I do not mean to say that you were ever a
wine-bibber, but we were so accustomed to water, we drank so much
water without getting tired of it, that this item, 'wine,' seems
very extraordinary to me. We added up every page until the eighth
of November, when the sum total reached eight dollars and twelve
cents; here the additions ceased. We doubtless were averse to
trembling at the sight of the total. The tenth of November, you
purchased a thimble: some men have skill enough to mend their
clothes at their leisure moments. A few days ago I paid a visit to
a charming literary man, who writes articles full of life and wit
for the newspapers. I opened the door so suddenly, he blushed as
he threw a pair of pantaloons into the corner. He had a thimble on
his finger. Ah! wretched cits, who refuse to give your daughters
in marriage to literary men, you would be full of admiration for
them, could you see them mending their clothes! Smoking-tobacco
absorbed more than one-third of our money; we received too many
friends, and then there was a celebrated artisan-poet who used to
be brought to our rooms, and who used to bawl so many stanzas I
would go to bed.

"Monsieur Credit made his reappearance on the fourteenth of
November. He went to the grocer, to the tobacco-shop, to the
fuel-dealer, and was received tolerably well; he was especially
successful with the grocer's daughter when he appeared in your
likeness. Did Monsieur Credit die on the seventeenth of November?
I ask, because I see on the 'credit' side of our account-book,
'Frock-coat, sixty cents.' These sixty cents came from the
pawnbroker's. How his clerks humiliated us! I could make a long
and terrible history of our dealings with the pawnbroker; I shall
make a short and simple story of it. When money failed us, you
pointed out to me an old cashmere shawl which we used as a
table-cover. I told you, 'They will give us nothing on that.' You
replied, 'Oh, yes, they will, if we add pantaloons and waistcoats
to it.' I added pantaloons and waistcoats to it, and you took the
bundle and started for the den in Place de la Croix Rouge. You
soon came back with the huge package, and you were sad enough as
you said, 'They are disagreeable _yonder_; try in the Rue de
Condé; the clerks, who are accustomed to deal with students, are
not so hard-hearted as they are in the Place de la Croix Rouge.'
I went to the Rue de Condé. The two pair of pantaloons, the famous
shawl, and the waistcoats were closely examined; even their
pockets were searched. 'We cannot lend anything on that,' said the
pawnbroker's clerk, disdainfully pushing the things away from him.
You had the excellent habit of never despairing. You said, 'We
must wait until this evening; at night all clothes are new; and to
take every precaution, I shall go to the pawnbroker's shop in the
Rue du Fouare, where all the poor go; as they are accustomed there
to see nothing pledged but rags and tatters, our clothes will
glitter like barbaric pearl and gold.' Alas! the pawnbroker in the
Rue du Fouare was as cruel as his brethren. So the next morning in
sheer despair I went to pledge my only frock-coat, and I did this
to lend half the sum to that incessant borrower, G----. Lastly, on
the nineteenth of November, we sold some books. Fortune smiled on
us; we had a chicken-soup with a superabundance of laurel. Do you
remember an excellent shopkeeper of the Rue du Faubourg Saint
Jacques, near the city-gate, who, we were told, not only sold
thread, but kept a circulating library? What a circulating library
it was! Plays, three odd volumes of Anne Radcliffe's novels,--and
if the old lady had never made our acquaintance, the inhabitants
of the Faubourg Saint Jacques would never have known of the
existence of 'Letters upon Mythology' and 'De Profundis,' two
books I was heartless enough to sell, notwithstanding all their
titles to my respect. The authors were born in the same
neighborhood which gave me birth: one is Desmoustiers, the other
Alfred Mousse. Maybe Arsène Houssaye would not be pleased, were I
to remind him of one of the _crimes_ of his youth, where one sees
for a frontispiece skeletons--'twas the heyday of the Romantic
School--playing tenpins with skulls for balls! The sale of 'De
Profundis' enabled us to visit Café Tabourey that evening. You
sold soon afterwards eighty cents' worth of books. Allow me to
record that they came from your library; my library remained
constantly upon the shelves; notwithstanding all your appeals, I
never sold any books, except the lamentable history of Alfred
Mousse. Monsieur Credit contrived to go to the tradesmen's with
imperturbable coolness; he went everywhere until the first of
December, when he paid every cent of debt. I have but one regret,
and this is, that the little account-book suddenly ceases after a
month; it contains only the month of November. This is not enough!
Had I continued it, Its pages would have been so many mementos to
recall my past life to me."

Monsieur Champfleury introduced Henry Murger to Monsieur Arsène Houssaye, who was then chief editor of "L'Artiste," and it happened oddly enough that Murger wrote nothing but poetry for this journal. Monsieur Houssaye took a great fancy to Murger, and persuaded him, for the sake of "effect" on the title-pages of books and on the backs of magazines, to change Henri to Henry, and give Murger a German physiognomy by writing it Mürger. As Frenchmen treat their names with as much freedom as we use towards old gloves, Murger instantly adopted Monsieur Houssaye's suggestion, and clung as long as he lived to the new orthography of his name. He began to find it less difficult to procure each day his daily bread, but still the gaunt wolf, Poverty, continued to glare on him. "Our existence," he said, "is like a ballad which has several couplets; sometimes all goes well, at other times all goes badly, then worse, next worst, and so on; but the burden never changes; 'tis always the same,--Misery! Misery! Misery!" One day he became so absolutely and hopelessly poor, that he was undecided whether to enlist as a sailor or take a clerk's place in the Messrs. de Rothschilds' banking-house. He actually did make application to Madame de Rothschild. Here is the letter in which he records this application:--

"_15th August, 1844._

"I am delighted to be at last able to write you without being obliged to describe wretchedness. Ill-fortune seems to begin to tire of pursuing me, and good-fortune appears about to make advances to me. Madame Rothschild, to whom I wrote begging her to get her husband to give me a situation, informed her correspondent of it, and told him to send for and talk with me. I could not obtain a place, but I was offered ten dollars rather delicately, and I took it. As soon as I received it, I went as fast as I could to put myself in condition to be able to go out in broad daylight."

We scarcely know which is the saddest to see: Henry Murger accepting ten dollars from Madame de Rothschild's generous privy purse,--for it is alms, soften it as you may,--or to observe the happiness this paltry sum gives him. How deeply he must have been steeped in poverty!

But now the very worst was over. In 1848 he sent a contribution to "Le Corsaire," a petty newspaper of odds and ends, of literature and of gossip. The contribution was published. He became attached to the paper. In 1849 he began the publication in "Le Corsaire" of the story which was to make him famous, "La Vie de Bohême," which was, like all his works, something in the nature of an autobiographical sketch. Its wit, its sprightly style, its odd images, its odd scenes, its strange mixture of gayety and sadness, attracted attention immediately. But who pays attention to newspaper-articles? However brilliant and profound they may be, they are forgotten quite as soon as read. The best newspaper-writer on his most successful day can only hope to be remembered from one morning to another; if he commands attention for so long a period, his utmost ambition should consider itself satisfied.

It was not until Murger had rescued his book from the columns of the newspaper that he obtained reputation. He was indebted to Monsieur Jules Janin, the eminent theatrical reporter of the "Journal des Débats," for great assistance at this critical hour of his life. One morning Henry Murger entered Monsieur Jules Janin's study, carrying under his arm an immense bundle of old newspapers, secured by a piece of old twine. He asked Monsieur Jules Janin to read the story contained in the old newspapers, and to advise him if it was worth republication, and what form of publication was best suited to it. As soon as Murger retired, Monsieur Jules Janin took up the newspapers. Few bibliopoles in Paris are more delicate than Monsieur Janin; it is positive pain to him to peruse any volume, unless the margin be broad, the type excellent, the printing executed by a famous printer, and the binding redolent of the rich perfume of Russian leather. These newspapers were torn and tattered, stained with wine and coffee and tobacco. They were not so much as in consecutive order. Conceive the irritation they must have produced on Monsieur Janin! But when he once got fairly into the story he forgot all his delicacy, and when Henry Murger returned, two days afterwards, he said to him,--"Sir, go home and write us a comedy with Rodolphe and Schaunard and Nini and Musette.[D] It shall be played as soon as you have written it; in four-and-twenty hours it will be celebrated, and the dramatic reporters will see to the rest." The magnificent promises to the poverty-racked man fevered him almost to madness; he took up the packet, (which Monsieur Janin had elegantly bound with a rose-colored ribbon,) and off he went, without even thinking to thank Monsieur Janin for his kindness, or to close the door. Murger carried his story to a friend, Theodore Barrière, (since famous as a play-writer,) and in three months' time the piece was ready for the stage, was soon brought out at the "Variétés," and the names of Murger and Barrière were on every lip in Paris.

We have nothing like the French stage in the suddenness and extensiveness of the popularity it gives men. We have no means by which a gifted man can suddenly acquire universal fame,--can "go to bed unknown and wake famous." The most brilliant speech at the bar is heard within a narrow horizon. The most brilliant novel is slow in making its way; and before its author is famous beyond the shadow of the publisher's house, a later new novel pales the lustre of the rising star. The French stage occupies the position our Congress once held, when its halls were adorned by the great men, the Clays, Calhouns, Websters, of our fathers' days, or the Supreme Court occupied, when Marshall sat in the chief seat on its bench, and William Pinckney brought to its bar his elaborate eloquence, and William Wirt his ornate and touching oratory. The stage is to France what Parliament is to England. It is more: it is the mirror and the fool; it glasses society's form and pressure; it criticizes folly. Murger's success on the stage opened every door of publicity to him. His name was current, it had a known market-value. The success of the piece assured the success of the book. The "Revue des Deux Mondes" begged Murger to write for its pages. Murger's fortune seemed assured.

There was but one croak heard in all the applause. It came from Murger's father. He could not believe his eyes and his ears, when they avouched to him that his son's name and praises filled every paper and every mouth. It utterly confounded him. The day of the second performance of the piece Murger went to see his father.

"If you would like to see my piece again to-day, you may take these tickets."

His father replied,--

"Your piece? What! you don't mean to say that they are still playing it?"

He could not conceive it possible that his "vagabond" son should interest anybody's attention.

The very first use Murger made of his increased income was to fly Paris and to seek the country,--that rural life which Frenchmen abhor. Marlotte, a little village in the Forest of Fontainebleau, became his home; there he spent eight months of every year. Too poor, at first, to rent a cottage for himself, he lodged at the miserable village-inn, which, with its eccentric drunken landlord, he has sketched in one of his novels; and when fortune proved less unkind to him, he took a cottage which lay between the highway and the forest, and there the first happy years of his life were spent. They were few, and they were checkered. His chief petty annoyance was his want of skill as a sportsman. He could never bring down game with his gun, and he was passionately fond of shooting. On taking up his abode in the country, the first thing he had made was a full hunting-suit in the most approved fashion, and this costume he would wear upon all occasions, even when he came up to Paris. He never attained any nearer approximation to a sportsman's character. One day he went out shooting with a friend. A flock of partridges rose at their feet.

"Fire, Murger! fire!" exclaimed his friend.

"Why, great heavens, man, I can't shoot so! Wait until they _light_ on yon fence, and then I'll take a crack at them."

He could no better shoot at stationary objects, however, than at game on the wing. Hard by his cottage a hare had burrowed in a potato-field. Every morning and every evening Murger fired at the hare, but with such little effect, that the hare soon took no notice either of Murger or his gun, and gambolled before them both as if they were simply a scarecrow. Murger bagged but one piece of game in the whole course of his life, and the way this was done happened in this wise. One day he was asleep at the foot of a tree in the Forest of Fontainebleau,--his gun by his side. He was suddenly awakened by the barking of a dog which he knew belonged to the most adroit poacher that levied illicit tribute on the imperial domain. The dog continued to bark and to look steadily up into the tree. Murger followed the dog's eyes, but could discover nothing. The poacher ran up, saying,--"Quick, Monsieur Murger! quick! Give me your gun. Don't you see it?"

Murger replied,--"See it? See what?"

"Why, a pheasant! a splendid cock! There he is on the top limb!"

The poacher aimed and fired; the pheasant fell at Murger's feet. "Take the bird and put it in your game-bag, Monsieur Murger, and tell everybody you killed it."

Murger gratefully accepted the present; and this was the first and only time that Murger ever bagged a bird.

But the cloud which darkened his sky now was the cloud which had lowered on all his life,--poverty. He was always fevered by the care and anxiety of procuring money. Life is expensive to a man occupying such a position as Murger filled, and French authors are ill paid. A French publisher thinks he has done wonders, if he sells all the copies of an edition of three thousand volumes; and if any work reaches a sale of sixteen or seventeen thousand volumes, the publisher is ready to cry, "Miracle!" Further, men who lead intellectual lives are almost necessarily extravagant of money. They know not its value. They know, indeed, that ten mills make one cent, and that ten cents make one dime, and that ten dimes make one dollar; but they are ignorant of the practical value of these denominations of the great medium of exchange. They cannot "jew," and know not that the slight percentage they would take off the price asked is a prize worth contending for. Again, the physical exhaustion or reaction which almost invariably follows mental exertion requires stimulants of some kind or other to remove the pain--it is an acute pain--which reaction brings upon the whole system. These stimulants, whether they be good dinners, or brilliant company, or generous wines, or parties of pleasure, are always costly. Besides, life in Paris is such an expensive mode of existence, the simplest pleasures there are so very costly, and there are so many microscopic issues through which money pours away in that undomestic life, in that career passed almost continually in public, that one must have a considerable fortune, or lead an extremely retired life. A fashionable author, whose books are in every book-shop window, and whose plays are posted for performance on every wall, cannot lead a secluded life; and all the circumstances we have hinted at conspire to make his life expensive. In vain Murger fled the great city. It pursued him even in the country. Admirers and parasites sought him out even in his retreat, and forced their way to his table. There is another reason for Murger's life-long poverty: he worked slowly, and this natural difficulty of intellectual travail was increased by his exquisite taste and desire of perfection. The novel was written and re-written time and again. The plot was changed; the characters were altered; each phrase was polished and repolished. Where ordinary writers threw off half a dozen volumes, Murger found it hard to fit a single volume for the press. Ordinary writers grew rich in writing speedily forgotten novels; he continued poor in writing novels which will live for many years. Then, Murger's vein of talent made him work for theatres which gave more reputation than ready money. He was too delicate a writer to construct those profitable dramas which run a hundred or a hundred and fifty nights and place ten or twenty thousand dollars in the writer's purse. His original poverty kept him poor. He could not afford to wait until the seed he had sown had grown and ripened for the sickle; so he fell into the hands of usurers, who purchased the crop while it was yet green, and made the harvest yield them profits of fifty or seventy-five per centum.

His distress during the last years of his life was as great as the distress of his youth. His published letters tell a sorrowful tale. They are filled with apprehensions of notes maturing only to be protested, or complaints of inability to go up to Paris one day because he has not a shirt to wear, another day because he cannot procure the seventy-five cents which are the railway-fare from Fontainebleau to Paris. Here is one of his letters, one of the gayest of them It is charming, but sad:--

"I send you my little stock. Carry it instantly to Monsieur
Heugel, the music-publisher in the Rue Vivienne, next door to
Michel Levy's. Go the day afterwards to Michel Levy's for the
answer. Read it, and if it shows that Monsieur Heugel buys my
songs, go to him with the blank receipt, herein inclosed, which
you will fill up as he will point out, according to the usual
conditions. It is ten dollars a song; but as there is a poor song
among them, and money I must have, take whatever he gives you; but
you must pretend as if you expected ten dollars for each song.
This money must be used to take up Saccault's note, which is due
the fifteenth. Take the address of the holder, and pay it before
it is protested. You will be allowed till the next day to pay it.
Be active in this matter, and let me hear how things turn out. I
cannot, in reason, in my present situation, take a room at a rent
of a hundred and twenty dollars a year.[E] We have cares enough
for the present; therefore let us not sow that seed of
embarrassment which flowers every three months in the shape of
quarterly rent. Do not give at the outside more than eighty
dollars for the room, even though we be embarrassed by its
smallness. I hope we may have means before long of being more
delicate in our selection; but at present put a leaf to your
patience, for the horizon is black enough to make ink withal.
However, the little dialogue (which has been quite successful) I
have just had with the muses has given me better spirits. I have a
fever of working which is high enough to give me a real fever. I
have shaken the box, and see that it is not empty. But I stood in
need of this evidence, for in my own eyes I had fallen as low as
the Public Funds in 1848. Return here before the money Michel Levy
gave you is exhausted, for I cannot get any more for you. I am
working half the day and half the night. I feel that the great
flood-tide of 'copy' is at hand. My laundress and my pantaloons
have both deserted me. I am obliged to use grape-vine leaves for
my pocket-handkerchief.... There is nothing new here. The dogs are
in good health, but they do not look fat; I am afraid they have
fasted sometimes. Our chimney is again inhabited by a family of
swallows; they say that is a good sign: maybe it means that we
shall have fire all the winter long."

To this letter was added a postscript which one of the dogs was supposed to have written:--

"My dear lady,--They say here we are going to see mighty hard
times. My master talks of suppressing my breakfast, and he wants
to hire me to a shepherd in order that I may earn some money for a
living. But as I have the reputation of loving mutton-chops,
nobody will hire me to keep sheep. If you see anywhere in Paris a
pretty diamond collar which does not cost more than
five-and-twenty cents, bring it to

"DOG MIRZA.

"_14th March, 1855_."

Hope dawned upon him in 1856. He was promised a pension of three hundred dollars from the Government out of the literary fund of the Minister of Public Instruction's budget. It would have been, from its regularity of payment, a fortune to him. It would have saved him from the anxiety of quarter-day when rent fell due. But the pension never came. The Government gave him the decoration of the Legion of Honor, which certainly gratified him. But money for bread would have been of more service. When Rachel lay upon that invalid's chair which she was never to quit except for her coffin, she gazed one morning upon the breakfast of delicacies spread before her to tempt the return of absent appetite. After some moments of silence, she took up a piece of bread as white as the driven snow, and, sighing, said in that whisper which was all that remained to her of voice,--"Ay, me! Had the world given me a little more of _this_, and earlier in my life, I had not been here at three-and-thirty." Those early years of want which sapped Rachel's life undermined Murger's constitution. His rustic life repaired some of the damage wrought, and would probably have entirely retrieved it, had his life then been freer from care, less visited by privation. Had the money the Government and his friends lavished on his corpse been bestowed on him living, he had probably still been numbered among the writers militant of France. Some obscure parasite got the pension. He continued to work on still hounded by debt. "Five times a week," he wrote in 1858, "I dine at twelve or one o'clock at night. One thing is certain: if I am not forced to stop writing for three or four days, I shall fall sick." In 1860 we find him complaining that he is "sick in soul, and _maybe in body too_. I am, of a truth, fatigued, and a great deal more fatigued than people think me." Death's shadow was upon him. The world thought him in firmer health and in gayer spirits than ever. He knew better. He felt as the traveller feels towards the close of the day and the end of the journey. It was not strange that the world was deceived, for Murger's gayety had always been factitious. He often turned off grief with a smile, where other men relieve it with a tear. Sensitive natures shrink from letting the world see their exquisite sensibility. Besides, Murger's gayety was intellectual rather than physical. It consisted almost entirely in bright gleams of repartee. It was quickness, 'twas not mirth. No wonder, then, that the world was deceived; the mind retained its old activity amid all its fatigue; and besides, the world sees men only in their hours of full-dress, when the will lights up the leaden eyes and wreathes the drawn countenance in smiles. Tears are for our midnight pillow,--the hand-buried face for our solitary study.

So when the rumor flew over Paris, Murger is sick!--Murger is dying!--Murger is dead! it raised the greatest surprise. Everybody wondered how the stalwart man they saw yesterday could be brought low so soon. Where was his youth, that it came not to the rescue? The reader can answer the question. Of a truth, the last act of the drama we have sketched in these pages moved rapidly to the catastrophe. He awoke in the middle of one night with a violent pain in the thigh, which ached as if a red-hot ball had passed through it. The pain momentarily increased in violence, and became intolerable. The nearest physician was summoned. After diagnosis, he declared the case too grave for action until after consultation. Another medical attendant was called in. After consultation they decided that the most eminent surgeons of Paris must be consulted. It was a decomposition of the whole body, attended with symptoms rarely observed. The princes of medical science in Paris met at the bedside. They all confessed that their art was impotent to alleviate, much less to cure this dreadful disease. Murger's hours were numbered. The doctors insisted upon his being transported to the hospital. To the hospital he went: 'twas not for the first,--'twas for the last time. His agonies were distressing. They wrung from him screams which could be heard from the fifth floor, where he lay, to the street. Death made his approaches like some skilful engineer against some impregnable fortress: fibre by fibre, vein by vein, atom by atom, was mastered and destroyed.

During one of the rare intervals of freedom from torture, he turned to the sick-nurse who kept watch by his pillow, and, after vacantly gazing on her buxom form and ruddy cheek, he significantly asked,--"Mammy, do you find this world a happy place, and life an easy burden?" The well-fed woman understood not the bitterness of soul which prompted this question. "Keep quiet, and sleep," was her reply. He fell back upon his pillow, murmuring, "_I_ haven't! _I_ haven't!" Yet he was only eight-and-thirty years old, and men's sorrows commonly commence later in life. A friend came to see him. As the physicians had forbidden him all conversation, he wrote on a card this explanation of his situation:--"Ricord and the other doctors were of opinion that I should come to Dubois's Hospital. I should have preferred St. Louis's Hospital. I feel more _at home_ there. _Enfin_!..." Is there in the martyrology of poets any passage sadder than these lines? Just think of a man so bereft of home and family, so accustomed to the common cot of the hospital, so familiar to hospital sights and sounds and odors, that he can associate home with the public ward! Poor Murger!

So lived and so died the poet of youth, and of ambitious, struggling, hopeful poverty. We describe not his funeral, nor the monument reared over his grave. Our heart fails us at sight of these sterile honors. They are ill-timed. What boot they, when he on whom they are bestowed is beyond the reach of earthly voices? The ancients crowned the live animal they selected as the sacrifice for their altars; it saw the garlands of flowers which were laid on its head, and the stately procession which accompanied it, and heard the music which discoursed of its happiness.

* * * * *

THE GREAT AIR-ENGINE.

There is an odd collection of houses, and a stretch of green, with half a dozen old elms, raspberry-bushes, and pruned oaks growing on it, opening out from this window where I work; this morning, they blended curiously with this old story that I want to tell you, helping me to understand it better. And the story, too, explained to me one reason why people always choose to look at those trees rather than the houses: at any trees before any houses. Because, you see, whatever grows out of Nature is itself, and says so: has its own especial little soul-sap, and leafs that out intact, borrows no trait or trick or habit from its neighbor. The sunshine is sunshine, and the pine-burr a pine-burr, obstinately, through and through. So Nature rests us. But whatever grows out of a man's brain is like the brain, patched, uncertain: a perverse streak in it somewhere, to spoil its thorough good or ill meaning.

There is a little Grecian temple yonder, back of the evergreens, with a triangular stove-funnel revolving at its top; and next door a Dutch-built stable, with a Turk's turban for a cupola; and just beyond that, a _châlet_-roof, sprouting without any provocation whatever out of an engine-house. I do not think they are caricatures of some characters. I knew a politician once, very low down in even that scale; Quilp they nicknamed him; the cruelest husband; quarter-dollarish in his views and principles, and greedy for bribes even as low as that: yet I have seen that man work with a rose-bush as long and tenderly as a mother with her baby, and his eyes glow and grow wet at the sight of a new and delicate plant. Near him lived a woman,--a relative of his, I believe: one of those women who absorb so much of the world's room and air, and have a right to do it: a nature made up of grand, good pieces, with no mean bits mortared in: fresh and child-like, too, with heat or tears ready for any tale of wrong, or strongly spoken, true word. But strike against one prejudice that woman had, her religious sect-feeling, and she was hard and cruel as Nero. It was the stove-funnel in that temple.

Human nature is full of such unaccountable warts and birth-marks and sixth fingers; and the best reason that I know of why all practical schemes for a perfect social system have failed is, that they are so perfect, so compact, that they ignore all these excrescences, these untied ends, in making up their whole. Yet it is a wonderful bit of mosaic, this Communist system: a place for every man, and every man in his place; "to insure to each human being the freest development of his faculties": there is a grand fragment of absolute truth in that, a going back to primal Nature, to a like life with that of sunshine and pines, a Utopia more Christ-like than the heaven (which Christ never taught) of eternal harp-playing and golden streets. But as for making it real, every man's life should have the integrity of meaning of that of a tree. A. statesman, B. seer, C. scavenger: pines, raspberries, oaks. Impossible, as we know. And then, a thistle at the beginning knows it is a thistle, and cannot be anything else, so there is the end of it; but when Pratt, by nature _né_ knife-grinder, asserts himself poet, what then? How many men know their vocation? Who is going about to tie on the labels? Who would you be willing should tie on yours? Then, again, there is your neighbor Brownson, with a yeasty brain, fermenting too fast through every phase of creed or party to accept a healthful "settling"; so it is left to work itself out, and it will settle itself by-and-by, in a life or two it may be. You know other brains which, if you will but consider, prove this life to be only one stage of a many-yeared era: they are lying fallow from birth until death; they have powers latent in them, that next time, perhaps, will bear golden grain or fruit. Now they are resting, they lie fallow. Communism allows no time for fermentation, or lying fallow; God does: for brains, I mean, not souls. But what are we going to do with this blindness of human beings as to what they are fit for,--when they go, or are forced to go, stumbling along the wrong path all their lives? Why, the bitterest prayers that God bears are from men who think they have lost time in the world. The lowest matter alive, the sponges, _fungi_, know what they have to do, and are blessed in the doing, while we--Did you think the Socialist helped the matter? Men needed thousand years' education to make their schemes practicable; they ignored all this blindness, all selfishness, and overgrowth of the passions: no wonder these facts knobbed themselves up against their system, and so, in every instance it crumbled to pieces. The things are facts, and here; there is no use in denying that; and it is a fact, too, that almost every life seems a wasted failure, compared with what it might have been. Such hard, grimy problems there are in life! They weaken the eyes that look long at them: stories hard to understand, like that of this old machinist, Joe Starke.

But over yonder, how cool and shady it is on that sweep of green! that rests one so thoroughly, in eyes and brain! The quiet shadows ebb and flow over the uncut grass; every hazy form or color is beyond art, true and beautiful, being fresh from God; there are countless purpled vines creeping out from the earth under that grass; the air trembles with the pure spring healing and light; the gray-barked old elms wrestle, and knot their roots underground, clutching down at the very thews and sinews of the earth, and overhead unfold their shivering delicate leaves fresh in the sunlight to catch the patter of the summer rain when it comes. It is sure to come. Winter and summer, spring and autumn, shall not fail. God always stays there, in the great Fatherland of Nature. One knows now why Jesus went back there when these hard riddles of the world made his soul sorrowful even unto death, and he needed a word from Home to refresh him.

Do you know the meaning to-day of the beds of rock and pregnant loam, of the woods, and water-courses, and live growths and colors on these thousand hills near us? Is it that God has room for all things in this Life of His? for all these problems, all Evil as it seems to us? that nothing in any man's life is wasted? every hunger, loss, effort, held underneath and above in some infinite Order, suffered to live out its purpose, give up its uttermost uses? If, after all, the end of science, of fact and fiction, of watching those raspberry-bushes growing, or of watching the phases of these terrible years in which we live, were only to give us glimpses of that eternal Order, so that we could lie down in it, grow out of it, like that ground-ivy in the earth and sunshine yonder, sure, as it is, that there is no chance nor waste in our own lives? It would be something to know that sentence in which all the world's words are ordered, and to find that the war, and the Devil, and even your own life's pain, had its use, and was an accord there,--would it not? Thinking of that, even this bit of a history of Joe Starke might have its meaning, the more if there should be trouble and a cold wind blowing in it; because any idiot can know what God means by happy lives, but to find His thought behind the hunger and intolerable loss that wring the world's heart is a harder thing to do,--a better, a great, healthful thing. And one may be sure that the man, be he Christian or Pagan, who does believe in this under Order and Love, and tries to see and clear his way down to it, through every day's circumstance, will have come very near to the real soul of good and humanity,--to the Christ,--before the time comes for him to rest, and stand in his lot, at the end of the days.

But to our story. It was in Philadelphia the old machinist lived; he had been born and had grown old there; but there are only one or two days in his life you would care to hear about: August days, in the summer of '59, the culmination and end of all the years gone before for him. You know what a quiet place Philadelphia is? One might fancy that the first old Quaker, sitting down among its low, flattish hills, had left a spell of thoughtful reticence behind him. The hills never dare to rise into abrupt earnestness; the two broad, bright-faced rivers that hold it in lapse with a calm consciousness into the sleepy, oyster-bedded bay; even the accretion of human life there never has been able to utter itself in the myriad rebellious phases of a great city, but falls gravely into the drilled monotony of its streets. Brick and mortar will not yield themselves there to express any whim in the mind of their owner: the house-fronts turn the same impassive, show-hating faces on the sidewalks from the Delaware to the Schuylkill. Give the busiest street a moment's chance and it broods down into a solitary reverie, saying,--"You may force me into hotels and market-places, if you will, but I know the business of this town is to hold its tongue." Even the curiously beautiful women wrap themselves in the uniform of gray, silent color; the cast of thought of the people is critical, attentive, self-controlled. When a covered, leaden day shuts the sun out, and the meaning of the place in, hills and city and human life, one might fancy, utter the old answer of the woman accused of witchcraft:--"While I hold my thought, it is my own; when I speak it, it is my master." Out in the near hills the quietude deepens, loosening and falling back out of the rigid reserve of the city into the unconscious silence of a fresh Nature: no solitudes near a large town are so solitary as these. There is one little river in especial, that empties into the Schuylkill, which comes from some water-bed under the shady hills in Montgomery County,--some pool far underground, which never in all these ages has heard a sound, or seen the sun, nor ever shall; therefore the water flowing from it carries to the upper air a deeper silence than the spell left by the old Quaker on the hills, or even the ghostly memory of the Indian tribes, who, ages long ago, hunted and slowly faded away in these forests on its shores.

When they came to the New World, at a time so far gone from us that no dead nation even has left of it any record, they found the river flowing as strangely silent and pure as now, and the name they gave it, Wissahickon, it bears to-day. The hills are there as when they first saw them, wrapping themselves every year in heavier mantles of hemlocks and cedars; but a shaded road winds now gravely by the river-side, and along it the city sends out those who are tired, worn out, and need to hear that message of the river. No matter how dull their heads or hearts may be, they never fail to catch something of its meaning. So quiet it is there, so pure, it is like being born again, they say. So, all the time, in the cool autumn-mornings, in the heavy lull of noon, or with the low harvest-moon slanting blue and white shadows, sharp and uncanny, across its surface, the water flows steadily from its dark birthplace, clear, cheerful, bright. The hills crouch attentive on its edge, shaggy with shadows; from the grim rocks ferns and mosses sleep out delicate color unmolested, the red-bearded grass drops its seed unshaken. The sweetbrier trails its pink fingers through the water. They know what the bright little river means, as well as the mill-boy fishing by the bank: how He sent it near the city, just as He brought that child into the midst of the hackneyed, doubting old tax-gatherers and publicans long ago, with the same message. Such a curious calm and clearness rest in it, one is almost persuaded, that, in some day gone by, some sick, thirsty soul has in truth gone into its dewy solitude in a gray summer dawn, and, finding there the fabled fountain of eternal life, has left behind a blessing from all those stronger redeemed years to come.

There is a narrow road which leaves the main one, and penetrates behind the river-hills, only to find others, lower and more heavily wooded, with now and then odd-shaped bits of pasture-land wedged in between their sides, or else low brick farm-houses set in a field of corn and potatoes, with a dripping pump-trough at the door. It is a thorough country-road, lazy, choking itself up with mud even in summer, to keep city-carriages out, bordering itself with slow-growing maples and banks of lush maiden's-hair, blood-red partridge-berries, and thistles. You can find dandelions growing in the very middle of it, there is so little travel out there.

One August morning, in one of its quietest curves among the hills, there was a fat old horse, standing on it, sniffing up the cool air: pure air, it is there, so cool and rare that you can detect even the faint scent of the wild-grape blossoms or the buttercups in it in spring. The wagon to which the horse was fastened had no business there in the cedar-hills or slow-going road; it belonged to town, every inch, from hub to cover,--was square-built, shiningly clean, clear-lettered as Philadelphia itself.

"That completes the practical whole," said Andy Fawcett, polishing a tin measure, and putting it on the front seat of the wagon, and then surveying the final effect.

Andy was part-owner of it: the yellow letters on the sides were, "_A. Fawcett & Co. Milk_." It was very early,--gray, soggy clouds keeping back the dawn,--but light enough for Andy to see that his shoes, which he had blacked late last night, were bright, and his waistcoat, etc., "all taut."

"I like the sailor lingo," he said, curling his moustache, and turning over his pink shirt-collar. "They've a loose dash about 'em. It must go far with the girls."

Then he looked at the wagon again, and at a pinchbeck watch he carried.

"Five. No matter how neat an' easy a fellow's dress is, it's wasted this time in the mornin'. Them street-car conductors hev a chance for it all day, dang 'em!"

He went back to the house as softly as possible, and brought out a lantern, which was silver-mounted and of cut glass. He hung it carefully in the wagon.

"There's no knowin' what use I may have for it,"--shaking his head, and rubbing it tenderly.

Andy had owned that lantern for several years, and carried it with him always. "You cannot know, Jane," he used to say to the woman whom he worked for, "what a comfort I find in it. It"--He always stopped there, and she never replied, but immediately talked of something else. Their customers (for they kept half a dozen cows on the place, and Andy took the milk into town)--their customers, when they found out about the lantern, used to look oddly at Andy, and one or two of them had tried in consequence to overreach him in the bills. But no thimble-rigger had a keener eye for the cents than Fawcett. So their milk-speculation had prospered, until, this spring, they had added to their stock of cows. It was the only business in which Andy was partner; after he brought the wagon back at noon, he put on his flannel shirt, and worked as a hired hand for the woman; the other produce she sold herself.

The house was low, built of lichen-covered stone, an old buttonwood-tree tenting it over; in the sunny back-yard you could see fat pullets and glossy-backed Muscovy ducks wabbling in and out through the lilac-bushes. Comfortable and quaint the old place looked, with no bald white paint about it, no unseemly trig new fences to jar against the ashen and green tones of color in house and woods. The gate by which you passed through the stone wall was made of twisted boughs; and wherever a tree had been cut down, the stump still stood, covered with crimson-leaved ivy. "I'd like things nattier," Andy used to say; "but it's Jane's way."

The Quaker woman herself, as she stood in the gateway in her gray clothes, the hair pushed back from her sallow face, her brown, muscular arms bare, suited the quiet, earnest look of the place.

"Thee'll take neighbor Wart into town, Andrew?" she said.

"More noosances?" he growled.

"Thee'd best take her in, Andrew. It costs thee nothing," with a dry, quizzical smile.

Andy's face grew redder than his shirt, as he climbed up on the wagon-wheel.

"H'ist me up her basket here, then. A'n't I kind to her? I drink my coffee every noon at her stall, though 't's the worst in the market. If 'twas a man had sech a bamboozlin' phiz as hers, I'd bat him over th' head, that 's all."

"She's a widow, and thee's afraid of thy weak point," said Jane.

"Take yer joke, Jane." The lad looked down on the woman's bony face kindly. "They don't hurt, yer words. It's different when some folks pokes fun at me, askin' for the lantern, an'"--

"What odds?" said the woman hurriedly, a quick change coming over her face. "They mean well. Haven't I told thee since the night thee comed here first for a meal's victuals, an' all the years since, how as all the world meaned well to thee, Andrew? Not only sun an' air an' growth, an' God behind; but folks, ef thee takes them by the palm of the hand first, an' not raps them with the knuckles, or go about seekin' to make summat off of each."

Andy was in no mood for moralizing.

"Ye'r' hard on old Wart in that last remark, I'm thinkin',"--glancing at the dumpy bunch of a woman seated at their breakfast-table within, her greedy blue eyes and snub-nose close to her plate.

The Quaker turned away, trying to hide a smile, and began tugging at some dock-weeds. Her arms were tougher and stronger than Fawcett's. He used to say Jane was a better worker than he, though she did it by fits and starts, going at it sometimes as if every limb was iron and was moved by a steam-engine, and then for days doing nothing, playing with a neighbor's baby, sitting by the window, humming some old tune to herself, in a way that even Andy thought idle and childish. For the rest, he had thought little about her, except that she was a strangely clean and silent woman, and kind, even to tenderness,--to him; but to the very bats in the barn, or old Wart, or any other vermin, as well.