by Robb, Graham
If any of the men and women who rushed to defend those barricades had paused to examine them, they might have noticed something odd about their architecture and composition. The barricades had firm foundations, as though the builders had manoeuvred the carts into position according to some unwritten principle of barricade construction. There was an unusual preponderance of desks and file cabinets forming neat courses with bridged joins and buttresses, and, running along the top, a row of cartwheels and chairs that served as coping-stones and battlements. If the battle had been long in coming, the insurgents might have realized that a barricade in a maze of alleyways could be attacked from several directions at once, or isolated from the neighbouring barricades by a handful of troops. They might have flushed out the occupants of the houses that looked down on the barricades, and picked off any snipers who squatted behind the chimneys and the mansards. Any such precautions would, of course, have been futile if some of the rebels defending the barricades had turned out to be soldiers or policemen in disguise.
In the absence of detailed records, it is hard to say exactly what happened that morning under the shadow of the Sainte-Chapelle. The most explicit document is a letter drafted by an unknown hand and signed by two hundred and fifty inhabitants of the neighbouring streets (Rue de la Licorne, Rue de la Calandre and Rue de la Juiverie). This testimonial, which was later produced by Vidocq in support of his application for a government pension, praised ‘the zeal and courage of M. Vidocq’, who, though no longer officially employed by the Sûreté, had somehow managed to capture the ‘malefactors’, and ‘cleaned up’ the quartier by ‘sweeping away the rabble’.
The notion that the barricades on the Île de la Cité had been constructed under Vidocq’s direction and manned by his agents provocateurs was expressed, long after the events, by some of the revolutionaries who were captured that day on the barricades, and then tortured and imprisoned. Some of the survivors later made attempts on Vidocq’s life, and their testimony has always been considered unreliable.
SO MANY MURKY TALES are attached to Vidocq’s name that he seems to hover over nineteenth-century Paris like a phantom. Governments that were increasingly sensitive to public opinion, and inclined to farm their policing out to criminals, were bound to find a man like Vidocq indispensable. There were probably few political pies in which he did not have a finger. In 1846, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte (the future Napoleon III), who had been imprisoned after bungling a coup d’état, escaped from the fortress of Ham with the benefit of Vidocq’s advice. He fled to London, where Vidocq was sent to spy on him, and where Vidocq also took the opportunity to advise him on his next coup d’état. After the Revolution of 1848, and before Louis-Napoléon’s successful coup d’état of 1851, he served Lamartine as a secret agent. Lamartine himself paid tribute to the ex-convict, saying that he would have ‘mastered the situation with only Vidocq to help’.
The exact truth of these and other tales is almost impossible to separate from the mass of rumour and misinformation. In a city as large and as volatile as Paris, where ministries came and went like commuter trains, and whole quartiers disappeared from one year to the next, a historian is reduced to sifting through piles of suspect evidence like a rag-picker. Most of the documents have long since vanished, and many were probably destroyed. Within minutes of Vidocq’s death in 1857, a squad of policemen rushed to his house in the Marais and removed his files, leaving not a single clue by which to solve the penultimate mystery: when news of his death reached the newspapers, eleven women turned up at his home, each carrying a signed will that made her the sole heir to his fortune.
The old convict had remained slippery to the end. Some of the people who attended his quiet funeral at Saint-Denys-du-Saint-Sacrement in the Marais might have been forgiven for wondering whose body was in the coffin. The grave in Saint-Mandé cemetery, marked with the half-erased inscription, ‘Vidocq, 18—’, is now known to contain the body of a woman. It is most unlikely that Vidocq’s final resting-place will ever be known, and there will probably never be a monument or even a street name to commemorate the part he played in making Paris safe.
A PROPERTY IN BOHEMIA
I
Théâtre des Variétés, Thursday, 22 November 1849
THE SHADOWS DREW IN, until only her lily-white hands and her pale face could be seen. Figures dressed in black stood around her: they might have been angelic undertakers, waiting to bear her flimsy body to the grave. The silence was almost complete. The only sounds were the hissing of the gas-jets and the murmur of a thousand people barely breathing. Then a voice cried out, ‘O my youth! It is you they are burying!’
Darkness engulfed the scene, and furious applause cascaded down from the upper circle and the amphithéâtre. As the shabby section of the audience rose to its feet, waving its hats and food-wrappers, a rich, stale smell wafted through the auditorium. It had something of the fog on the boulevard outside, where the pavements were sticky with rain, but also something more intimate: it suggested old stew and coarse tobacco, the coat-racks and bookshelves of a pawnshop, and damp straw mattresses impregnated with urine and patchouli. It was–as though the set-designer had intended some ironical epilogue–the smell of the real Latin Quarter.
A denizen of that world walked stiffly onto the stage to shouts of ‘Author!’ He went to stand between the lovely white creature, now back from the dead like a sheet from the laundress, and his ideal alter ego, the elegantly disconsolate Rodolphe. A few smiles broke out among the parterre, which was still savouring the novelty of seeing garret-room revolutionaries portrayed as considerate young men. Liberties had obviously been taken with the truth…Someone must have kidnapped M. Murger and delivered him to a tailor. His body was still making the acquaintance of a perfectly black jacket and an unventilated pair of shoes; the handkerchief he clutched was unmistakeably white. His ‘knee’, as he called his balding brow, looked almost distinguished, and a fearless barber had ventured into the virgin forest of his beard and turned it into a tidy hedge. No one would see the fear and the sarcasm in those big, gloomy eyes, but the footlights might catch the tear that ran endlessly down his cheek–for the master of pathos was blessed with a defective lachrymal gland.
Beyond the footlights, he could make out the faces of famous critics who were about to crown him King of Bohemia. They had shown him their reviews of La Vie de Bohème before the performance and implicated him in the conspiracy of praise: ‘It positively rains witticisms.’ ‘Never has the public been so moved…those penniless young men and women have won our hearts.’ ‘One can tell that this work was lived before it was written.’
He saw the new President, Louis-Napoléon, smiling approval from his box, the living assurance that the revolutions of 1848–in which Henry Murger himself had played a small and only slightly shameful part–now belonged to history. The dishevelled originals of the stage Bohemians were hard to distinguish beyond the chandelier and the red velvet of the upper circle: they were a dark mass of heads and caps, just below the rotunda and the gilt cherubs made grubby by the gas-light. But he knew them well enough–the lank hair, the old men’s teeth, the humorous foibles that had hardened into vices. It should have been obvious to everyone that La Vie de Bohème was a highly selective version of the truth.
The actress who had incarnated Mimi placed her hand in his and curtsied to the critics; then his collaborator, the professional playwright, joined him on stage and the applause grew louder. He had imagined his moment of triumph a thousand times and was surprised to find himself thinking about furniture–a pair of matching chairs, a mattress with springs, and a full-length mirror. He thought of doors that filled the doorway and windowpanes that would not be shattered by a gust of wind. He pictured an apartment that would not have been out of place on the stage of the Variétés, with a boudoir in which to hide a beautiful new admirer and an antechamber in which to detain her beautiful predecessor.
It was an understandable distraction. Henry Murger, the tailor’s son and penni
less scribbler, was about to leave that suffering land of debts and dreams where ‘bold adventurers hunt from dawn to dusk that savage beast known as the five-franc piece’. The success of La Vie de Bohème was his passport to the Right Bank. Most of his friends had forgiven him his sentimental depiction of Bohemia. Some of them had even begged him to expunge that last, calculatedly selfish line, ‘Omy youth! It is you they are burying!’ But the professional playwright had already turned his little tales into a sugary fantasy. Something had to remain of the bitterness and the wasted time. If ‘they’ had not buried his youth, he would have butchered it himself and danced on its grave.
As they left the stage, he squeezed Mimi’s tiny hand and looked forward to the sequel.
II
The Latin Quarter, 1843–46
IN THOSE DAYS, long before, a view over the rooftops of Paris was an unaffordable luxury. The apartment he had shared with a mousy young writer from Laon had a view of the Jardin du Luxembourg–if he stuck his head out of the window as far as it would go and twisted it to the left, a smudge of green foliage appeared in the corner of one eye. That had been his best apartment to date. They had decorated it in the ‘Bohemian’ style of the 1830s: a few volumes of Shakespeare and Victor Hugo, a Phrygian cap, an Algerian hookah, a skull on a broomstick handle (from the brother of a friend, Charles Toubin, who was an intern at one of the big hospitals) and, of course, a window box of geraniums, which was not only pretty but also illegal. (Death by falling window box was always high up the official list of fatalities.) For a proper view of Paris, they visited Henry’s painter friends who lived in a warren of attic rooms near the Barrière d’Enfer and called themselves the Water-Drinkers. When the weather was fine and the smell of their own squalor became unbearable, they clambered onto the roof and sat on the gutters and ridges, sketching chimneyscapes, and sending up more smoke from their pipes than the fireplaces below.
Three of the Water-Drinkers had since died of various illnesses known collectively as ‘lack of money’. When the last of the three was buried, in the spring of 1844, Henry and the others had found themselves at the graveside without a sou to give the gravedigger. ‘Never mind,’ said he, ‘you can pay me next time,’ and then, to his colleague: ‘It’s all right–these gentlemen are regular customers.’
Four times a year, when leases expired, half the population of Paris took to the streets in a mass, short-distance migration. Few people owned more furniture than would fit on a hand-cart, and few were so enamoured of their dwelling that they wanted to stay for more than a year. Henry’s migrations had left him almost as far down the residential ladder as it was possible to go. After his latest move, he was living in the Hôtel Merciol near Saint-Sulpice, in a dingy little room on the third floor (‘for the excellent reason that there isn’t a fourth’).
The Hôtel Merciol was one of those grudgingly furnished hotels where so many people came and went–hiding from creditors, borrowing a bed, staying drunk as long as their friends’ generosity allowed–that it could hardly be called home. Working girls in search of more congenial employment sometimes brightened the place with their chatter and their imitation of domestic respectability, until the police raided the hotel in the name of public morality and sent the girls to be hygienically inspected and registered as prostitutes.
Despite the boredom, the discomfort and the constant anxiety, Henry had decided to live by his pen. Since his mother’s death, his father had behaved like a typical bourgeois, which was particularly irritating in a man who earned his living as a tailor and a concierge. He refused to subsidize his son’s career as France’s future greatest poet. He scoffed at Henry’s ragged clothes and suggested that he find work as a domestic servant. Henry was forced, as he put it, to ‘prostitute his muse’. He wrote for a bath-house journal that was printed on waterproof paper, and for two children’s magazines, whose editors found his sentimental style well suited to the junior reader. He wrote verse for Le Palamède, which printed chess problems and gave the solutions in rhyming couplets. As ‘Viscountess X’, he wrote a fashion column for Le Moniteur de la Mode. (‘Everyone this season is wearing periwinkle blue’, he wrote, dressed in his mouse-brown overcoat.) He had even penned a few sarcastic editorials for the organ of his father’s trade, Le Coupeur:
The Tailor’s Art–that deplorable expression! Does a man who improves his stitching technique thereby acquire the right to stand proudly beside our artists and to claim, when he hears the names
David, Girodet or Horace Vernet, ‘I, too, am an artist!…’ No, a thousand times no. He should say no such thing, or run the risk of bringing a smile to every lip.
At the age of twenty-three, he saw his dreams of poetic glory turn to dust. His longest poem had been written for Mr Rogers, whose name appeared on walls and buses all over Paris. Mr Rogers liked to advertise his product in Romantic verse and paid one franc per couplet. Henry’s ode was supposedly written by a countess to her friend, who could now face the world again thanks to a mouthful of hippopotamus ivory. It was by far his most widely read publication:
A dire calamity had come about–
There is none worse:–my teeth had fallen out.
ROGERS! My husband’s love I owe to thee,
Thou hast restor’d domestic harmony.
(Men love not the woman but the idol.)
Touch’d by thy hand, of Nature’s the rival,
By no gold thread, nor hook, nor tie oppress’d,
Our tender jaws become a treasure-chest!
I’d bade adieu to Youth’s sweet adventures,
When, my dear, you told me of His dentures.
May HIS name ever in my heart reside,
ROGERS! without thy skill I should have died,
Or ever lived a prisoner of my house,
The toothless widow of a living spouse!
Since the muse was beginning to lose her appetite for doggerel like this, it was just as well that her poet had another source of income. A certain Count Tolstoy employed him as a secretary on a small but regular wage. Though the young man was often ill and lying idle in a hospital bed, Count Tolstoy found that with his intimate knowledge of political clubs and underground journalism in the Latin Quarter, Henry Murger made an excellent informant for the Tsarist spy network.
AT THE TIME the great event occurred, Henry’s personal life was in a similarly wretched state. The Danish ‘sylph-in-velvet’ who had spent two nights sleeping in his chair had flown away, complaining to a mutual friend that he was physically unambitious (‘which only goes to show that I’m a fool’). The overweight soubrette (‘two hundred pounds, not including petticoats’) had frightened him off with talk of weddings and babies. The search for a ‘legitimate mistress’ who would marry him ‘in the thirteenth arrondissement’–as they said when there were only twelve of them in Paris–had been long and fruitless. Even his most ingenious plan had come to naught: the principal of the girls’ orphanage at Saint-Étienne-du-Mont had not received his application for a wife with undisguised delight.
It was, therefore, with a mixture of ecstasy and relief that, in the spring of 1846, he discovered a creature sent from heaven via the Faubourg Saint-Denis who seemed destined to fill his heart with joy and his pockets with money.
III
A newspaper office, 1846
ON TUESDAY 5 MAY, slightly later than he had intended, Henry Murger crossed the river to the Right Bank and turned into a busy street between the Passage des Panoramas and the Stock Exchange. At no. 36, Rue Vivienne, the index finger of a disembodied hand pointed up a staircase to something called ‘Le Corsaire-Satan’.
His heart was pounding even before he began to climb the stairs. That Sunday, he had returned to Paris on a cloud, accompanied by his friends, who travelled more mundanely on the number 9 bus. They had been taking the air at Bougival by the Seine, where shopgirls and factory workers went to remind themselves of the sun, and where the riverbanks bristled with painters’ easels.
Champfleury–the mousy
young writer with a cat’s-whiskers moustache–had brought along his girlfriend, Mariette. Their fellow Bohemian, Alexandre Schanne, who was known to a handful of fellow artists and several hundred exasperated neighbours as the composer of a symphony ‘On the Influence of Blue in the Arts’, had brought his mistress, Louisette. She was, according to Henry, a typical grisette (the name given to working girls because of the cheap grey cloth they wore). She got about the city by hanging on to the back of carriages and supplemented her wages as a flower-girl by attaching herself to cheerful young men until their money ran out. She was known to have seduced her married landlord in lieu of a month’s rent, and then to have blackmailed him for a further month. Like most girls at her factory, she had green hands–from the arsenic dye that was used on the artificial petals. It was monotonous work and poorly paid. Each girl performed a single task and never saw the finished flowers that adorned the tables and ball-gowns of the ladies whose husbands flirted with the flower-girls.
They were lying on the grass, discussing the delicate art of paying one’s debts without spending any money, when Louisette’s friend from the factory arrived on the arm of a young architect called Crampon. Henry removed the pipe from his mouth and turned to look.
She was wearing a blue polka-dot muslin dress, tied at the waist with a ribbon that matched her blue eyes. Her boots were laced tightly over white stockings. Her puff sleeves and white collar had been carefully stitched by candlelight in the few hours that remained after work. Like all flower-girls, she was deathly pale, but not pale enough to hide her scars. Her face had been ravaged by smallpox. A friend of Henry’s later compared it to a honey cake, because it was sweet and had a pitted surface.