Page:The Bohemians of the Latin Quarter.djvu/19

vanished, he has crumbled to dust with his old frock-coat and his boots with three rows of port-holes like a ship of war. He died an owl to resuscitate a phœnix. What a fine Latin verse that would make I feel sure. Ah! it is so, my dear fellow. At this hour the high and powerful Lord Viscount de la Tour d’Auvergne^[1] is dazzling. Passers-by draw aside on his passage, beggars ask him for alms and he gives them a franc, women do not ask him for anything and nevertheless he wafts them a smile—and what a smile! Such, oh! great man, is my portion, and I conclude from it that life is a fine thing. Now you will no doubt ask whence comes the cloud charged with five franc pieces that has broken over my head. This hurricane comes from the North, it is a magnificent aurora borealis. My employer has advanced me three hundred and fifty francs at once. Judge of my jubilation when this stunning news reached me, I quivered from your late cravat down to my late shoes. I ran at once to cash my draft on Rothschild, from there to the library, from there to the tailor, from there to the restaurant, from there to the theatre, from there to the café, from there home, where I plunged into new sheets and an atmosphere of perfumed smoke, and where I dreamed that I was the Emperor of Morocco and was marrying the Bank of France.” Six weeks later Murger was in the hospital with a second attack of purpura.

Schaunard is Alexandre Schanne, “the sole survivor of the quatuor Murger ” when he published his memoirs at the beginning of last year (1887), a few months only before his death. He was the son of a toy-maker in the Rue aux Ours, and was at first destined for an artistic career, becoming a pupil of Léon Coignet. Champfleury, however, paints him as “quitting the easel for the piano and