Rebel Souls

by Justin Martin

  Clapp felt more at home in the temperance movement. Here, he managed to take up with a group called the Washingtonian Total Abstinence Society. This was a very new organization, founded in 1840. Even though General Washington was known to tipple, the movement took its name from him, as a show of respect. This says a lot about the Washingtonians. In this era, most temperance organizations pursued a two-pronged strategy: fight to ban alcohol so as to prevent future drinking, and let the current crop of drunkards rot. Justin Edwards, cofounder of the American Temperance Society, stated that one of his organization’s goals was to let alcoholics “die off and rid the world of an amazing evil.” By contrast, one of the tenets of the Washingtonians was “faith in man.” The group believed that drunkards could be redeemed and held out hope that it was at least possible for someone to stop drinking and return to society. Washingtonians can be rightly seen as a forerunner of Alcoholics Anonymous.

  The contours of Clapp’s character were starting to become evident. He was irreverent. He possessed a ready wit. And he was what today would be called a moral relativist, especially given his involvement with the love-the-drunkard-but-hate-the-drink Washingtonians.

  In August 1849, Clapp went to Paris to attend a three-day world peace congress. This was his first visit, and after the sessions were over, he decided to stay for a while, even though he spoke only a smattering of French. “I could say oui, but couldn’t give the native squeal even to that,” he’d later joke, and was forced at the outset to resort to “bad English—the American’s usual substitute for French.”

  Clapp chose a fortuitous time. Only one year earlier, France had experienced a revolution that started off with the best utopian intentions, but ultimately devolved into another ho-hum, bureaucracy-as-usual government. In the wake of this incomplete revolution, the boulevards of Paris still thrummed with idealism, slogans, and grand artistic schemes. The city’s cafés played host to a thriving scene, known as Bohemianism.

  The term Bohemian (Bohémien with two e’s in the original French) dates to roughly 1830. Its coinage is rooted in a misperception, namely, that the Romani people who were wandering into France during the nineteenth century were natives of Bohemia, then a central European kingdom and part of the Hapsburg Empire (today a region of the Czech Republic). It now appears that the Romani originated centuries ago in India and from there migrated through Asia and into Europe. But as a people, the Romani have always managed to sow puzzlement. In England a similar confusion about the Romani people’s origins gave rise to the term Gypsy, derived from the mistaken notion that they hailed from Egypt.

  The French notion of Bohemian contains still another layer of complication. From the outset, the word was bandied about loosely and with a kind of willful indiscriminateness. Well-to-do, establishment Parisians—especially those of a conservative political bent—applied it to the Romani, but also to anyone who looked eccentric: flamboyantly dressed artists, scruffy students, women of suspect moral standing. This attitude was rooted in a kind of xenophobia: France was under siege, from the forces of the decadent and odd, and it didn’t matter whether they came from a far-off, mystical Bohemia or from within the Republic itself.

  Parisian artists and other free-living types seized on Bohemian, appropriated it, made it their own. The word made it possible to contrast two opposing forces in society. You had your bourgeois—cautious, smug, and prosperous. And you had their opposite—Bohemians. In France, Bohemian quickly became tight-packed with cultural coding. Utter but that single word, and a vivid image unfolded.

  Clapp checked into the Hôtel Corneille in the Latin Quarter, smack in the heart of Parisian Bohemia. The Corneille had figured in a Balzac novel and had become the favored quarters for foreign travelers seeking an authentic down-and-out-in-Paris experience. In future years, the painter James Whistler would stay here, as would James Joyce. Clapp got a cheap room on the top floor; he had to walk up seven flights. The room’s furniture and other appointments were in such an advanced state of disrepair that, as Clapp put it, “Everything that had an arm, a leg, a knee, a foot, or a back to it, was more or less dislocated.” On the wall hung some caricatures of the hotel’s proprietress presenting a bill for the cost of a stay, executed in a crude hand by a previous occupant.

  Clapp made the acquaintance of some fellow guests at the Corneille, a group of Englishmen who were dabbling in assorted artistic pursuits. He accompanied several of them to a café, his very first brush with a ubiquitous institution that provided the very lifeblood of Bohemia. (Paris, circa 1849, had an estimated forty-five hundred cafés.) Clapp ordered coffee and also smoked some tobacco. Undoubtedly, Clapp had tried coffee before, and he appears to have had some firsthand familiarity with smoking as well. (Neither was forbidden in Congregationalist New England, so long as one practiced moderation.) Still, he was intrigued by his first taste of Parisian coffee, which he described as having “a consistency between a liquid and a paste. . . . It ran like molasses in the winter.” And he enjoyed his first puff of caporal, strong French tobacco, and was intrigued by the practice of smoking it in a little clay pipe.

  As a confirmed Washingtonian, however, Clapp stopped short of alcohol. According to his written reminiscence, upon being offered a drink, Clapp dutifully said, “Thank you, gentlemen, I don’t drink.”

  “Don’t drink!” was one Englishman’s response. “Nonsense, man! Surely you’ll take something.”

  But Clapp was resolute: “I’m a teetotaler.”

  “A tee-what?”

  “A teetotaler.” Clapp explained, and his companions were dumbstruck.

  “Come, now, that won’t do in this country. A teetotaler in Paris? . . . You don’t mean to drink Paris water, do you?”

  His companions may not have realized it, but for Clapp, simply spending time in a café represented a huge departure. Already, so early in his Paris sojourn, he’d strayed miles from the righteous path. Clapp’s New England demanded that every minute of every day be given over to industriousness and vigilance, reform and revival. Idle hands are the devil’s workshop. The mere act of sitting in a café with no purpose, no agenda, just sipping coffee, smoking a pipe, and whiling away the time, was decadence enough.

  On a subsequent evening, Clapp’s English companions took him to a café chantant, a different type of Paris café. (There were dozens of species of café: bistros and brasseries and cabarets; bastringues, boîtes, and mastroquets—the list goes on and on, each a subtle variation from the others.) A café chantant offers musical performances, burlesque, and dancing. Clapp’s group “secured a nice little nook of observation” and ordered coffees all around. He was intrigued to see that even though it was well into the evening, the café was full of unmarried women. It struck him that, by taking up with these Englishmen, he had fallen in with a truly “fast set.” His consorts, in turn, got a kick out of schooling Clapp about the various types of French women.

  One of Clapp’s party pointed out some nearby women, saying that they were étudiantes (translation: studentesses). He explained that the name derives “not because of their devotion to study, but because of their devotion to students.” The Latin Quarter takes its name from a university established there in the Middle Ages, where Latin was the required language. When Clapp visited, it remained a cheap section of Paris, still crawling with dirt-poor students—and studentesses. The Englishman continued: “But let me describe the studentesses: In the first place, she is what she looks to be—a fast woman. As you see, she dresses in the shabby-genteel style; hangs her bonnet over the chair and makes herself at home; burns brandy in her coffee.”

  From this point, Clapp’s new friends launched into a general discussion of other types of Parisian women, demonstrating in the process a grasp of one of those precise, and uniquely French, systems of nomenclature. There were grisettes, often young country girls who had come to Paris in search of factory work and romance. There were lorettes, a type of high-class cou
rtesan. And there were the femmes publiques, licensed prostitutes and a type of woman that one of Clapp’s friends decreed “the lowest round on the ladder.”

  “Horrible!” exclaimed Clapp. “But what are the characteristics of the lorette?”

  “The lorette belongs to the Aristocracy of Easy Virtue,” continued one of the Brits. “She is the finest-dressed woman you meet on the Boulevards, and looks down upon the étudiante in her straw bonnet and cheap finery, and the grisette in her plain cap and sixpenny calico, with haughty disdain. She resides in the quarter which takes its name, like herself, from the church of Notre Dame de Lorette, where she usually worships.”

  Throughout the discussion, one of Clapp’s newfound companions remained silent, buried in his sketch pad, rendering a French woman at a nearby table. She was someone he had pursued and been rebuffed by, leaving him heartsick. Clapp and his group eventually departed the café chantant into the Paris night, where “the air rung with shouts of dissipation and mirth.”

  If Bohemia was thriving upon Clapp’s arrival in Paris, it would soon ratchet up to a whole other level. In late November 1849, only three months after Clapp checked into the Hôtel Corneille, Paris went wild, seeming to lose its collective mind, over a particular artistic creation. In the aftermath, a kind of Bohemian frenzy swept the city.

  The unlikely catalyst was Henry Murger. For years, this centime-less writer had lived in a squalid attic room, laboring away in utter anonymity. Occasionally, he had succeeded in placing a piece in a small literary magazine, but mostly he’d been churning out pabulum for hat-making trade journals, second-rate children’s magazines, even a novelty publication printed on water-resistant paper and aimed at bathhouse patrons.

  Murger was part of a circle of artists and eccentrics who hung out at the Café Momus. Among them were an aspiring musician named Alexandre Schanne, the Desbrosses brothers—one a sculptor, the other a painter—and Marc Trapadoux, a mysterious figure who always wore the same faded frock coat and somehow managed to get by without a discernible occupation. The group was so poor that they often sat for hours at the Café Momus, sharing a single cup of coffee.

  Murger’s health was terrible. He suffered from purpura, an affliction sometimes caused by extreme malnourishment and characterized by patches of reddish discoloration on the skin. His left eye continually watered, the result of a defective lacrimal gland. Yet somehow, this sickly scribe managed to take a series of lovers, most notably Lucile Louvet. Lucile was employed in a sweatshop, where she put in punishingly long hours making artificial flowers. Her hands were forever covered in colored splotches, stains from the dyes used in her work.

  Lucile died of tuberculosis in the paupers’ wing of Hôpital de Notre Dame de Pitié, bed number 8. She was just twenty-four—or at least that was the age estimated on her death certificate. Murger didn’t even get to say good-bye. Visiting hours were on Sundays only; when the day rolled around, it was too late—Lucile had already expired.

  Murger captured the doings of his circle—its high jinks and heartbreaks—in a series of literary sketches published in Le Corsaire-Satan, an underground journal. He altered some details, and pumped up a few episodes for effect, but the sketches were a fairly faithful chronicle of his life and the lives of his companions. He did change the names, though. Murger became the main character, Rodolphe; Lucile was Mimi. The mysterious Trapadoux was an inspiration for Colline. But Le Corsaire-Satan was a fairly obscure journal, and Murger’s sketches failed to make much of an impact.

  That all changed after Murger was approached by Théodore Barrière, a successful playwright who had the idea of collaborating on a theatrical version. Their first meeting was in Murger’s cramped quarters, and Murger insisted on remaining in bed. Having lent his only pair of trousers to a friend, he thought it best to remain under the covers. From this inauspicious beginning, a dramatic collaboration was born, and the pair crafted a five-act play. Barrière brought professional polish and rearranged the sequence so that certain events would pack a dramatic wallop. A musical score was also added, courtesy of composer Pierre-Julien Nargeot. Even so, the completed work features an extraordinarily free-form plot, particularly by the standards of the day. Mostly, the action consists of a group of artists hanging around, talking, fighting, and scrounging for money. It’s an unusual play, but also one that stayed true to the random spirit of Murger’s original sketches and to the way of life that inspired them.

  La vie de Bohème premiered on November 22, 1849, at the Théâtre des Variétés. It was an instant sensation. “The public is being moved as it has not for a long time,” raved the Journal des Débats. “Everything is, so to speak, observed, felt and suffered,” wrote another reviewer, adding, “One can tell that this work was lived before it was written.” Night after night, the play performed to sold-out houses. Audiences were fascinated by its seeming verisimilitude. Charles Perey, the actor who played the impoverished musician Schaunard, had made a point of meeting with his character’s real-life counterpart, Alexandre Schanne. Perey had studied Schanne’s mannerisms, even borrowing his clay pipe for the production. Despite the specific subject matter, the play achieved a kind of universality. In the first act, for example, a character shouts, “La Bohème, c’est nous” (We are Bohemia). Most of all, the play succeeded in moving audiences, particularly in the famous closing scene, when Rodolphe learns that Mimi has died and wails, “Oh, my youth, it is you that is being buried!”

  For some time, Bohemianism had been a fixture of Parisian life. But the play succeeded as nothing had before in defining its myriad compass points: intense passion for art; more talk of art than actual making of art; cafés, strong coffee, stronger alcohol; a near-pathological fear of conventionality and a charming insouciance in the face of impending disaster; no money, no prospects, no qualms about romance—the more and messier the entanglements, the better; and, most vividly, early tragic death, often hastened by damp, chilly garret conditions, typically from tuberculosis.

  Murger and Barrière’s play would remain a work of enduring appeal. In 1896 Puccini adapted it for his classic opera, La Bohème. More recently, it furnished the basis for Rent, the long-running Broadway play. Even though Rent takes place in a different century and a different setting—New York’s East Village at the height of the AIDS crisis—it retains many elements of the original work. Among other things, Rent holds on to the names of a couple of Murger’s most beloved characters, Collins and Mimi.

  There is no evidence that Clapp attended La vie de Bohème during its landmark Paris run. What is clear, however, is that he dove ever more deeply into Bohemianism, becoming totally immersed in the mania that swept the city in the play’s aftermath.

  Clapp decided to stay in Paris indefinitely. He earned a small income by contributing articles to London papers. He didn’t require much, as he was paying just fifteen francs (then three dollars) a month for his room at the Corneille. Clapp drifted away from the group of Englishmen who had provided him his entrée into Paris Bohemianism. Over time they started to look to him like mere tourists, and he was seeking a deeper experience.

  Clapp began hanging out at a café near the Luxembourg Gardens, always careful to select a table far from the orchestra, where he could overhear people talking in their native language. It was a wise gambit, for, as Clapp observed, the French were utterly “addicted to talk.”

  He became such a regular that he soon achieved that highest of café honors: the table where he sat became his table. The waiters all knew him; they brought him coffee without his even having to ask. The other patrons grew friendly as well and began to visit him at his table. Clapp learned to speak French so fluently, he claimed, that he had to convince natives that he was actually a Yankee. He took up smoking in earnest, even bought his own clay pipe.

  And he began to drink. Whiskey proved his liquor of choice. This was a drastic turnabout, particularly for a confirmed teetotaler, and afterward Clapp would alw
ays attempt to wave away his decision with humor. “Temperance secured for us all the right not to drink. Meanwhile, it left the right to drink intact” was a favorite wisecrack. Clapp also began spending time in the company of young women. He took a special liking to one named Octavie. She was about twenty, hailed from the provinces, and could neither read nor write. But Clapp found her a challenging conversationalist with “more good sense than could be distilled out of a dozen libraries.” He added, “Her mind was not lumbered with other people’s thoughts. . . . The keenness of such a woman was not to be eluded.”

  Clapp—in thrall to whiskey and Octavie—fell utterly in love with Paris. “There was a charm about the beautiful city which was inconceivable,” he would recall. Paris was so specific. It was so different from anything he’d known before. Yet it felt so right. For Clapp, the boulevards, the bridges, the Seine, even the early-morning yells of milkmaids hocking their goods, all became familiar. As he put it, “A strange home-feeling took possession of me.”

  Clapp remained in Paris for more than three years. When he finally returned to America late in 1853, it was to New York, not the New England of his previous life, and he was hell-bent on re-creating la vie Bohème that had transformed him so completely.

  2: A Long Table in a Vaulted Room

  ON MOVING TO NEW YORK, Clapp was able to settle in remarkably quickly. This felt like a spiritual home, as surely as Paris had before. New York’s vastness, jumble, and, most of all, its veil of anonymity made the city a welcome departure from the confining Puritan world of his early years. Clapp managed to get piecemeal work as a journalist and also did some translation, French to English.

  As he settled into the life of the city, Clapp held fast to his idea of bringing Bohemia to America. In 1856 he happened upon a promising venue for this experiment: Pfaff’s Restaurant and Lager Bier Saloon. For Clapp’s earliest visits, the establishment may have been located elsewhere on Broadway, but it soon settled into its famous spot, in the basement at No. 647, a few doors north of Bleecker Street.