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be taken away to Normandy. Nothing more was ever known. But with all this Murger remained in a tail-coat, and was thus condemned to show himself in this ceremonious get-up under the most commonplace circumstances of life, such as buying four sous’ worth of tobacco or taking a cassis and water at Trousseville’s drinking-shop.”

The incident of the piano has also some foundation. Schanne was living with the painter, Tony de Bergue, in the Rue du Petit Lion Sauveur, when one day the commissary of police sent for him. An opposite neighbor, who was a Greek professor, had lodged a complaint about his piano-playing. The commissary read the regulations, which may be just but are very severe, and told him that he was obliged to consider him as carrying on a “noisy calling.” He therefore duly warned him that his “noise” must not begin before daylight in winter, and six in the morning in summer, and must cease at ten at night. This was all very well, but the musician felt that he could not regale his enemy with such pieces as the Dernière Pensée de Weber. He resolved to worry him by practicing nothing but scales. Tenacious in his rancor, he kept this up for months. Sometimes the exasperated professor would throw up his window and vociferate insults in Greek but without effect, and when Schanne decided to put an end to the infliction he found for his own part that his fingers had acquired an agility previously lacking to them.

Nor is the desperate poverty in any way exaggerated. The sufferings of Murger and his fellows, especially of the Water-drinkers, are hardly to be imagined. In a work jointly written by three members of that society, Pierre Tournachon, better known as Nadar, Adrien Lelioux, and Léon Noël, some harrowing details are given. One poor fellow lived a week on some raw potatoes sent him up from the country by his mother, having no fire to cook