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prominent part in Murger’s life, save as regards this name bestowed on her by him in memory of the two preceding ones. She was a blonde, named Juliette, well behaved and respectable looking. She willingly offered a cup of tea to her lover’s friends who made her cough with their tobacco smoke, but whose long discussions on art she listened to with politeness, perhaps even with interest. As by some fatality Mimi III. also died of consumption.” Some love tokens Murger always carried with him, and they were displayed on the wall of all his abodes, from the half naked garret in the Latin Quarter to his first comfortable dwelling in the Rue Notre Dame de Lorette. They consisted of a velvet mask, a woman’s gloves, and a faded bouquet. They had been Marie’s.

The Musette of Murger and the Mariette of Champfleury are modelled on one and the same person, though both writers have deviated somewhat from their original. Murger, for instance, ascribes to her vocal qualifications she did not possess. This was a trait he borrowed from Lise, the wife of Pierre Dupont, who at that time used to charm their circle with the inexhaustible store of country ditties she sang in a rather sharp but true voice. Mariette, for such was Musette’s name, was remarkably well made, and was a model highly esteemed by both painters and sculptors. Her features were not so regular, and her face acquired a mocking aspect from the fact that when she smiled the left side of her mouth was drawn up, whilst the right retained its normal position, a fact that led her friends to remark that she “squinted with her lips.” She was fully conscious of her plastic value, and was ready at the slightest provocation to reveal it. “One evening, at Lazare’s,” says Schanne, “a dozen of us were met, amongst whom was the austere Jean Journet, who had constituted himself in the name of the ‘phalanstere,” the lay apostle of virtue. The idea