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The Bohemians
ate well when they had money and poorly when they did not; they ate in
jocular company at cafes and in the "comfort" of their own
attic lodgings. Their menu varied from extravagant delicacies to prosaic
staples, but every meal featured good conversation with friends.
The most famous
café frequented by Bohemians was the Café Momus from Scenes de la Vie
de Boheme; it was later mentioned in the opera La Boheme as well. It was
a real café where Murger and his comrades spent much of their time.
Alexandre Schanne, the model for the novel's Schaunard, wrote that
"at closing time this refreshment housekeeper and courtier of the
Muses would stand beside the counter smiling or not at the customer,
according to whether the latter was a wielder of the pen or the
brush". The four main characters of the novel
frequent the Momus until they are no longer permitted on the premises on
account of their overdue bills. Inside, they took over a room of the café
"where forty people might have been accommodated, but they were
usually there alone, inasmuch as they had rendered the place
uninhabitable by its ordinary frequenters" .One of Thackeray's
characters, Philip Firmin, ate at a restaurant called Flicoteau's:
The main
beverage drunk at cafes was coffee; very few alcoholic beverages,
excepting punch and mulled wine, were ever consumed. Smoking, on the
other hand, was prevalent; "the pipe, now replaced by the
cigarette, was in high esteem; the students even made it an accessory
to their costume, and when it was not in their mouths, they wore it in
their buttonhole" .
In Les Miserables, Hugo
writes of one member of the Societe de l'ABC: "He was one of the
students who had learned the most during their course at Paris; he knew
that the best coffee was to be had at the Cafe Lemblin, and the best
billiards at the Cafe Voltaire, that good cakes and lasses were to be
found at the Ermitage, on the Boulevard du Maine, spatchcocked chickens
at Mother Sauget's, excellent matelotes at the Barriere de la Cunette,
and a certain thin white wine at the Barriere du Compat"
Day-to-day
bohemian meals depended on the current financial state of the diners.
When Rodolfe in Scenes de la Vie de Boheme was feeling especially
generous, he treated his friends to lobster. ("Under the pretext
that he had studied natural history, Schaunard suggested that he should
carve it".) This gathering also included many sorts of wine,
such as "three bottles with red seals … three bottles with green
seals … one which by its neck topped with a silver helmet, [which] was
recognized as belonging to the Royal Champagne Regiment - a fantastic
champagne vintaged at Saint Ouen and sold in Paris at two francs a
bottle …". On another evening, however, the Bohemians are
left with only thirty sous with which to feed themselves dinner; they
eat "three dishes most symmetrically arranged - a dish of herring,
a dish of potatoes, and a dish of cheese".
The first
Bohemians were the young Romantics in the Impasse du Doyenne in the
early 1830s; and Arsene Houssaye, who was one of them, declared that
there would never be a last as long as there were poets living in Paris.
19th century
England produced eccentrics such as Edward FitzGerald and Ouida,
aesthetes such as the Rossettis and William Morris, socially unorthodox
writers such as Swinburne and Wilde; but these Bohemian figures seem to
have been exceptional.
There is a
world of difference between the Cafe Royal and Dinochau's, or the
Brasserie des Martyrs. Besides, as Andrew Lang remarked in his article
'Three Poets of French Bohemia, England has never combined the
university with the capital, nor fixed so wide a gulf between two
classes of men of letters. The English undergraduate in the nineteenth
century came, almost certainly, from the upper or middle classes, and he
did not know the poverty of the student on the Left Bank. He might (as
Shelley did at Oxford) write a pamphlet on the necessity of atheism. He
might (as Byron did at Cambridge) show his scorn of convention by
keeping a tame bear in his rooms. He might be unorthodox in his creeds,
extravagant in his behaviour, but he would not lead a tavern life; he
would not live on a crust of bread with a seamstress in an attic.
After the
failure of the Revolution of 1848, the socialist movement in France
collapsed, finance capital and the credit system prospered, Paris was
virtually rebuilt by Haussmann, the boulevards glittered with department
stores and smart cafes, architects imitated baroque mansions and Roman
palaces, painting became decoration, operettas displaced serious music,
literature was read only for light entertainment, and art that posterity
would enjoy was appreciated by the few and financed by almost no one.
Many artists found this bourgeois paradise too offensive for comment or
too powerful to condemn. Instead they preferred to inhabit a world of
their own, both through their work and by gathering in those literary
cafes where the fairground world of Louis Napoleon was less audible. The
most famous was probably the Brasserie des Martyrs, a smoky, noisy cafe
in the rue des Martyrs at the corner of rues Breda and Navarin. The
Brasserie was a cafe for rebels, outsiders, failures, writers or
painters like Murger, Baudelaire or Courbet who had to fight official
silence or hostility. Many of its clients felt its name might have been
chosen with more tact.
One, Alfred
Delvau, wrote in 1857 that if all Paris had burnt down except for the
Brasserie, a fascinating new city could have been built using only the
talents of the survivors, although it might not have looked exactly as
Haussmann had planned. The Brasserie was the Cafe Procope of the Second
Empire. In the 1850s its clients were more famous, the waiters busier,
the repartee was faster than anywhere else. The two high rooms, upstairs
and downstairs, were furnished with flaring gas lamps, elegant divans
and polished oak tables, but the mirrors, prints and gilt mouldings,
caryatids and artificial flowers, were less tasteful - total aesthetic
quarantine was impossible even in the rue des Martyrs. Among its habitués
were unknown artists like the serious if shy young painter
Claude Monet, and eccentrics like the astronomer Alexis Morin who denied
the existence of the sun but tried to placate public opinion by allowing
the existence of the moon. Or there were faded models and young girls
with nicknames like Cigarette, Moonlight, Fried Eggs, White Grape. 'The
Brasserie des Martyrs,' wrote the Goncourt brothers who disliked most
literary cafes, 'a tavern and a cavern of an impotent and dishonest
world, of all those nameless great men and minor Bohemian journalists
who try their best to pick up a new five franc piece or an old idea
while those they insult have to fight, live and die in solitude, quiet
and hard work.' Told about a duel that had begun in the Brasserie the
police commissaire told Bosquet: 'But if someone insults you there, you
must take a knife and kill him! The police would never dream of
interfering
Personally, I have always
had a special admiration for those people, whether they are poets,
novelists or journalists, who write in the noisy privacy of cafes.
Settling down in the morning with a coffee, a croissant and a blank
sheet of paper, and filling it as the cafe fills, these may be the most
civilized of all human beings, the ring of the cash register serving for
them as the ring at the end of a typewriter carriage, the shouted orders
and the hum of voices providing background music for the arrangement of
words on a page.
Selecting one's favourite
cafe is much a very personal affair. It makes no difference however,
whether one sits at an establishment that is world famous or one that
has never been heard of outside of one's own neighbourhood. Even
architectural design and ambiance are a matter of individual taste. Some
find themselves comfortable in the modern establishments that boast an
abundance of glass and decoratively used structural steel building
components. Others will find a place such as that described by Lawrence
Durell, "with nothing fancy, but with the added a small garden, one
where the sun is always more friendly and the charm of knowing that
hidden behind a small kitchen one will find rain more tempered."
True devotees of the cafe
life never restrict themselves to sitting at any single location. Like
Don Juans and nymphomaniacs, they are always in search of someplace new.
They may have their regular morning or evening ports-of-call but any
excuse at all will do to have them sampling the coffee and ambiance in
whatever new cafe catches their eye. Such people are not so much fickle
as they are adventurous, at least in their desire to sample as much of
life as possible.
© Daniel Rogov
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