The Bohemians of the Latin Quarter. Henri Murger

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      “Yes,” said Rodolphe, unwilling to vex her by a contradiction at the outset.

      “It is very like,” returned Louise.

      “Alas!” sighed Rodolphe as he looked at her, “the poor child has not very much literature. I feel sure that she only knows the orthography of the heart, which knows no ‘s’ in the plural. I must buy her a grammar.”

      While he thus meditated, Louise complained that her shoes hurt her, and he obligingly was helping her to unlace them, when all on a sudden the light went out.

      “There!” exclaimed Rodolphe, “who can have blown out the candle?”

      A joyous burst of laughter answered him.

      Some days later Rodolphe met a friend who accosted him in the street.

      “Why, what are you doing? You have dropped out of sight.”

      “Making poetry out of my own experience,” returned Rodolphe, and the unfortunate young man told the truth.

      He had asked more of Louise than the poor child could give him. Your little hurdy-gurdy cannot give out the notes of the lyre, and Louise used to talk, as one may say, the patois of love, while Rodolphe insisted that she should use poetical language. So they understood each other somewhat imperfectly.

      A week later, at the very dancing saloon where she met Rodolphe, Louise came across a fair-haired young fellow, who danced a good many dances with her and ended by taking her home.

      He was a second-year student; he spoke the prose language of pleasure very well; he had fine eyes, and pockets that jingled musically.

      Louise asked him for paper and ink, and wrote Rodolphe a letter thus conceived:—

      “Dont count on mee any more. One larst kiss and goodbye.—LOUISE.”

      As Rodolphe read this epistle that night, when he came in, the light suddenly went out.

      “There!” he said to himself meditatively, “that is the very candle which I lighted when Louise came that evening; it is fitting that it should burn out now that all is over between us. If I had only known, I would have chosen a longer one,” he added, with a ring in his voice, half vexation, half regret, and he laid Louise’s note in a drawer, which he was wont at times to call the catacombs of his dead love affairs.

      One day when Rodolphe was with Marcel he picked up a scrap of paper off the floor to light his pipe, and recognised Louise’s handwriting and spelling.

      “I possess an autograph of the same writer,” he remarked to his friend, “only in mine there are two fewer mistakes in spelling. Does that not show that she loved me better?”

      “It proves that you are a fool,” returned Marcel; “white arms and shoulders have no need of grammar.”

      IV

      ALI RODOLPHE

      OR, THE INVOLUNTARY TURK

      OSTRACISED by a churlish landlord, Rodolphe led for a time a nomad life, doing his best to perfect himself in the arts of sleeping supperless, and supping without a bed to follow, with Chance for his chef, and the ground open to the stars for his lodging. No cloud wandered more than he.

      Still amid these painful cross events two things did not desert him—to wit, his good humour and the manuscript of The Avenger, a tragedy which had made the rounds of all the likely openings for dramatic talent in Paris.

      But one day, as it befell, Rodolphe, having been conducted to the “jug” for a choregraphic performance a trifle too weird for public taste, found himself face to face with an uncle, a genuine uncle whom he had not seen for an age, in the shape of one Monetti, a stove manufacturer, an authority on chimneys, and a sergeant in the National Guard to boot.

      Touched by his nephew’s misfortunes, Uncle Monetti promised to mend matters; how, we shall presently see, if the ascent of six pairs of stairs does not dismay the reader.

      So let us grasp the handrail and climb. . . . Ouf! one hundred and twenty-five steps! Here we are. One step more takes us into the room, another would bring us out at the other side. The place is perhaps small, but it is high up, and besides there s good air up there and a fine view.

      The furniture consists of a good selection of chimney cowls, a couple of portable stoves, a few patent grates for economising fuel (especially if no fuel is put in them), a dozen or so of funnels and fire-bricks, and a whole host of warming apparatus; furthermore, to complete the inventory, add to these a hammock slung from a couple of hooks in the walls, a garden chair with an amputated leg, a chandelier still adorned with a solitary socket, and various fancy articles and objects of art.

      As for the second room, a balcony and a couple of dwarf cypresses in pots convert it into a park for the summer.

      The tenant of this abode, a young man dressed like a Turk of comic opera, is just finishing his breakfast as we enter, a meal which in itself is a shameless violation of the law of the Prophet, as may be sufficiently seen by the presence of the mortal remains of a knuckle of ham and what was once a full bottle of wine.

      Breakfast ended, the youthful Turk extended himself on the floor in Oriental fashion, languidly smoking a narghilé marked “J.G.,” and while he gave himself up to a sense of Asiatic beatitude, he passed his hand from time to time over the back of a magnificent Newfoundland dog, who would no doubt have responded to these caresses if he had not been made of earthenware.

      All at once a sound of footsteps came from the passage, and the door opened to give admittance to somebody who without a word went straight up to a range which did duty as a bureau, drew a roll of papers out of the oven, and subjected them to a close scrutiny.

      “What!” cried the new-comer, speaking with a strong Piedmontese accent, “have you not finished the chapter on ‘Ventilation Holes’ yet?”

      “With your leave, uncle,” replied the Turk, “the chapter on ‘Ventilation Holes’ is one of the most interesting in your work, and requires to be studied with especial care. I am now studying it.”

      “Wretched boy, it is always the same thing! And my chapter on ‘Hot-air Stoves,’ how is that going on?”

      “The hot-air stove is doing well. By-the-by, uncle, if you would let me have a little firewood it would not come amiss. It is a small edition of Siberia up here; I am so cold that I have only to look at the thermometer, and it drops below zero!”

      “What! have you burned a whole faggot already?”

      “With your permission, uncle, there are faggots and faggots, and yours was a very little one.”

      “I will send you a block of patent fuel; it keeps the heat in.”

      “That is precisely why it gives none out.”

      “Oh; well, I will send you up a little faggot,” returned M. Monetti as he withdrew. “But I want my chapter on ‘Hot-air Stoves’ to-morrow.”

      “When the fire comes it will inspire me,” called the Turk, as the key was turned a second time in the lock.

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