Scenes of Bohemian Life

By Henry Murger

This bookis a new translation of Henry Murger’s influential Scènes de la vie de bohème, first published in French in 1851. The book recounts the lives of a bohemian group of creative young people as they fall in and out of love, endure cold and hunger, enjoy drunken parties, see their friends suffer and die of poverty, and finally emerge as mature artists. The book's publication soon inspired many (mostly young) people to seek out a bohemian life in Paris and other cities around the world. Not only did it inspire people at the time to change their lives, it also inspired Puccini’s beloved opera La Bohème(1896) and, a hundred years later, Jonathan Larson’s phenomenally successful Rent (1996). Few works of literature have had such a social impact. Bohemian cultures and subcultures have been with us ever since and Murger’s book remains an engaging and satisfying work of literature.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Oct 3, 2023
• ISBN: 9781839988813

Book preview

Scenes of Bohemian Life

Scenes of Bohemian Life

Henry Murger

Translated and Edited by Robert Holton

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2023

by ANTHEM PRESS

75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK

or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

English translation and editorial material © 2023 by Robert Holton

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023938583

A catalog record for this book has been requested.

ISBN-13: 978-1-83998-880-6 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-83998-880-0 (Hbk)

Cover Credit: Image Le Désespéré (1843-1845) by Gustave Courbet

This title is also available as an e-book.

This book is for Barbara Young.

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1 How The Bohemian Society Was Established

Chapter 2 A Gift from the Gods

Chapter 3 Love at Lent

Chapter 4 Ali-Rodolphe, or A Turk by Necessity

Chapter 5 Charlemagne’s Coin

Chapter 6 Mademoiselle Musette

Chapter 7 The Sands of Pactolus

Chapter 8 What Five Francs Can Cost

Chapter 9 Polar Violets

Chapter 10  The Cape of Storms

Chapter 11  A Bohemian Café

Chapter 12  A Reception in Bohemia

Chapter 13  The Housewarming Party

Chapter 14  Mademoiselle Mimi

Chapter 15  Donec Gratus

Chapter 16  The Passage of the Red Sea

Chapter 17  The Graces Adorned

Chapter 18  Francine’s Muff

Chapter 19  Musette’s Whims

Chapter 20  Mimi’S Fine Feathers

Chapter 21  Romeo and Juliet

Chapter 22  Epilogue to Love

Chapter 23  Only Young Once

Appendix: Murger’s Preface

Notes

Introduction

… bohemia does not and cannot exist except in Paris.

(Murger’s Preface page 228)

Most English-speaking readers, if they have heard of Henry Murger at all, will associate the name with Giacomo Puccini’s beloved opera La Bohème or perhaps with Jonathan Larson’s Broadway hit Rent. But despite the fact that these hugely popular works are adapted from Murger’s 1851 Scènes de la vie de bohème (Scenes of Bohemian Life), Murger and his work are not well known and his book, unfortunately, has largely fallen into obscurity. Audiences might laugh with the bohemians as their exuberance and creative energy run up against middle-class resistance on stage and screen, they might warm to the famous love scenes that challenge the strictures of conventional sexual codes, and they might even shed a tear as Mimi lies dying in La Bohème or in Rent (almost). But for decades, Murger’s book, the source of those scenes and a starting point for the many and varied bohemian subcultures that have sprung up ever since, has remained largely unread, in English at least. It is even included in a 2016 digital archive whose URL is forgottenbooks.com. Most major urban centers have a bohemian district of some description, but few of the people who live, work or play there will be aware of the role that Murger and his book played in the development of these spaces.

It hasn’t always been this way. By the early twentieth century, several English translations were available, a highly unusual response suggesting the remarkable level of interest the book had provoked. One American translation, for example, began to appear serially in The Knickerbocker in 1853, only two years after its publication in France, and at least six English translations were published over the next few decades. The most recent (Cameron) was published in 1949 and, while reprinted in 1960, it has long been out of print. For one reason or another, those translations have not aged well, are not easily available and no longer provide contemporary readers with a satisfying reading experience.¹

In France, on the other hand, attention to Murger and his work has not only continued but increased as well. In the decades following its initial publication, new editions proliferated, numerous memoirs were published by his friends documenting their time together, and biographies, critiques and appreciations multiplied. Murger was awarded France’s Legion of Honor and, when he died in 1861 at only 38 years of age, his state funeral was attended by as many as 2,000 people, including a number of the most prominent figures in French culture as well as crowds of bohemians who came to pay their respects to the writer who, more than any other, defined that term. In 1895, more than 30 years after his death, a large stone monument to Murger, including a bust and flowers cast in bronze, was erected in the Luxembourg Gardens, paid for by hundreds of private contributions. While there was a lessening of interest through the mid-twentieth century, carefully edited new editions of Scènes de la vie de bohème appeared in 1988 (Chotard) and again in 2012 (Berthelot). Bohèmes, a large and highly acclaimed art exhibition opened at the Grand Palais in Paris in 2012, and a fascinating 1,440-page anthology of French bohemian writing (Les Bohèmes 1840-1870 Écrivains—Journalistes—Artistes) appeared that same year. While Murger is a central presence in the latter, the idea of bohemia that he helped shape also influenced much of the artwork on display at the former.

Murger grew up in poverty. His father was a concierge and tailor who deplored his son’s desire to be a writer, an ambition that must have seemed foolish and hopeless. His mother was more understanding, but his working-class parents had neither the education nor the money to lend him any support. Nevertheless, despite leaving school at 15 at a time when literature was the domain of the well-educated, he saw himself first and foremost as a poet and his ambitions as a serious writer lay in that direction. When he wrote the stories that make up this book, he was living in precisely the kind of dire, hand-to-mouth poverty they describe and he was paid very little for them. Written without lofty literary ambitions or pretensions, they were based very closely on his own life at the time and on the lives of his penniless friends, a group that included Charles Baudelaire, who became one of France’s greatest poets, Nadar, one of the founders of photography, Gustave Courbet, one of the most important painters of the time, and Champfleury, a writer and critic who was one of the models for Marcel. Champfleury’s tempestuous relationship with Marie-Christine Roux provided the basis for the love story of Marcel and Musette. Even such details as the party Musette holds as she’s being evicted and her belongings put out on the street or the highly unlikely circumstances of Mimi’s death (based on Lucile Louvet’s death) reflect actual events. Yet the stories had the power to invoke such a powerful sense of identification that some readers’ lives were changed as more and more people became (or were tempted to become) bohemian. Literary audiences trained in the classics, critics and many established literary figures of the time (and subsequently) disparaged them for failing to be something they were never intended to be: High Art—a category with a very clear standing in the nineteenth century. Still, that very accessibility contributed to their popularity and to the remarkable impact they have had at many levels of modern culture.

The stories that comprise Murger’s book attracted little attention when they first appeared between 1845 and 1849 in Le Corsaire-Satan, a small Paris journal Murger worked for that focused on literary and theatrical news, satire and gossip. At first, they had a very limited readership made up largely of his bohemian friends, some of whom appeared thinly disguised as the central characters. He and Théodore Barrière then adapted the stories for musical theater—La Vie de Bohème—and, when it opened in 1849, the show was a huge and immediate success, making Murger and la vie bohème itself famous. The term bohemian was so new to many theatergoers that, as Jerrold Seigel observes, some of the play’s first reviewers felt it necessary to explain to their readers what bohemia was and where in Paris it might be found (61). The stories were soon collected into an even more successful book—Scènes de la vie de bohème (1851)—and Murger’s reputation was firmly established. More importantly, perhaps, the idea of bohemia was also firmly established in public consciousness more or less as it continues to this day: groups of (mostly) artistic and intellectual (mostly) young people who scorn convention, prioritize creativity, endure poverty and live on the edge where pleasures and dangers are equally present.

It would be an understatement to say that the idea caught on quickly both in France and elsewhere. Most of Murger’s readers were satisfied with the vicarious experience of bohemia the stories provided, much as audiences for Puccini’s La Bohème or Larson’s Rent may immerse themselves thoroughly in the performance but return to their regular lives when the curtain falls, feeling no serious inclination to radically transform themselves. But for some who saw the play or read the book, the appeal was stronger and more directly personal. Murger’s stories seemed to offer a powerful new sense of possibility, an alternative way of life outside the strictures of nineteenth-century middle-class duty and respectability. In fact, the book constituted a kind of how-to manual for (mostly male) young people who were able to imagine themselves living like Murger’s characters, lives that somehow combined carefree zany non-conformity with love and sexual freedom, intense but meaningful suffering and artistic self-expression. With this goal in mind, they flocked to Paris’ emerging bohemian neighborhoods and cafes in large numbers. A few years later, a novel by the Goncourt Brothers (who did not approve of Murger’s bohemia) described the allure this way:

Anatole was called by art much less than he was attracted to the artist’s life. He dreamt of the artist’s studio. He aspired to it with a schoolboy’s imaginings and the appetites of his nature. He saw in it those horizons of Bohemia which enchant from a distance: the novel of Poverty, the shedding of bonds and rules, a life of freedom, indiscipline and disorder, every day filled with accident, adventure and the unexpected, an escape from the tidy, orderly household, from the family and its tedious Sundays and the jeering of the bourgeois, the voluptuous mystery of the female model. Work that entails no effort, the right to wear fancy dress all year, a sort of unending carnival; such were the images and temptations which arose for him from the austere pursuit of art. (in Bourdieu 66)

In fact, the image of bohemia Murger’s work conjured into being in the mid-1800s drew people to Paris in such great numbers, lured by the mystique of bohemian life and a desire to experience it, that the previously undesirable and impoverished neighborhoods bohemians could afford began to become more fashionable, prices rose and questions were raised about who were the real bohemians and which were the real bohemian cafes.

Murger, who was right about many things, doesn’t provide an explanation for his astonishingly wrong claim in the epigraph above that bohemia is impossible anywhere other than Paris. Despite this pronouncement, outposts of bohemia began to spring into existence across Europe and beyond almost immediately after his book was published. Now, nearly two centuries later, bohemian life—and all those questions about its authenticity and the gentrification that often follow in its wake—continues to thrive, not only in Paris, as Murger claimed, but in many other parts of the world as well. People who may never have heard of Murger, much less read his book, nonetheless live lives that bear the imprint of his work. The word may change with the generations, but bohemians, beats, hippies, hipsters, punks, they have all been touched by the garrets and cafes, parties and love affairs of Murger’s stories. And the same process, in which a neighborhood can undergo a bohemian transition from abject destitution to trendy destination in a remarkably short time, has been reenacted many times and continues undiminished to this day. In fact, an extensive literature now exists analyzing the positive economic impact of bohemia on the cities in which they are located—an irony that would not have been lost on Murger and his impoverished friends. The Geography of Cool, published in The Economist in 2000, offered a step-by-step guide to neighborhood bohemianization and the economic benefits to be garnered from attracting young people who are at their penniless but creative best. And since then, Richard Florida is only one of the many recent economists, sociologists, business management experts and urban planners to note the importance of bohemia to the creation of a thriving city and a strong urban economy. Florida even created a statistical Bohemian Index to calculate the relative bohemian quotient of major North American cities and the positive impact bohemian diversity and creativity (58) has on investment and on innovative industries.

Another important study, Richard Lloyd’s Neo-Bohemia, carefully documents the transformation of Wicker Park, an area of Chicago once known for crime and poverty before bohemia arrived in the 1990s. Now it is known more for boutiques, restaurants and pricey real estate. Lloyd refers explicitly to Murger several times in his study, and, he asserts, I take this continuity seriously (12). This kind of acknowledgment is not unusual: The image of bohemia that had the greatest impact on future generations of artists, according to a 2019 study of the Philadelphia art scene, was the one promoted by Henri Murger (Moss et al 19). It would not be difficult to adduce many more examples of studies referring to Murger’s central place in a social phenomenon that has remained important for almost two centuries, which makes it all the more surprising that a modern English translation has long been unavailable.

One crucial reason for the book’s success with readers at the time and its ongoing (albeit under-acknowledged) cultural influence is its very deliberate reshaping of the concept of bohemia itself. Murger didn’t invent it; the term had been around for decades, initially as a pejorative name applied to Roma people, who were mistakenly thought to have come from Bohemia in eastern Europe and who were also known as Gypsies due to the mistaken belief that they had come from Egypt. In any case, they lived, whether by choice or as a result of racist exclusion, outside the conventions of bourgeois life. But by the 1840s, the term had expanded to include all manner of marginal urban types. One memorable catalogue of bohemians can be found in Karl Marx’s 1852 examination of what he called the lumpenproletariat:

Alongside decayed roués with dubious means of subsistence and of dubious origin, alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie, were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni [street people], pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, maquereaux [pimps], brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars—in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French call la bohème [… who are the] scum, offal, refuse of all classes. (149)

It may seem a bit odd to find the literati in such company, but this list is typical of the prevailing idea of bohemia. In Bohémiens de Paris, a series of prints from the early 1840s by Honoré Daumier, there are images of a pickpocket, several con men, a rag picker and a scavenger, a dog groomer (a vocation that has clearly been revalued since then), a man who picks cigar butts up off the ground, and even a man who abducts and kills neighborhood cats and sells the meat to local restaurants.

A vast gulf separates Marx’s bohemian scum from Florida’s bohemian creative class, and Murger played a crucial role in crossing it. What he set out to accomplish in his book was to separate the artists and intellectuals, who have a negligible presence in Marx’s catalogue or Daumier’s prints, from the more disreputable Parisian bohemians. In Murger’s vision of bohemia, the artists and intellectuals might be living in poverty and squalor, thrown hither and thither alongside criminals and derelicts, but not because they were social scum. They were in this situation because of their determination to pursue their creative ambitions and uncompromising way of life without having the financial means to do so. They intended to live life to the fullest despite the hardships they confronted and if they happened to rub elbows with prostitutes and eccentrics and criminals along the way, that just demonstrated the breadth and diversity of experience available in bohemia but denied to the sheltered, convention-bound middle class, and it added another exciting dimension to the idea of bohemian life. The fact that Murger’s characters were so easy to identify with led readers to imagine themselves living those lives and created a cultural magnetic pole that drew them in.

Murger’s book is without a doubt the most important piece of writing in shaping how bohemia has been understood and experienced ever since. Felix Pyat, for example, had noticed a similar phenomenon a few years before. It’s a fashion, all the rage, a craze, an epidemic, a contagious disease, spreading quickly, a scourge worse than cholera, like an Oriental plague. It is artistism. And the symptoms of artistism are easy to diagnose: The infection initially takes hold of the head, like some kind of cerebral crisis that targets the sense of reason. Overcome by the influence of contemporary Paris, the subject first loses all common sense and throws out his razors and soap. With remarkable alacrity, a beard emerges, most often around the lips and on the chin, but in acute cases it emerges all over the face (65-66). But while many elements of a concept of bohemia were already present, as Seigel writes, it was Murger who put the pieces together into a compelling story and gave the term its staying power.

Those who have sought to reduce Murger to a mere popularizer of a notion already formed and established before his work—and they include most of those who have written about la vie de bohème—have missed the special nature of the account he provided. It was he who clothed the image of Bohemia with elements that gave it the widespread appeal, and the peculiar evocative power, it retained for so long. (30)

That evocative power has led Murger’s images of bohemia to take on a life of their own in popular culture despite the fact that the book itself is seldom read.

The degree to which the stories accurately reflect the complex reality of bohemian life in Paris at that time is debatable. But that kind of accuracy was not Murger’s intention. He softened all the edges and created a more or less depoliticized semi-fictional world that would not disturb his middle-class readers and theater audiences. The accounts of young bohemians enduring cold and hunger and the scenes of death are certainly there, but rarely overwhelm the stories. His friend Charles Baudelaire pointed out that Murger jokes, even when describing misery … [As a narrator, he] slips away and flees quickly from those scenes whose honest contemplation would grieve his tender spirit too much. Those who have romanticized Murger’s bohemia, he adds, do not know with what bitter mockery Mürger spoke of that experience (6, 8–9).² The context of that experience and Murger’s response is important: Europe had been in the grip of tumultuous social upheaval for decades and there was no clear way forward. It was a time of revolution based in utopian idealism and leading to the reign of terror, the rise of Bonaparte and a massively destructive war throughout Europe, the development of Marxism, anarchism, Fourierism, Saint-Simonism and more. Bohemianism can be seen as a dissenting reaction to the emergence of bourgeois capitalism that runs parallel to political dissent, and in fact, the two frequently overlapped. By the 1840s, even in the midst of the 1848 uprisings across the continent, as Graña writes, there were those who could only respond with exhaustion, hilarity, and contempt, or seek the respite of new forms of imagination (7). T. J. Clark observes that if we want to understand the sociopolitical situation in Paris in the 1840s, "we need to rescue Bohemia from Murger’s Scènes de la vie de bohème" (14). This is certainly true, and it reflects the influence Murger’s book has had, but if we want to understand the history of bohemia and its key role in modern culture, then and ever since, we need to begin by rescuing Murger’s book itself from obscurity.

Its obscurity involves readership but also its representation of social life. Murger’s stories have a well-deserved reputation for their lighthearted depiction of bohemia, but it is possible to gaze through the lighthearted surface to recognize as well that these are stories about people who are often homeless and have little food to eat. They may joke about their ragged clothes, their lack of firewood and food, but they also shiver when the weather turns cold and endure failing health. The stories relentlessly address poverty—often with humor, but sometimes with a bleak hopelessness. While Murger appears to have had no faith in any political solutions, he was well aware of the problems of his time and his book offers a critique of the monetization of every aspect of life, a modernizing process dissolving traditional structures of family and religion and leaving vulnerable young people—for better or worse—to come to terms with a new economic and social reality. Indeed, money, and the endless pursuit of that ferocious beast known as the five franc piece, as he writes in the Preface (239), could be said to be the main subject of the book. The young men discuss the need to sell their art (and thus their principles) to stay alive at a time when theories of art for art’s sake were taking hold. Marcel’s painting ends up as a sign outside a grocery store, for example, and Rodolphe is commissioned to write a poem celebrating dentures. Baudelaire, Murger’s friend, repeatedly observed the similarity between artists and prostitutes, and while Murger doesn’t make the connection explicit, he does line them up side by side. While the artists are selling out their talents, their lovers are selling the commodity they have to trade: their bodies. Mimi, Musette and Phémie all work part time as prostitutes. Marcel realizes that Musette’s infidelity arises from the cold and from the lack of food. Rodolphe at one point recognizes that his unfaithful lover has not really been unfaithful to him but has merely traded sex with a man she doesn’t love for money to buy clothes. And it is poverty, of course, that leads to the deaths of Francine, Jacques and Mimi.

This aspect of Murger’s stories shouldn’t be overstated, but neither should it be overlooked. In the end, his main concern is to establish the idea of a bohemia separate both from political radicalism, which he saw as futile, and the underworld of criminals and eccentrics, which he saw as dangerous. The opening lines of Murger’s Preface make his strategy quite clear: The bohemians who are the subject of this book have nothing in common with those whom the boulevard playwrights have painted as thieves and murderers, he argues, almost as though he were directly refuting Marx and Daumier.

They are not to be found among those who lead dancing bears, nor among sword-swallowers, those who buy and sell safety chains, the hawkers shouting Step right up! Everyone’s a winner!, the dealers who swim in the shallow waters of loan-sharks, or the thousand other mysterious and shadowy workers whose main work is to avoid all work, people who are always ready to do anything except what’s right. (Preface 232)

Murger then lays out a quick (and not entirely convincing) literary history to provide his bohemians with an artistic legacy and cultural legitimacy they otherwise lacked. It is quite a stretch, to say the least, to count Homer as a bohemian as Murger does, but this is simply part of his attempt to shape a narrative that takes his artists out of the category of social scum that had so tarnished their reputations and locate them instead as heirs to the glorious traditions of classic literature.

The second part of the Preface is intended to warn people away from bohemia. The myth of bohemia, built largely on the success of his writing, had already drawn many young people to Paris in search of the life his stories depicted. But bohemia could be a very dangerous place in the nineteenth century, much more dangerous than his stories suggested. Far from enjoying an unending carnival, its inhabitants, as Murger knew firsthand, suffered extreme poverty, rejection and ill health, and some young people in his immediate circle died in these harsh conditions. The deprivation depicted in a number of the stories, Francine’s Muff in particular, is not exaggerated. Realizing that his stories had nonetheless led readers to underestimate those dangers, sometimes with fatal consequences, he argues that only serious artists and writers with a real chance of ultimate success should venture into bohemia. But the warning he issued in his Preface about the very real limitations and hardships to be encountered there was never very persuasive in countering the curiosity and desire his stories had aroused, the exciting new sense of possibility they had opened up.

While the allure of bohemia drew many people to Paris, others, who were inspired by Murger but couldn’t go to Paris, soon established bohemias of their own in cities throughout Europe and America. Much has been written about bohemian London in the late 1800s. Traffic between the two cities was so constant that it would be difficult to trace Murger’s influence with any precision. William Makepeace Thackeray, author of Vanity Fair, had spent a considerable amount of time in Paris beginning with a stint in the Latin Quarter as an art student, and he was an early influence on English bohemianism. While his time there predates Murger’s rise to fame, the atmosphere he experienced would have been quite similar. In 1863, The Westminster Review, a prominent English quarterly, published a study that compared Murger’s Parisian bohemia very favorably to London’s Thackeray-influenced version and concluded with the hope (unfortunately not realized) that English readers of the future will continue to recognize the wit, the geniality, the vividness, the pathos, the exuberant spirits and good-nature of the typical Bohemian of Paris, Henri Murger (McCarthy 56). In 1873, the same journal published another lengthy and laudatory article detailing the life and death of Murger. The author George Gissing claimed in 1890 to be reading Murger’s Scenes for the twentieth time (Coustillas 214). And later in the 1890s, the wild popularity of George du Maurier’s Trilby and the bizarre Trilbymania craze that followed its publication owed a huge and obvious debt to Murger’s bohemia.³ Arthur Ransome, author of beloved children’s books such as Swallows and Amazons, describes his early days in the city among artists and writers in Bohemia in London (1907) and presents Murger as the culmination of Parisian bohemia prior to its emigration to London. Murger’s version of bohemia came early to England and remained a significant cultural influence. As Peter Brooker writes in his study of British bohemianism, "All this had a beginning … in the short narrative sketches of Henri Mürger’s Scènes de la Vie Bohème" (2).

In America, the line is easier to follow. Henry Clapp, a New England Sunday school teacher and activist involved with abolitionism, socialism and the temperance movement, was in Europe in the late 1840s for reasons connected to his political work. He moved to Paris around the time of Murger’s successful play and, while it’s not clear whether Clapp actually attended a performance, he does seem to have undergone a conversion. Bohemian Paris radically reshaped him and on his return to New York in 1853, now a smoker and drinker, he began to nurture the development of America’s first bohemia, explicitly based on Murger’s model. In the course of a decade, he established a newspaper with a bohemian slant, the Saturday Press, and installed his group—including Walt Whitman—in Pfaff’s tavern on lower Broadway near Bleecker Street on the edge of what was to become (and remain) one of the world’s most famous bohemian neighborhoods, Greenwich Village.⁴ The scene at Pfaff’s appears to have been modeled on Murger’s Café Momus and other bohemian meeting places in Paris where Murger and his friends met, places Clapp would have known about. Whitman not only wrote a poem about Pfaff’s (The Vault at Pfaff’s, which remained unfinished), he also translated (loosely) a poem by Murger—La Ballade du Désespéré, or The Night Visitor—which he sometimes performed for audiences. Vanity Fair magazine, still a major publication today, was founded in 1859 by a group including some of the Pfaff’s bohemian circle.

In 1853, the same year Clapp brought bohemianism to New York and only two years after its publication in France, a serialized English translation of Murger’s book began to appear in The Knickerbocker, a prominent New York literary magazine. The translator, Charles Astor Bristed (grandson of John Jacob Astor, America’s richest man), felt obliged to use a pseudonym (Carl Benson) for the first chapter. Given the controversial nature of the subject and the gulf separating French from American moral sensibility, Bristed abandoned the project about halfway through due to his

sense of self-respect and of respect for art, which revolts at a wanton profanation of sentiment. For, to take the first omitted chapter as a specimen, a young man, under the impulse of sheer animal passion, attaching himself to the first eight-day courtesan he can pick up, and then making out of this ephemeral connection a romantic episode in his life, what is this but an utter perversion and profanation of sentiment, no matter how the coarse points may be glossed over, and the story made amusing? Very true in the realist sense, no doubt, but a hideous falsification of all ideal and principle …. what a disgusting waste of talent. (488-489)

It is worth noting here that one social function of bohemia has always involved challenging bourgeois morality and tastes. Seigel describes bohemia as a space within which newly liberated energies were continually thrown up against the barriers being erected to contain them, where social margins and frontiers were probed and tested (11). The sexuality depicted in Murger’s stories, far from appearing hideous and disgusting today, seems simply to anticipate some aspects of the sexual freedom we have become accustomed to more than a hundred years later as a result of this process. This is not to say that all aspects of gender power relations are similarly contested in Murger’s stories, as they certainly are not. Schaunard’s cane is but one example of this. Nor does the book eschew various antisemitic stereotypes that were common at the time in its depiction of Médicis. Nevertheless, it is important to recall those aspects of social experience that its non-conformism did impact. Henry Clapp’s activist bohemianism, for example, continued to include support for the abolition of slavery, socialism, women’s rights and the Free Love League. Pfaff’s was also a meeting place of the Fred Gray Association, which appears to have been a group of gay young men including Whitman and Fred Gray himself.

Bristed’s scruples notwithstanding, bohemian enclaves boasting a moral compass quite different from mainstream culture soon appeared in many American cities; not only New York but San Francisco, Chicago and even staid Boston had a robust bohemian presence. Mark Twain declared himself to be a bohemian and Bret Harte was closely involved with San Francisco’s bohemia. William Dean Howells, one of the most important literary figures of his time (and no bohemian himself), made a point of visiting Clapp’s bohemian circle when he came to New York, and his novel The Coast of Bohemia (1893) is a critical exploration of the affectations of bohemianism, one of many at the time—and since—to challenge the authenticity of bohemian identity.

Such challenges notwithstanding, bohemias have continued to spring up since then, generation after generation, in Paris and elsewhere. Perhaps, even if there hadn’t been a Murger, the Greenwich Village bohemia of the early 1900s might have existed in some form anyway, and the beat generation and the hippies and the punks and all the other groups that have emerged under a wide variety of names. But there was a Murger and it is not difficult to draw a straight line from his seminal work to the whole evolving history of bohemian subcultures that continues to this day, not only in France, Great Britain and America but in many other parts of the world as well.

Of course, Murger’s influence is by no means restricted to the spread of bohemian subcultures and neighborhoods. Many people who would never for a moment think of becoming bohemian have nevertheless been entranced by its mystique as portrayed in Puccini’s 1896 opera, La Bohème. Adapted from Murger’s stories, this is often cited as the world’s most popular opera—indeed, its performance history is astonishing, not only for the sheer number of productions over the decades but also for the astonishing variety of stagings. While traditional productions continue to flourish, one recent version, the 2021 Las Vegas performance of La BoDEAD, mingled Murger, Puccini and zombies. Another, a 2017 Paris production, set the story in outer space. And, of course, there was the 2007 episode of The Simpsons in which Homer sang the role of Rodolfo. It’s difficult to imagine what Murger, who claimed that bohemia is impossible outside Paris, might have made of all this. In any case, Puccini’s is not even the only operatic version: Leoncavallo also recognized the book’s potential and there was some tension between the two composers as they each worked on their separate versions of Murger’s stories. Leoncavallo’s successfully premiered in 1897 but never gained the audience acclaim that Puccini’s did. Amadeo Vives’s Bohemios, a Spanish zarzuela version that premiered in 1904 is still performed today, and, while the plot details differ, the atmosphere and a few characters borrow directly from Murger,

Jonathan Larsen’s Rent, one of Broadway’s longest running hits, reinvents Murger’s bohemia and locates it in New York’s East Village in the 1990s. While this musical adaptation is looser than Puccini’s, Murger’s presence is still unmistakable and its rousing centerpiece, La Vie Bohème, is a high-energy bohemian anthem (that takes its place beside Charles Aznavour’s melancholy but iconic La Bohème, a 1966 ballad drenched in nostalgia for the atmosphere of Murger’s world). The popularity of Rent was such that two film versions soon followed: the first in 2005 and the second in 2009, presenting the Broadway stage version on its closing night after a 12-year run. Baz Luhrmann’s 1990 Australian production of La Bohème was revived in New York in 2002 where it won numerous stage awards. The appeal of bohemia was such that he returned to it with the film Moulin Rouge in 2001, a story set in Paris and drawing on the image of bohemia that Murger’s book had established. Perhaps the best known musical use of Murger’s term is the title of Queen’s hit song Bohemian Rhapsody, and, though it is difficult to fit the lyrics into any standard bohemian category, some oblique allusion seems present. Countless other examples might be listed here to demonstrate the reach of the idea, from La Vida Bohème, a Venezuelan rock band, to a Punjabi rapper whose stage name is Bohemia. The term transcends genre boundaries, as evidenced by Joni Mitchell’s The Boho Dance, Lyle Lovatt’s Down in Bohemia or The Dandy Warhols’ Bohemian Like You. New York’s Café Bohemia has been an important jazz venue and the site of live recordings by Kenny Dorham (Round About Midnight at the Café Bohemia), Art Blakey (At the Café Bohemia), Charles Mingus (At the Café Bohemia), and Miles Davis and John Coltrane (Café Bohemia Broadcasts).

This list could go on indefinitely, but the point is that this foregrounding of the idea of bohemia is a clear indication of the word’s evocative power, a power that can be traced back to Murger’s work and the stamp that he put on the idea of bohemia. This idea resonates in film