Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris (14 page)

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.

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:

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:

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

N
EXT 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:

(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.