Page:The Bohemians of the Latin Quarter.djvu/24

gether several times at the masked balls at the Opera. She was a frail, delicate looking woman with a pale complexion and blue eyes. As to the girl who was his chief model for the Mimi of The Bohemians, and whose real name was Lucile, Murger’s own description of her may be supplemented by Théodore de Banville’s. “The real Mimi was one of those sickly Parisian flowers that are born and grow up in the shade without a ray of sunlight, and who afterwards go mad with joy, when at length they see the sun one day at Marlotte or at Bougival. Very pale, with dead white skin, somewhat faded looking chestnut hair and bluish-grey eyes, one saw that she had suffered with resignation, that poverty with a poet seemed to her paradise.” Both of these descriptions are over eulogistic, for Murger and De Banville saw Mimi with artists’ eyes and through spectacles washed with the waters of youth. Mimi was indeed a sickly plant grown up in the shade, a Parisienne of the Faubourgs, and if her face at times wore an angelic expression, she was none the less devoid of all moral sense. She was a shameless little hussy. When Murger’s friends would urge on her the decency of at least keeping up appearances and giving apparently valid excuses for a night spent away from the lodging-house in the Rue des Canettes where she was living with him, she would only laugh. She seemed to experience pleasure in keeping a man of superior intellect chained to her feet and mad with jealousy. Her end was a lamentable one. She died of phthisis at the hospital, for M. Benoit would not allow a death in his house, and Murger not having been informed in time could not claim her body, which according to rule went to the dissecting-room. This incident is connected with that of the muff of Francine. The latter personage never existed, and the muff was really a dress promised to Mimi. Schanne adds that there was a third Mimi who did not play a very