many men do know how to mend their own clothes in their leisure

moments.

'On the morning of the 14th Monsieur Crédit returned. Monsieur Crédit pays a visit to the grocer, to the tobacconist, to the coalchandler; he is fairly received, I may say well, by the daughter of the grocer, for you accompanied him. Did Monsieur Crédit die about the 17th, for I find written under receipts" frock-coat three francs"? Those three francs came from the Mont de Piété-the Mont sans Piété, as I would call the brute, whose agents seem bent upon our humiliation. Yes, it was my only frock-coat that went, and that to lend half what I raised on it for the insatiable G―.

On the 19th we sold some books-fortune favoured us, and we boiled the pot with a fine fowl and plenty of bay leaves.

'Monsieur Crédit seems to continue his circuit in search of supplies with a dignified composure. He shows himself daily up to the 1st December, when, to the universal astonishment, he pays his debts. How I regret to see this little register limited to one month-only that one November! Why not more? If we had only continued, there might have been so many landmarks to survey the distances of our Youth.

Happy time! when from our little balcony we could catch one tree of all the garden of the Luxembourg, and that by leaning over.'

The Scènes de la Vie de Bohème' and 'Les Buveurs d'Eau' are the fruits of this and similar experience. The first presents a group of Bohemians accidentally brought together and sharing in the happy brotherhood, the occasional luxury, and the habitual indigence; consoling each other's vanity in the frequent failures of their art, and exaggerating each rare success into fortune and fame. But the charm of the Society was an unfailing gaiety, making necessity a storehouse of ingenious mirth, looking upon life as a pantomime, in which the main object is to secure the part of Harlequin, and regarding their bitterest enemies in no worse light than Clown and Pantaloon. Within the class of antagonists to Bohemian happiness must be included all those respectable persons whose supply, sooner or later, is followed by demand, and though the right-minded reader will recognise the abstract justice of their claim, yet it is difficult for him not to rejoice in their frequent discomfiture.

The Scènes de la Vie de Bohème' open with Schaumard, a musician whose chief work is a symphony descriptive of 'the influence of the colour blue on art,' seated on the side of his bed, with a spangled pink petticoat for a dressing-gown, meditating on the means of paying his landlord seventy-five francs before twelve o'clock. He tries to compose a ballad, but the multiplication-table haunts him till he sets it to music. He looks over the register in which he has alphabetically noted down all his friends and acquaintances, with

the

the sum that they might reasonably be required to lend to a brother in difficulty opposite each name: when the maximum of any one had been exceeded, he had always scrupulously borrowed from some other to pay off the excess. At this moment,

alas! he finds only three persons who have not paid the full tax, and one of them lives far in the suburbs. But he starts on the hopeless crusade, and in the mean time, at noon, the 'propriétaire' arrives, and begins fuming at the departure of his lodger. In a few moments an orderly from the War-office rides up; the 'propriétaire,' in an agony of delight, exclaims to the porter that "it is clearly his nomination to the Legion of Honour,' but instead it is the announcement from Schaumard that better times will come for France and for himself, and that at present it is impossible for him to pay one sou; and he takes the opportunity of writing this at the desk of a clerk of his acquaintance, and forwarding it by the soldier, who is going that way.' As the day advances Schaumard betakes himself to a café, where he has a small credit, and there cultivates an intimacy with the philosopher Colline, who teaches all the sciences and spends his pay in buying odd volumes on the quays, and with Rodolphe, the editor of the Castor, ou l'Echarpe d'Iris.' After a jovial evening, Schaumard, forgetful of the circumstances of his domicile, invites his friends to supper, and finds to his astonishment his room let meublé' to the painter Marcel, whose original picture of the Passage de la Mer Rouge' had been thrice rejected by the jury of the 'Salon,' before whom it had successively appeared as Passage du Rubicon' and 'Passage de la Bérésine' (by the transformation of Moses into Cæsar and Napoleon) -the indomitable artist declaring that the following season it should appear as the 'Passage des Panoramas'-but meanwhile it is purchased by a 'marchand de comestibles,' who inserts a steamer, and hangs it up before his shop as Port de Marseilles.' Schaumard claims the apartment; Marcel recognises his rights over the furniture, and proposes to pay the arrears and set up a united household, which arrangement is consecrated by a splendid orgie.

Can we compress, in this colourless fashion, the 'chasse' of Rodolphe, the man of letters, after five francs, absolutely necessary for him to treat to the 'Grands-Eaux de Versailles' a brilliant conquest he had just achieved? He has five hours to get them in-twenty sous per hour; and his first visit falls on an influential critic, who is in an agony for an article. You saw the new piece at the Odéon yesterday?' 'I am the public of the Odéon.'

Do you remember the incidents?' Like a creditor.''Can you write me an analysis?' 'In a moment'—and he does

it. 'It is too short.' 'Put in some dashes and your criticism.' -'I have no time for any criticism, and it's too short if I had: put in an adjective every three words.'- Would n't it be better for you to appreciate the piece?' 'You can have my opinions on Tragedy; but I have printed them three times.'-' What does that matter? there is nothing new but virtue; lend me forty lines,' 'Here goes,' says Rodolphe, adding to himself 'he must give me five francs for this.'-'Admirable,' says the critic; 'but I still want two columns; have you any paradoxes?' 'I've a few, but not my own: I paid a poor friend fifty centimes a piece for them;' soliloquising, that will be ten francs-they should be as dear as partridges.' They take up thirty lines, and, with the addition of the touching sentiment-'It is only at the galleys that one really tests the honesty of mankind,' the article is complete. But the critic has not a farthing in the house, and poor Rodolphe is glad to borrow two francs on a Bossuet and a bust of Odillon Barrot which he carries off. For the remaining three francs, consult the original.

The Bohemians have a club at a certain restaurant, where their conversation drives the garçon into idiotcy in the flower of his youth. After some weeks the maître presents a formal remonstrance of several articles against their proceedings, and demands redress. They have forced him to take in a paper which nobody reads, by always hallooing, 'Le Castor, le Castor !' There is only one trictrac, and when any one wants it they cry, Le trictrac est en lecture.' M. Marcel has brought his easel, and M. Schaumard his piano, into the salon, and placarded the window with Cours gratuit de Musique vocale et instrumentale, à l'usage des deux sexes.' They bring a machine and make their own coffee, on the ridiculous pretext that they cannot countenance an immoral connexion between mocha and chicory, and thus discredit the establishment. content with having destroyed the intellect of the garçon, they have corrupted the unhappy boy to the extent that he has addressed some passionate verses to the impeccable matron who presides at the comptoir; and for these and other reasons the Society is requested to transfer its revolutionary manners to another locality. Apologies and promises heal the breach; and on Christmas Eve, being accidentally without any money whatever, they propose to have a banquet that shall cost a hundred thousand francs, and have just entered on that speculation when they meet a young man of property, whose sole object in life is to become a citizen of Bohemia, and who begs humbly to be permitted to pay their bill.

Not

The more private arrangements are equally interesting. One

of

of the friends is asked to dine with a député; the habit noir (it is blue), which belongs to one of the company, and serves for all, is gone to be mended. What is to be done? The scene is at Marcel's a respectable citizen arrives to have his portrait taken; the Roman costume is recommended, and he is invested with a robe-de-chambre, while the invited guest offers to hang up the coat in an ante-room, but puts it on and goes off with it. The pretexts by which the bourgeois is detained till the guest returns are of the highest genius, and only paralleled by the contrivance recounted in another story, where two friends get wet out shooting, and the host they are visiting invites them to change their dress, and come to dinner; having no change of clothes, they dry what they have on, and then, each assuming the other's garments, they literally obey the injunction, and produce the impression that they are somehow different from what they were before, which is quite satisfactory.

The grisette naturally has her place in this volume. 'Moitié abeilles, moitié cigales,' as Mürger draws them-their merry industry, their facile pleasures, their personal devotion, and their endurance of everything but unkindness, has the additional value of an historical picture, now that Paris knows them no more, and that such a race of Bohemian womanhood is only to be found in Bordeaux and some other southern cities. Mimi urging Rodolphe to write her a gown, and tiring him out to add to it so many sentences of breadth and so many flounces of peroration; and Francine confounding the cold of disease with the want of external warmth, and setting her heart on a muff, which the selfprivation of her friend procures only in time for her to die and be buried in-are acquaintances that are not easily forgotten. But the 'Mademoiselle Mariette' of Champfleury remains the authentic chronicle of the Life and Fall of the Grisette, and may take rank in French fiction with Manon Lescaut.

It is in this story that Champfleury introduces the following account of a Bohemian journal, which must have been a formidable rival to the 'Castor,' and is a good specimen of the more serious occupations of the fraternity. We recommend this description of editorial management to the authorities of every similar enterprise :

'This journal was in the hands of an old man, who had passed all his life in similar undertakings. Though sixty years of age, he contrived to surround himself with fresh and unused talent-to persuade others to spend their youth and their genius for his secret profit.

"The old "Saint-Charmay" had preserved the literary habits of the Restoration, but he admitted the new forms of intellectual activity which come up every ten years. And the body of young men who thus

started

started in literature were able to give the paper an original colour that made it a puissance for the moment.

'Mons. de Saint-Charmay employed many means to hold in and master these fervent youths. One was, to pay them very low salaries, that they might not have time for idleness. Those who produced much were paid no more than those who produced little, the articles of both being mysteriously stored up in the red morocco portfolio with which the editor walked up and down the Boulevards, convinced he was taken for a Minister on his way to the Chambers.

'Another method was to detail the great deeds of the celebrities that had passed through the hands of Mons. de Saint-Charmay on their road to honours, office, and wealth. It was also his habit to seem entirely to despise his contributors, to treat them with insolence and brutality, and to make them believe that, once out of his magic circle, there was no hope for them with any other journal.

'Seldom had there been seen such an assemblage of youngsters, meeting there from the most opposite directions, with the most different and conflicting ideas. As they all agreed pretty well on the demolition of the present, they formed a new school for the demolition of the future. Each looked upon himself as the chief of a literary movement to come; some seasoning their literature with those political notions which ten years afterwards brought on the Revolution; others wrote on every subject with indiscriminating levity and ridicule. There were boys who, with a logical facility, anonymously attacked the greatest poets, stinging them with perfidious triplets and venomous stanzas. There were idolaters who only knew one man in the world, and never put their pen to paper except to talk of Him; there were the disappointed, who criticised everything; there were young intriguers, who made their way everywhere through the influence of the paper-acolytes of the painters, poets, and actors, whom they were never tired of incensing ; there were the cleverest fellows, and some who could not spell. There were very many besides who did not know French, including Russians, Italians, Germans, and Poles, who brought useful material to the workshop, but difficult to make up, and more difficult to mend. There were Frenchmen who wrote worse than the Germans; there were men about town, lawyers, ladies of fashion, members of the jockey-club, little attachés who sent little notes that looked important, and were meant to increase the importance of the author.

'It was a notable part of Mons. de Saint-Charmay's system to allow no personal friendship to interfere in his journal. He admitted the most violent attacks on any celebrity, but he did not approve of enthusiasm. Each contributor was obliged to send in at least ten "crushing' articles before he could get inserted one agreeable to anybody; the writer, who anticipated some social advantage from the favourable article, impatiently awaited the day of its appearance, but the next morning his jealous colleagues generally contrived to get up something so insulting to the object of the laudation, that the previous panegyric only served to irritate him still more against his intentional benefactor. The same plan was acted upon with regard to the new social schools,

which