La Boheme | Page 2

their meal. They have a wild
time and are dancing and singing when Musetta enters and tells them
that Mimi is outside so weak and ill that she can go no further. They
make up a bed on the couch for her and bring her in. She clings to
Rudolph and implores him not to leave her. Mimi reconciles Marcel
and Musetta. Musetta tells her old friends that Mimi is dying and gives
them her earrings to sell, asking them to get a doctor for Mimi. They all
go out leaving Rudolph alone with Mimi. He holds her in his arms and
recalls their love. Mimi is seized with a fit of coughing and falls back
in a faint. Musetta returns with medicine. Mimi regains consciousness
and turning to Rudolph tells him of her love. Musetta falls upon her
knees in prayer and Mimi passes away in Rudolph's arms.
_...rain or dust, cold or heat, nothing stops these bold adventurers.
Their existence of every day is a work of genius, a daily problem which
they always contrive to solve with the aid of bold mathematics.
When want presses them, abstemious as anchorites--but, if a little

fortune falls into their hands, see them ride forth on the most ruinous
fancies, loving the fairest and youngest, drinking the oldest and best
wines, and not finding enough windows whence to throw their money;
then--the last crown dead and buried--they begin again to dine at the
table d'hôte of chance, where their cover is always laid; smugglers of
all the industries which spring from art; in chase, from morning till
night, of that wild animal which is called the crown.
"Bohemia" has a special dialect, a distinct jargon of its own. This
vocabulary is the hell of rhetoric and the paradise of neologism_.

_A gay life; yet a terrible one_!
(Il. MURGER, preface to "Vie de Bohème")[1]

[Footnote 1: Rather than follow MURGER'S novel step by step, the
authors of the present libretto, both for reasons of musical and dramatic
effect, have sought to derive inspiration from the French writer's
admirable preface.
Although they have faithfully portrayed the characters, even displaying
a certain fastidiousness as to sundry local details; albeit in the scenic
development of the opera they have followed Murger's method of
dividing the libretto into four separate acts, in the dramatic and comic
episodes they have claimed that ample and entire freedom of action,
which, rightly or wrongly, they deemed necessary to the proper scenic
presentment of a novel the most free, perhaps, in modern literature.
Yet, in this strange book, if the characters of each person therein stand
out clear and sharply defined, we often may perceive that one and the
same temperament bears different names, and that it is incarnated, so to
speak, in two different persons. Who cannot detect in the delicate
profile of one woman the personality both of Mimi and of Francine?
Who, as he reads of Mimi's "little hands, whiter than those of the
Goddess of Ease," is not reminded of Francine's little muff?
The authors deem it their duty to point out this identity of character. It
has seemed to them that these two mirthful, fragile, and unhappy
creatures in this comedy of Bohemian life might haply figure as one
person, whose name should not be Mimi, not Francine, but "the Ideal."]

ACT I

"...Mimi was a charming girl specially apt to appeal to Rudolph, the
poet and dreamer. Aged twenty-two, she was slight and graceful. Her
face reminded one of some sketch of high-born beauty; its features had
marvellous refinement.
"The hot, impetuous blood of youth coursed through her veins, giving a
rosy hue to her clear complexion that had the white velvety bloom of
the camellia.
"This frail beauty allured Rudolph. But what wholly served to enchant
him were Mimi's tiny hands, that, despite her household duties, she
contrived to keep whiter even than the Goddess of Ease."

ACT I
IN THE ATTIC

_Spacious window, from which one sees an expanse of snow-clad roofs.
On left, a fireplace, a table, small cupboard, a little book-case, four
chairs, a picture easel, a bed, a few books, many packs of cards, two
candlesticks. Door in the middle, another on left._

Curtain rises quickly RUDOLPH and MARCEL. RUDOLPH _looks
pensively out of the window._ MARCEL _works at his painting, "The
Passage of the Red Sea," with hands nipped with cold, and warms them
by blowing on them from time to time, often changing position on
account of the frost._
MAR. (_seated, continuing to paint_) This Red Sea passage feels as
damp and chill to me As if adown my back a stream were flowing.
(_Goes a little way back from the easel to look at the picture._)
But in revenge a Pharaoh