At this time we were all a little Murger-mad in the
Latin Quarter. The play of the VIE DE BOHEME (a
dreary, snivelling piece) had been produced at the
Odeon, had run an unconscionable time--for Paris--and
revived the freshness of the legend. The same
business, you may say, or there and thereabout, was
being privately enacted in consequence in every garret
of the neighbourhood, and a good third of the students
were consciously impersonating Rodolphe or Schaunard,
to their own incommunicable satisfaction. Some of us
went far, and some farther. I always looked with awful
envy (for instance) on a certain countryman of my own
who had a studio in the Rue Monsieur le Prince, wore
boots, and long hair in a net, and could be seen
tramping off, in this guise, to the worst eating-house
of the quarter, followed by a Corsican model, his
mistress, in the conspicuous costume of her race and
calling. It takes some greatness of soul to carry even
folly to such heights as these; and for my own part, I
had to content myself by pretending very arduously to
be poor, by wearing a smoking-cap on the streets, and
by pursuing, through a series of misadventures, that
extinct mammal the grisette.
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