Bohemians of the Latin Quarter

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Bohemians of the Latin Quarter

The Project Gutenberg eBook, Bohemians of the Latin Quarter, by Henry Murger
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Title: Bohemians of the Latin Quarter
Author: Henry Murger

Release Date: May 27, 2006 [eBook #18445]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BOHEMIANS OF THE LATIN QUARTER***
E-text prepared by Chuck Greif from digital text provided by the Worchel Institute for the Study of Beat and Bohemian Literature (http://home.swbell.net/worchel/index.html)

Note: This book by Henry Murger, originally publised in 1851, was the source of two operas titled "La Bohème"--one by Giacomo Puccini (1896) and the other by Ruggero Leoncavallo (1897). Project Gutenberg also has the original French version of the book (Scènes de la vie de bohème); see http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/18446.

BOHEMIANS OF THE LATIN QUARTER
by
HENRY MURGER

1888
Vizetelly & Co. London

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface
Chapter I
, How The Bohemian Club Was Formed
Chapter II
, A Good Angel
Chapter III
, Lenten Loves
Chapter IV
, Ali Rodolphe; Or, The Turk Perforce
Chapter V
, The Carlovingian Coin
Chapter VI
, Mademoiselle Musette
Chapter VII
, The Billows of Pactolus
Chapter VIII
, The Cost Of a Five Franc Piece
Chapter IX
, The White Violets
Chapter X
, The Cape of Storms
Chapter XI
, A Bohemian Cafe
Chapter XII
, A Bohemian "At Home"
Chapter XIII
, The House Warming
Chapter XIV
, Mademoiselle Mimi
Chapter XV
, Donec Gratus
Chapter XVI
, The Passage of the Red Sea
Chapter XVII
, The Toilette of the Graces
Chapter XVIII
, Francine's Muff
Chapter XIX
, Musette's Fancies
Chapter XX
, Mimi in Fine Feather
Chapter XXI
, Romeo and Juliet
Chapter XXII
, Epilogue To The Loves Of Rodolphe And Mademoiselle Mimi
Chapter XXIII
, Youth Is Fleeting

PREFACE
The Bohemians of whom it is a question in this book have no connection with the Bohemians whom melodramatists have rendered synonymous with robbers and assassins. Neither are they recruited from among the dancing-bear leaders, sword swallowers, gilt watch-guard vendors, street lottery keepers and a thousand other vague and mysterious professionals whose main business is to have no business at all, and who are always ready to turn their hands to anything except good.
The class of Bohemians referred to in this book are not a race of today, they have existed in all climes and ages, and can claim an illustrious descent. In ancient Greece, to go no farther back in this genealogy, there existed a celebrated Bohemian, who lived from hand to mouth round the fertile country of Ionia, eating the bread of charity, and halting in the evening to tune beside some hospitable hearth the harmonious lyre that had sung the loves of Helen and the fall of Troy. Descending the steps of time modern Bohemia finds ancestors at every artistic and literary epoch. In the Middle Ages it perpetuates the Homeric tradition with its minstrels and ballad makers, the children of the gay science, all the melodious vagabonds of Touraine, all the errant songsters who, with the beggar's wallet and the trouvere's harp slung at their backs, traversed, singing as they went, the plains of the beautiful land where the eglantine of Clemence Isaure flourished.
At the transitional period between the days of chivalry and the dawn of the Renaissance, Bohemia continued to stroll along all the highways of the kingdom, and already to some extent about the streets of Paris. There is Master Pierre Gringoire, friend of the vagrants and foe to fasting. Lean and famished as a man whose very existence is one long Lent, he lounges about the town, his nose in the air like a pointer's, sniffing the odor from kitchen and cook shop. His eyes glittering with covetous gluttony cause the hams hung outside the pork butcher's to shrink by merely looking at them, whilst he jingles in imagination--alas! and not in his pockets--the ten crowns promised him by the echevins in payment of the pious and devout fare he has composed for the theater in the hall of the Palais de Justice. Beside the doleful and melancholy figure of the lover of Esmeralda, the chronicles of Bohemia can evoke a companion of less ascetic humor and more cheerful face--Master Fran?ois Villon, par excellence, is this latter, and one whose poetry, full of imagination, is no doubt on account of those presentiments which the ancients attributed to their fates, continually marked by a singular foreboding of the gallows, on which the said Villon one day nearly swung in a hempen collar for having looked too closely at the color of the king's crowns. This same Villon, who more than once outran the watch started in his pursuit, this noisy guest at the dens of the Rue Pierre Lescot, this spunger at the court of the Duke of Egypt, this Salvator Rosa of poesy, has strung together elegies the heartbreaking sentiment and truthful accents of which move the most