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though it was a standing jest that whilst he sallied out day after day he never hit anything. Indeed, he wrote to a friend when inviting him down, “There are pheasants. I will introduce you to an old cock whom I have missed five times. Indeed, he knows me, and now does not trouble himself to take flight at my passage.” Winter he described as “a beastly time, when the sun himself has a red nose.” His early death was in a great measure due to a neglect of the regimen prescribed by the doctors, for as he said: “When I am ill I treat my illnesses with indifference and cure them by contempt.” To the last, however, he retained his cheerfulness, and when in the hospital observed to one of his friends, “I am so weak that even a fly might safely challenge me.”

The Bohemians, wild and eccentric as the work may appear, is essentially true to Nature. It is a series of sketches of real life. The experiences related are actual ones, the characters existed and can be readily identified. Many writers have put their heart into their work, but Murger put his life. It was when living with Champfleury in the Rue de Vaugirard that, under the influence of the author of the Bourgeois de Molinchard, he began to abandon the Muses and devote himself to prose; it was during this period that the first germs of the book that was to render him famous were deposited in his mind. The scenes which he has embellished in describing he was present at, the actors who take part in them and whose physiognomy his pen has somewhat poetized he knew and spoke of.

Rodolphe is Murger himself. As Théodore de Banville has observed, though with some exaggeration, “That which was done by Rodolphe during the month that he was Mademoiselle Mimi’s neighbor has had nothing analogous to it perhaps since literature has existed. He passed his days in composing poems and sketching out the plots of