This is the story of the circumstances that led Carolus Barbemuche, a man of letters and a platonic philosopher, to become a member of the bohemian group in the twenty-fourth year of his life.

At that time, Gustave Colline, the great philosopher, Marcel, the great artist, Schaunard, the great musician, and Rodolphe, the great poet—for this is how they referred to each other—regularly went to the Café Momus, where they were known as the four musketeers because they were always seen together. Most of the time, they came and went together, they played together and sometimes they didn't pay the bill, but always with the togetherness worthy of a Conservatory orchestra performance.

For their meeting place, they’d chosen a room that once held forty people comfortably, but now they always found themselves alone because they’d succeeded in making the place unbearable for all the other regulars.

Anyone who just happened to be passing by and ventured into their den immediately became the victim of this uncontrollable quartet, and while these unfortunate customers would usually escape, they would not have succeeded in getting newspapers or coffee. In any case, their outrageous commentaries on the arts, human feelings and political economy were enough to turn the coffee cream sour. The conversations of the four companions were of such a nature that the waiter who served them, a man in the very prime of life, went mad.

After some time, things had gotten so out of control that the café owner finally ran out of patience. He approached them very seriously one evening to discuss his grievances:

Oh Rodolphe, my friend, what's happened to you? What could have changed you this way? Should I believe all the rumors I’ve been hearing? Love of life has always been your guiding principle but now you seem overwhelmed by sadness. Can this really be true? And how can I, the faithful chronicler of your bohemian epic, a story so full of laughter, how can I find a melancholy tone sad enough to recount the painful events that have left you in a kind of mourning and brought the cheerful sounds of your witty banter to a sudden stop?

Oh Rodolphe, my friend! I know you’ve been through something awful, but still, it's really no reason to give up on everything. My advice is just to lay the past to rest as soon as you can. Above all, avoid solitude: it's crowded with phantoms who will feed on your grief and prolong it. Avoid silence, where your echoing memories will resound with the joys and sorrows of the past. Be brave—take the name you loved and toss it to the four winds of forgetfulness. And along with it, rid yourself of everything of hers you still carry with you. Those curls of her hair you tasted, your lips inflamed with desire. That Venetian flagon with just a few drops of perfume still slumbering inside, but more dangerous for you to inhale right now than all the world's most deadly poisons. Into the fire with the flowers, flowers made of cloth, silk and velvet. The white jasmine flowers, the anemones turned crimson with the blood of Adonis,1 the blue forget-me-nots, and all the bouquets she arranged during those days of love, days so brief and so long ago. I loved her too, your Mimi, and I didn't foresee the danger that loving her would bring. But take my advice: into the flames with those ribbons, those pretty ribbons, pink and blue and yellow, that she wore around her neck to hold your gaze. Into the flames with the lace and the bonnets, the veils, and all the seductive clothes she dressed herself in to make calculating love with M. César, M. Jérôme, M. Charles, or whatever other admirer she had scheduled, while you waited at the window for her, shivering from the icy wind and winter frost.

At twenty years of age, Mademoiselle Musette was a very pretty young woman, and not long after her arrival in Paris she had become what so many pretty young women become if they have a nice figure, if they know how to flirt easily and if they have a little ambition but not much education. For some time, she captivated the Latin Quarter at dinners where, in a voice that was always very fresh though not always in tune, she sang the many folk songs she knew and for this her name has since been celebrated by those fine artisans who create the jewels known as poetry. But then Mademoiselle Musette suddenly and without warning abandoned the Rue de la Harpe to take her place on the cytherean heights of the Quartier Bréda.

She soon rose to a place of prominence in the aristocracy of pleasure, slowly but surely ascending to such a pinnacle of celebrity that her name appeared in Paris newspapers and lithograph portraits of her were available from picture dealers.

Yet Mademoiselle Musette was an exception among the women in whose midst she lived. Like all women who are truly feminine, she was by nature elegant and poetic, with a love of luxury and the pleasures it afforded. Her coquetry arose from a powerful attraction to all things of beauty and distinction; a daughter of the common people, she wouldn't have been at all out of place amid the most regal splendor. But Mademoiselle Musette, who was young and attractive, would never willingly agree to become the mistress of a man who was not, like her, young and attractive. She was once known to gallantly refuse magnificent offers from an old man so rich that he was called the Peru of Chaussée-d’Antin, a man who would have placed at her feet a golden stairway leading to the fulfillment of her fantasies. Intelligent and spiritual, she couldn't stand fools and idiots no matter how old they were, no matter what their names and titles were.

Berlioz's Poetical Drama

The French composer Hector Berlioz (1803–1869) was born in La Côte-Saint-André in the department of Isère, which is located in the Rhône Valley, close to the Alps, halfway between Grenoble and Lyon. The Berlioz family had some distinction in the French region. Hector's father, Dr. Louis Berlioz, was a successful and prosperous physician in the region (see Berlioz's bibliography, Cairns 1989/1999: 3–5). He practiced healing through acupuncture to relieve chronic pain, thereby attempting to introduce this healing practice to the Western world. Acupuncture comes from Chinese medicine, originating two thousand years before the birth of Christianity, but in the Napoleonic era, acupuncture was regarded as an alternative, even occult, pseudoscience. Dr. Berlioz furthered Western medicine, helping take it from the simple observation of symptoms to the scientific reality of being able to heal patients as experienced today.

Louis Berlioz had an inquisitive mind with logical rigor, but for his children he was also interested in poetic literature, fine arts and music. His son Hector Berlioz was born in 1803. Hector turned against the financial chaos of the Old Regime. As a pioneer of the French Revolution, he seemed to mark a turning point in politics. As a result of his fascination with Napoleon's tumultuous, but short-lived, government, Hector Berlioz furnished Napoleonic ideas to the modern world. He advocated the revolutionary ideas of liberty, equality and fraternity to serve as a movement against the world of the privileged classes. Hector gained his initial education under his father's guidance. Under his father's tutelage, Hector engaged in scholarly pursuits that included the study of intellectual subjects such as Latin grammar, French literature, history and geography. In 1821, Hector passed his examinations in philosophy and rhetoric to enter the French baccalauréat in Grenoble. His Latin specialty was the ancient literature of Virgil's Aeneid, Horace and Cicero, which he had read and translated with his father (Cairns 1989/1999, 46–60). The two of them shared an enjoyment of Virgil's long poems in Latin, which Hector retranslated into French lyrics. In adapting this version, he found himself caught up in the difficulty of readapting Virgil's verse into French lyrics for the romantic opera, The Trojans.

One evening during Lent, Rodolphe returned home early intending to get some work done. But as soon as he sat down at the table and dipped his pen into the inkwell, he was distracted by some unusual noises. Putting his ear to the indiscrete wall that separated him from the next room, he listened. There was no mistaking the sounds of conversation alternating with kisses and all the rest of the onomatopoeia of love.

“Damn it!” Rodolphe thought as he looked at his clock. “It's still early … and my neighbour Juliet usually keeps her Romeo long after the song of the lark has been sung. I can't work here tonight.” Dropping his key off downstairs, he came upon the concierge's wife wrapped tightly in the arms of a lover. The poor woman was so flustered that it took her five minutes to pull the cord that unlocked the door.

“Who knew?” thought Rodolphe. “Sometimes a concierge's wife turns back into a woman.”

When he opened the door, he saw a fireman and a cook at the corner, out for the evening together, holding hands and exchanging vows of love.

“Well, well!” said Rodolphe, gazing at the fighter of flames and his robust companion, “these heretics have completely forgotten that it's Lent.”

And he set off down the road to the home of a friend who lived nearby.

“If Marcel is home,” he said to himself, “we can spend the evening saying nasty things about Colline. We have to pass the time somehow.”

He gave the door a vigorous knock and it opened halfway to reveal a young man dressed only in a shirt and a monocle.

“I can't invite you in,” he said to Rodolphe.

“Why not?” he asked.

“Look!” said Marcel, pointing toward a female head that appeared from behind a curtain. “There's my answer.”

“She isn't even all that pretty,” he replied to the door that had already been closed in his face. “Oh well, what now?” he said, once he was back on the street, “If I go to see Colline, we could spend the evening saying nasty things about Marcel.”

Crossing the Rue de l‘Ouest, dark and deserted as usual, Rodolphe was able to make out a shadowy figure pacing back and forth while gloomily and audibly chewing on lines of poetry.

New Tongues for Brecht's Language

The dramatic genre of opera in its modern form has abandoned the old, static poetry of formal text-with-music in response to the attraction of dynamic and unconventional rhymes, dramatic sounds and satirical melodies, thus introducing new art forms (Kerman 1956/1989, 203–213). Alternative opera developed from the operatic tradition in its exploration of new subjects and themes, accepting contemporary vocabulary and speech to intensify the lyrical effect in conjunction with modern rhyme and tempo. This allowed a remix of scenic effects to create new dramas (Kerman 1956/1989, 214–228). Indeed, the new form of contemporary drama with songs and music, along with new sets, different lighting and a readaptation of the costumes, revived the stages of opera and operetta by emphasizing the emotional gestures of the actors (Pavis 1980, 133–134, 191–195, 262–263, 354–356). Brecht's new song-play genre featured an unconventional, modern style of declamation (Sprechstimme). This “speech song” consisted of a half-singing, half-speaking recital of lyrical texts which were similar to the twentieth century's harmonic, but dissonant, arias. Sprechstimme echoed the eclectic and dissonant schizophrenia of the international politics that formed the backdrop of reality in the twentieth century. Brecht personified the new voices in his sketches using variations to and elaborations on German theater, a process which Jakobson termed as cryptanalytical hypertranslation.

Onstage, the dramaturgic effects of modern opera were altered through the mimetic involvement of playwrights in order to move away from the old, familiar tradition of the audience being amused by the amorous events depicted in Italian opera which resolved into a happy ending. Instead, Brecht manipulated his modern dramas in educative theater by offsetting the pleasure of the audience with a contrastive feeling of displeasure. Brecht coined the term Verfremdungseffekt (alienation effect) for his method. He used (and abused) the emotionality of the German music drama (Singspiel) genre while preaching the sacred and secular themes of the melodramatic action by recoding the language in the popular speech spoken by the “street” classes. Jakobson splendidly discussed the contrastive structure of Brecht's lyrics in his article, “Der grammatische Bau des Gedichts von B. Brecht ‘Wie sind sie’” ( Jakobson 1963/1981).

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. 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.

The species of bohemia at the heart of this book was not born today; it has existed always and everywhere and can stake a claim to illustrious origins. In ancient Greece, to trace the genealogy back no further, there was a famous bohemian who lived hand to mouth, trusting to fortune, traveling over the flowering countryside of Ionia, surviving on the bread of charity, and stopping in the evening by the hearth of hospitality to hang up his melodious lyre after singing the Loves of Helen and the Fall of Troy. As we descend the ladder of the ages, modern bohemia discovers its ancestors in every literary and artistic era. The Homeric tradition continues in the Middle Ages with the minstrels and the improvising actors, children possessing a joyful wisdom, all the musical vagabonds in the countryside of Touraine, all the wandering muses, with a beggar's bag of necessity on their shoulders alongside a troubadour's harp, singing as they crossed the plains of that beautiful land where the wild rose of Clemence Isaure was to bloom.

During the period of transition from the age of chivalry to the dawn of the Renaissance, bohemia races along the roadways of the kingdom and soon makes its appearance in the streets of Paris. Here we find the great Pierre Gringoire, a friend to beggars and bandits and an enemy to fasting, lean and hungry like a man whose whole life has been one long Lent.

While having dinner out one Saturday evening, in the days before he started living with Mlle. Mimi—we’ll meet her soon—Rodolphe made the acquaintance of Mlle. Laure, who dealt in fashion and beauty products. When she found out that Rodolphe was the editor in chief of The Scarf of Iris and The Beaver, two fashion magazines, she began to gaze at him with an array of expressions designed to attract his interest. Since she was in the field, she hoped he could help promote her business. Rodolphe responded to her provocative glances with a spectacular display of lyric poetry, a show of verbal fireworks whose elegant style would have made both Benserade and Voiture jealous—not to mention Ruggieri himself. By the end of their dinner, Laure, having learned that Rodolphe was a poet, made it clear that she could easily be convinced to accept him as her Petrarch and without further discussion they agreed to meet the next day.“

Oh my God!” Rodolphe said to himself as he took her home, “she's a delight! And her grammar is as impressive as her clothes. I’ll try to make a good impression on her.”

When they arrived at her door, Mlle. Laure removed her arm from his as she thanked him for taking the trouble to walk all the way with her to a neighborhood far from his own.

“Oh,” said Rodolphe as he bowed to her, “I only wish you lived in Moscow or the Sunda Islands so I could have devoted even more time to serving as your gallant escort home.”

“That's a bit too far,” Laure answered with a pleasing smile.

“We would travel in style along the boulevards, madame,” said Rodolphe. “Please allow me to kiss your hand, although I’ll place the kiss on your cheek instead,” he continued as he touched her lips with his before Laure could resist.

“Oh, monsieur!” she exclaimed, “you’re going too fast.”

“That's so I can get to the finish sooner,” Rodolphe replied. “The first laps of love's race should be run at a gallop.”

“What a peculiar person!” thought the woman of fashion as she went in.

“What an attractive person!” thought Rodolphe as he headed home.

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 .co m. 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.

Punished with banishment by an inhospitable landlord, Rodolphe had for some time been living a life more free-floating than the clouds, and he’d perfected as best he could the art of going to bed without supper, or having supper without a bed to go to. His chef was named Luck and he often slept out at the Starry Night Hotel.

There were two things that Rodolphe never lost during these difficult times: his good humor and the manuscript of The Avenger, a play he’d written that had made the rounds of every theatre in Paris.

One day, having been transported to jail because of some staggering footsteps that were too strangely choreographed for public taste, Rodolphe found himself face to face with his uncle Monetti, a stove and chimney maker he hadn't seen for a very long time.

Touched by his nephew's troubles, Uncle Monetti promised to help him improve his situation and we will find out how—that is, if the reader isn't afraid to climb with us up the stairs, all the way to the sixth floor.

To begin, take hold of the banister and climb. Ooowh! One hundred and twenty-five steps. Here we are. One more step and we’re in the room. It's so small that if we take another step we won't be. It's small, but it's high up. Anyway, the air is good and there's a fine view.

The furniture consists of several Prussian-style fireplaces, two stoves—very economical stoves too, especially when there's nothing to burn in them—a dozen lengths of pipe, some terra cotta, some tin, and many other heating devices. To complete this inventory, the list also includes a hammock hanging from two nails in the wall, a garden chair with one amputated leg, a candlestick decorated with a ring to catch the wax, and various other objects of art and of fantasy.

As for the other room, it's a balcony, with two dwarf cyprus trees, in pots, transforming it into a park in the summer.

As we enter, the host of this establishment, a young man dressed in the costume of a Turk from a comic opera, is coming to the end of a meal that shamelessly violates the law of the prophet: a bottle that had once been full of wine stands next to the remains of what had once been a pork knuckle.

Play Within Play

The double replacement of Wagner's linguistic-and-musical songs with the equivalent linguistic words of Woolf's novel is mingled together in Jakobson's interlingual translation and intralingual translation. Jakobson and Waugh (1979) paved the way for the pseudo-critical line of thought as lived through the sound shape of language. The transduction of vocal songs and their meaning can be defined as the retranslation of singable and performable words from old to new code languages (dialects, idioms or jargons), while the music remains unchanged and untranslated. Vocal or operatic translation seeks to transform lyrical works into the new setting of a different language. The double replacement of sound is made by a specialized translator working in the mixed area of literature and musicology, which also involves knowledge of theater studies. The hypertranslation made by the musical-and-literary translator becomes a co-authoring of the source translation brought to another language or pseudo-language, meaning that the translator's role is upgraded from that of secondary interpreter of the source text to that of a primary target interpreter.

Transduction works independently on the translational work through the translator co-interpreting the thematic, space-time and conceptual qualities of the source text. These revolutionary construction methods are inspired by the brain processes of the translator. The translator changes the elastic wave of conduction into the energy wave of transduction. The speed of the waves travels from the gravity surface of water into the higher graphical waves of the ellipsis, parabole and hyperbole (Shipley 1968/1972, 270–275). These waves are layered with the private “differences” in personal and cultural choice that make the “variations” and “invariations” of the source text, reshaping the target text away from the source text. The vocal translator is in the mixed position of doing more than intellectually retranslating the verbal text into another language without touching the musical values of the text. The operatic singers reinterpret and transpose the sounds into a different key—the perfect wave to perform the song or aria as a medium between artist and listeners.

It was March 19th, and Rodolphe would never forget this date even if he lived to the ripe old age of M. Raoul-Rochette, who had personally witnessed the construction of Nineveh. For on this day, Saint Joseph's Day, at three o’clock in the afternoon, he made his way out of the bank where he had just taken possession of the sum of five hundred francs in cold hard cash.

The first thing Rodolphe did with this slice of Peru that had dropped into his pocket was to not pay his debts, although he did promise himself that he was going to live very frugally and not take on any more debt. His opinions on this matter were quite firm and he reasoned that before dreaming about luxuries, one had to take care of necessities. For this reason, he didn't pay any of his creditors, but he did purchase the Turkish pipe he’d long been coveting.

Armed with this new prize, he headed off to his friend Marcel's place, where he’d been staying for some time. As he walked into the studio, Rodolphe's pockets were ringing out like a village bell on a festival day. Hearing this unusual sound, Marcel thought it must be one of his neighbors, a market speculator, counting up his winnings. In a low voice, he grumbled, “It's that calculating neighbor of mine starting his counting rituals again. If this keeps up, I’ll give my notice and move. It impossible to get any work done with that racket going on. It's enough to make me consider giving up my role as starving artist and joining up with the forty thieves.” As he turned back to his painting of The Passage of the Red Sea, which had been on his easel for the last three years, it never crossed his mind that Rodolphe might have become as rich as Croesus.

Rodolphe, who hadn't yet said a word yet, was quietly plotting some fun with his friend. “Now we’ll have a good laugh,” he said to himself. “Oh my God, this’ll be good!” And he dropped a five franc coin onto the floor.

Marcel lifted his eyes and looked at Rodolphe, whose face was as serious as an article in the Revue des Deux Mondes.

In the first month of every season, there is a time of terror: it usually descends on the first or fifteenth of the month. Rodolphe faced the approach of these dates with fear and referred to them as the Cape of Storms. On these days, it isn't Aurora opening the Oriental gates of the East at sunrise but creditors, landlords, bailiffs and other bagmen. On these days, it all begins with a shower of rent notices and bills, and it concludes with a hailstorm of threatening legal documents. Dies iræ!

Now, on the morning of the 15th of April, Rodolphe was sleeping very peacefully and he dreamed that one of his uncles had bequeathed to him, in his will, a whole province in Peru—including the Peruvians.

As he plunged deep into the waters of this imaginary Pactolus,3 the sound of a key turning in his lock penetrated to interrupt the rightful heir at the most brilliant moment of his golden dream.

Rodolphe sat up on his bed, his eyes and mind still heavy with sleep, and he looked around.

Near the center of the room, he vaguely made out a man who had just come in. And what a man!

This early morning stranger wore a three-cornered hat, carried a money-bag on his back and held a large portfolio in his hand. He was wearing a suit in the French style, made of gray cloth and seemed completely out of breath after his climb up to the fifth floor. His demeanor was very affable and his footsteps sounded like a money changer's counter if it should ever begin to walk.

Seeing the three-cornered hat, Rodolphe had a moment of fear, thinking that he was looking at a policeman.

But seeing the money-bag, which seemed quite full, he realized his mistake.

“Oh, right,” he thought, “this must be a payment from my inheritance. The man must have come from the Indies … but then why isn't he black?” Then, gesturing to the man and pointing to the money-bag, he said, “I know what it is. Put it down over there.”

The man was a messenger from the Bank of France and, in response to Rodolphe's invitation, he placed before his eyes a small piece of paper covered with hieroglyphic figures and multicolored numbers.

“Would you like a receipt? That's fine, just pass me my pen and ink. Over there on the table.”