Page:The Bohemians of the Latin Quarter.djvu/27

approaching the instrument in order to be nearer the instrumentalist, she ventured to ask for a few notes to accompany a ballad she knew. This featherless linnet was named Louisette, and was never called Phémie save in Murger’s book. Why now the surname of ‘Teinturière’ under which she is known in story? I will tell you. Louisette worked all day at an artificial flower maker’s in the Rue Saint Denis. She was a ‘dipper,’ that is to say, that having to dye the materials used in imitating foliage her hands were continually of the brightest green. She was a plump little woman, with blue eyes, despite her dark hair. Her nose was saucy, her mouth laughing, and behind teeth, as white as if they were false, lay hid the voice of a songstress. She was devoid of all instruction, but had the spirit of repartee of a Parisian street Arab. She was indeed so turbulent and foul-mouthed that she was often caught slandering the boys in the street in their own language, and having no regard for the dignity of her sex, would ride behind carriages like these youngsters.” She also seems, as we learn from Alfred Delorme, “to have gone to and fro from the barracks to the studio, from the Carbineers to Schaunard, and from Schaunard to the Chasseurs de Vincennes.” Hence, as Schanne remarks, “All the same when Murger speaks of Phémie Teinturière as ‘the idol of Schaunard,’ I think he goes a little too far.”

Places as well as persons are copied from nature. The Café Momus was a real establishment, and has been immortalized in fiction by Champfleury as well as by Murger. Schanne writes of it as follows: “The Café Momus was located at No. 15 of the silent and gloomy Rue des Prêtres Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois. The house still stands, but now shelters other industries. Murger and his friends preferred the upstairs room where smoking was allowed. There they were to some extent private and free from in-