Page:The Bohemians of the Latin Quarter.djvu/13

Henri Murger was born in 1822 and was the son of a man who exercised the joint calling of tailor and doorkeeper in the Rue Saint Georges, Paris. After receiving a scanty and fragmentary education he entered a lawyer’s office, but like many another “youth foredoomed his father’s soul to cross,” thought more of scribbling stanzas than of engrossing deeds. His verses, however, gained him the patronage of M. de Jouy, the Academician. Thanks to this gentleman, he obtained the position of secretary to Count Tolstoi, a Russian nobleman, who paid him infinitely less than his coachman or cook, but who, on the other hand, does not seem to have exacted much in return for the fifty francs a month disbursed. Murger’s literary career began about 1841. His first essays were mainly poetical, but under the pressure of stern necessity he wrote whatever he could find a market for, turning out prose, to use his own expression, at the rate of eighty francs an acre, and scattering his talent in the columns of petty literary journals so shaky that they never dared announce anything as “to be continued in our next,” and even in trade periodicals. Like his own Rodolphe, he edited a fashion paper, the Moniteur de la Mode, and the Castor, an organ of the hat trade. His struggles and privations had been terrible, but his position gradually improved, especially under the influence of Champfleury, with whom he