by Robb, Graham
Her chaperone that day, M. Crampon, had met her in the street by chance–so he thought–when she was trying to find the key to her apartment. In fact, at the time, Lucile Louvet had no permanent address. Five years before, she had left her father’s tripe shop in the Rue Saint-Denis, and married a cobbler in the same quartier, a M. Paulgaire, who beat her and bored her to tears. Since then, she had lived in garrets in the Latin Quarter, in hospitals for indigent women and sometimes in houses in the back streets where the charms of even the plainest flower-girl were appreciated to the full.
She never smiled. If she had ever had a sense of humour, she had lost it–or, as Henry might have said, had mislaid it or taken it to the pawnshop, hoping one day to redeem it. But at Bougival, the shadows of the leaves and the darting sun painted expressions on her face that would have charmed an artist. Henry’s eye, being bolder than the rest of him, explored her from top to toe, loosened the ribbon around her waist and entered the chestnut forest of her hair. Without saying a word, she made it obvious that the exploration did not offend her.
That evening, on the journey back to Paris, M. Crampon had somehow become detached from the rest of the party, and Henry had found himself alone with Lucile.
Now, two days later, as he climbed the stairs of no. 36 clutching a roll of paper, he was still in what he described as ‘a state of wild intoxication’. He passed the old soldier on the landing who repelled irate readers and welcomed actresses and politicians bearing bribes. He walked along a corridor where men in overalls were reading proofs and eating fried potatoes, and entered a large office that looked like a schoolroom several days after a pupils’ coup d’état. About twenty young men in varying states of dilapidation and dandification sat and sprawled around a table covered in green baize. On the far side was a bookcase devoid of books, and an illustrated wall-chart of world history on which all the cartouches bearing names and dates had been patiently obliterated with sealing-wax. A tall, elderly man wearing green-tinted spectacles was marching from one group to the next, shouting like an actor in a boulevard theatre and snatching up sheets of paper.
‘Let me see that…“My word!”, an actress with close ties to the Ministry was heard to say the other day… Rubbish! Into the basket…. What’s that? Say that again. Creditors are like women?…’
‘You can’t love them enough.’
‘That’s good. Write it down. It’s two o’clock. There’s nothing at the printers!…Oh, I forgot…Monsieur Baudelaire is a genius–we can’t expect him to soil his hands with ink…’
The chief-editor of the Corsaire-Satan was the man who, as he never tired of saying, had ‘discovered’ Balzac in 1821 and shown him how to write pornographic novels for money. Since then, Auguste Lepoitevin Saint-Alme had steered at least half a dozen newspapers to ruin but still harboured dreams of dominating the Parisian press. His latest venture–a scandal sheet called Satan–had taken over the old daily arts paper, Le Corsaire. He had sacked the salaried journalists and replaced them with the freelance geniuses who walked every morning from the Latin Quarter in the hope of seeing their names in print and to spend the day in a heated room. He paid them a niggardly six centimes a line (‘so they won’t get lazy’). But once they had produced ten articles that caused irreparable damage to the reputation of a public figure, they were allowed to puff each other’s books and praise the performances of any actress they happened to fancy. Saint-Alme called them his ‘little cretins’. (‘The future of literature, sir!’ he told his rivals.)
Until then, most of Henry’s work for the Corsaire-Satan had consisted of anecdotes of life in the Latin Quarter–that far-fetched world where mildly deranged young men discussed ‘hyperphysical philosophy’ until dawn, joked about squalor and starvation and paid the rent by immortalizing the landlord in oil. Saint-Alme took the paper from Henry’s hand, and read aloud to the assembled cretins.
It was a description of Henry’s meeting with Lucile. He had called the girl Louise and himself Rodolphe, and transposed their encounter to the Prado dance-hall on the Île de la Cité. Then, without changing any other detail, he recounted their return to Paris from Bougival on Sunday evening:
They stopped in front of a shop in the Rue Saint-Denis.
‘This is where I live,’ she said.
‘When shall I see you again, Louise, and where?’
‘Your place, tomorrow, eight o’clock.’
‘Really and truly?’
‘Here’s my promise,’ she said, offering her fresh cheeks to Rodolphe, who took a bite of those beautiful ripe fruits of youth and health.
He returned home, as they say, ‘in a state of wild intoxication’.
‘Oh!’ he exclaimed, striding about his room. ‘It can’t go on like this. I must write some poetry.’
Saint-Alme guffawed his approval: Murger’s tale was just the sort of thing to titillate the middle-aged subscribers. The ‘little cretins’ listened as Saint-Alme read on:
After tidying up the temple that was to receive his idol, Rodolphe dressed for the occasion, bitterly regretting the absence of anything white from his wardrobe.
The ‘holy hour’ struck, and with it came two timid knocks at the door. He opened it. It was Louise.
‘You see, I kept my word.’
Rodolphe pulled the curtain across the window and lit a fresh candle.
The girl removed her bonnet and shawl, and placed them on the bed. She saw the dazzling whiteness of the sheets, and smiled. In fact, she almost blushed.
When she complained that her boots were rather tight, he knelt down and obligingly helped her to unlace them.
Suddenly, the light went out.
‘Oh!’ said Rodolphe. ‘Who can have blown out the candle?…’
The rest of the evening was left to the fertile imaginations of the little cretins, who congratulated Henry on his new acquisition and his literary style.
IV
The Latin Quarter, 1846–47
NEXT DAY, Henry left his female protagonist in bed and went to read the Corsaire-Satan at the café. His tale had been given the honours of the ‘rez-de-chaussée’. (The ‘ground floor’ was the bottom half of the front page, where the serial usually appeared.) More importantly, it ran to two hunded and seventy-four lines. At six centimes a line, it would pay the rent for two weeks. If he could keep up that tone of ironical gaiety, he and Lucile might even enjoy the luxury of a daily meal.
From that brief period of happiness–as it later seemed to Henry–only two letters have survived, both written by Lucile. They can hardly be counted among the great love letters of the nineteenth century, but at least they have the flavour of reality:
Since you’re not back, I’m going out to see my aunt.
I’m taking the money so I can take a cab.
Louise
(‘Aunt’ was a euphemism for the pawnshop.)
I’m going to have some boots made. You’ll have to find some money so I can pick them up the day after tomorrow.
(A pair of boots cost twenty francs, or, in the circumstances, three hundred and thirty-three lines of prose.)
Henry liked the letters so much that he quoted them in his next ‘Scene of Bohemian Life’: the hero’s friend, seeing a shiny new pair of women’s boots at his door, assumes that he has come to the wrong address. Afterwards, the Bohemians eat a lobster and drink a few bottles of wine to celebrate Rodolphe and Mimi’s ‘honeymoon’. (He had decided to rename his character ‘Mimi’.) The friend discourses on the origins of coffee (‘discovered in Arabia by a goat’), while Mimi goes off to fetch the pipes and to serve the coffee, saying to herself, ‘Good heavens! What a lot of things that gentleman knows!’
It was only after a month of blissful moments to treasure in his memory–the faint smile on her lips when he brought her back a blue scarf from the fashion magazine, or the morning when he kissed her hair a hundred times while she slept–that he began to notice certain things. Lucile spent ages dressing and arranging her hair, just to go to the
market. She talked to the women who sat on the street corner. She spread out her second-hand tarot cards on his desk, examining them like a scholar of ancient languages, and on the days that were supposed to be lucky she was gone for hours. When he asked what she was doing, she said, ‘getting to know the neighbours’.
Henry sat at his desk, trying to be witty. Lucile was useless as a housewife, and since she had given up her job at the flower-factory, it was hard to satisfy her extravagant desire for cooked food and an occasional outing to the dance-hall. But at least, with Lucile as his mistress, there was no shortage of material. Without exactly spying on her, he found out about the gentleman from Brittany, and the precocious schoolboy who promised her a cashmere shawl and some mahogany furniture. From Lucile herself, he knew that Alexandre Schanne, who was probably envious, had called her ‘a little slut’. Another friend had been looking rather bashful, and Henry wondered how far the ‘neighbourhood’ extended. Sometimes, when she rested her head on his shoulder, he thought he could smell the men on her clothes. It was not surprising, after all, and the readers who were enjoying his ‘Scenes’ in the Corsaire-Satan would understand that this was quite normal in Bohemia–‘those flighty birds of passage’, he had written, ‘who, out of a whim or more often out of need, one day (or rather, one night) make their nest in the garrets of the Latin Quarter and agree to stay for a few days if they can be lured with a caprice, or with ribbons.’
The little household had to live, and M. Saint-Alme was pestering him for copy. Henry served up ever more intimate slices of his life, still warm and saignant. He sold Lucile’s infidelities to the Corsaire-Satan, and became, in effect, her literary pimp. If ‘Mimi’ had stayed at home and darned his socks, the stories would have dried up. They would have been poor but happy, or, more likely, dying at the hospital. It had a curious effect on his writing. Behind the jolly scenes of garret life, he began to sketch that other world that was never mentioned in print–the world of disillusioned ‘artists’ with small, hungry imaginations, the provincial businessmen who sat alone in dance-halls, and the students who came to Paris armed with their parents’ money, wanting to while away the months of academic idleness with a housewife-prostitute-companion before returning home to impregnate the chosen virgin. He used Lucile’s ‘adventures’ to give some tactful, fleeting notion of a darker Latin Quarter, in which illegal pamphlets such as Bachelor Life in Furnished Rooms advertised cheap clinics where midwives learned their trade, ‘mechanical corsets’ guaranteed to flatten the evidence and, as a cheap alternative to infanticide, ‘breuvages avortifs’.
Of course, he could only hint at this in the newspaper, and some of the details had to be changed in the name of romantic fiction. In one of the Scenes, Mimi, having grown tired of starving in a garret, disappeared with a viscount, at about the time that the real Henry wrote to a friend, ‘My wife has gone off to get married to a big soldier who wants to slit my throat–something to which I am opposed.’ To his own surprise, he saw his flimsy heroine turning into a character of substance: ‘Her features were not without a certain delicacy and seemed to be lit gently by her clear blue eyes, but at certain moments of boredom or ill humour, they wore an expression of almost savage brutality, in which a physiognomist might have recognized the signs of deep egotism or great insensitivity.’ Rodolphe, too, was becoming alarmingly true to life: he hit his mistress when she left him and when she returned like an alley cat, purring and striking poses. In the absence of opium, violence was the drug that induced the tearful reconciliations and the long, greedy nights when Lucile was as eloquent in bed as Henry was on the page. In muted forms, he described their fights and his jealous agonies; he wrote about the rosy fingernails that lacerated his heart, and he wondered why Mimi kept returning to Rodolphe, and why he allowed her to return.
After eight months of hell, he drew up the balance sheet: six ‘Scenes of Bohemian Life’ amounting to one hundred francs, some broken ornaments and a smashed chair, a pawnshop pledge on the shelf where his poetry books had been, and a feeling that anger and jealousy were all that remained of his passionate youth.
They had said goodbye so many times that he could never remember who decided to end it once and for all. They discussed it for a day in a strange state of calm. Henry was to keep the ornaments and the chair, and Lucile would keep the ‘antique’ statuette of Homer that she had bought one day to prove that she was not entirely insensitive to literature.
They spent a last night together in bed. He turned away from her and bit his pillow. She heard him sobbing in his sleep. In the morning, she waited until he was awake. She told him that she had no plans, which he found hard to believe. When they parted, he kissed her hand and moistened it with tears. She might have let him kiss her properly if he had tried. Then she opened the door and walked down the stairs.
That evening, Champfleury took him to a restaurant, and he drank a bottle of her favourite wine. As he stared at the sweet red liquid through tear-filled eyes, he found to his surprise that her face was already beginning to merge with all the other faces he had loved.
ONE DAY AT THE end of November, sitting at the wooden table of a cabinet de lecture between a flea-ridden scholar and a concierge engrossed in a novel, she opened the Corsaire-Satan and saw the poem he had inserted in his latest ‘Scene of Bohemian Life’. He must have written it, she supposed, on the day they parted. (In fact, the poem was three years old and had been written for another woman, but it suited the occasion quite well.) By the time she left the cabinet de lecture, she knew the poem by heart.
I’ve run out of money, which means, my dear,
That we’re legally obliged to forget.
I’m so démodé, you won’t shed a tear,
Mimi, you’ll forget that we ever met.
Ah well, we had our days of happiness–
Never mind the nights. My darling, it’s true,
They didn’t last long, but that’s how it is:
The most beautiful days are the shortest too.
Let those whom God hath joined together part;
Ring down the curtain on our song and dance.
In no time at all, you’ll learn a new part,
And raise the curtain on a new romance.
THERE WAS NO new romance. Lucile would soon be turning twenty-five: it was the age at which a woman was thought to be past her prime. She posed in unheated studios for painters who needed a breast or a lower torso. She sat with her friends on the street corner; she shared their wine and sometimes their customers. She grew so desperate, she went back to the old quartier, to the smell of boiled tripe and the tapping of the cobbler’s hammer. At the flower factory, she pushed against the rubber pad that made the petals soft and lifelike. She drank a bottle of detergent and waited for the time to pass. But like a landlord with a bill for overdue rent, life refused to let her go.
Sometimes, she thought of the attic where they had sat and shivered over a last meal of bread and sardines. She remembered his jealous questions and his hand across her face. She thought of the gloves she had left in his drawer on purpose. Once, she ran into Alexandre Schanne in the street, and he told her about the new girl. Her name was Juliette: Henry apparently liked to kiss her hair, one strand at a time, until each one had been kissed. She thought that if she ever went back and found the new girl there, she’d lie down on the bed and loosen her hair, and that would be that. She pushed a hand through her thick brown mane, and said, ‘It’s lucky for him he didn’t try doing that with me or we’d have had to stay together for the rest of our lives.’
V
A garret and a hospital, 1848
EVEN IN SUMMER, the Rue Mazarine was dark and damp; in winter, it was like a crypt. Daylight was blotted out by the tenements and the dome of the Institut, which guarded the exit to the river. Henry’s new room, in the boarding house at no. 70, suited his increasingly venerable appearance: it had a straw chair that was going bald and a mirror that was going blind. The bed was not much wider than a bookshelf.
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Juliette had left to find another Romeo. The price of bread was rising, and hungry peasants were trudging in from the countryside. As usual when people were queuing outside the pawnshops, there was talk of revolution. Henry’s neighbour at the boarding house, M. Proudhon, was visited at all hours by serious men with long beards and elegant, threadbare coats.
He was lying–or rather, balancing–on the bed, wondering how to spend the five hundred francs he had unexpectedly received from the benevolent fund of the Académie Française, when there was a knock at the door.
It was not quite the Lucile he had known. He moved aside to let her pass. In her post-suicidal state, she looked tremendously appealing, as though purified by the disinfectant. Her pockmarked face had a smooth, waxy complexion. Tuberculosis had widened her blue eyes and given them an expression of childish candour.
‘I’m disturbing you,’ she said.
She told him how to arrange the bed and sent him out to buy some food. When he returned with a loaf of bread, a bottle of wine and some firewood that was still recovering from its long journey down the river, she was fast asleep and snoring.
This time, there were no arguments. Death was a third person in the room, imposing a certain false courtesy and restraint. She lay in bed, coughing into a basin, while Henry busied himself with his column for the fashion magazine and then–while workers and Bohemians fought their revolution in the name of liberty, vanity and sloth–with his reports for Count Tolstoy. He sent copies of the anarchist paper that his friends, Baudelaire, Toubin and Champfleury, had been selling nearby on the Place Saint-André-des-Arts. He supplied some ‘unofficial information’ on those ‘conceited brutes’, the proletariat, who thought that hunger was a virtue and other people’s wealth a sin. Meanwhile, Lucile was becoming smaller and more angelic by the day.