id of him, "have enabled him to learn to read by looking at the signs
in the streets, and to cipher by glancing at the numbers on the houses."

Murger always attributed a great deal of influence upon his life to the
accident which had given his father artists for tenants. Not only La
Blache, but Garcia and his incomparable daughters, Marie Malibran and
Pauline Viardot, and, after they left, Baroilhet, the opera-singer, had
rooms in the house. The handsome boy was constantly with them, and this
early and long and intimate association with Art gave him elegance and
grace and vivacity. The seeds sown during such intercourse may for years
lie buried beneath the cares and thoughts of a laborious life, and yet
grow and bring forth fruit as soon as a more propitious atmosphere
environs them. Comrades in the office where he wrote likewise had
influence upon his career. He found among the clerks two brothers,
Pierre and Emile Bisson, gentlemen who have now attained reputation by
their admirable photographic landscapes, especially of Alpine scenery.
They were then as poor and as uneducated as Henry Murger. They lived in
a house inhabited by several painters, from whom they caught a love and
some knowledge of Art. They communicated the contagion to their new
comrade, and the moment office-hours were over all three hastened, as
fast as they could go, to the nearest public drawing-school. All three
aspired to the fame of Rubens and of Paul Veronese. Murger had no talent
for painting. One day, after he had been guilty of some pictures which
are said to be--for they are still in existence--enough to make the hair
of a connoisseur of painting stand on end, Pierre Bisson said to him,
"Throw away the pencil, Murger; you will never make a painter." Murger
accepted the decree without appeal. He felt that painting was not _in
him_.[B] He took up the pen and wrote poetry. There is nothing equal to
the foolhardiness of youth. It grapples with the most difficult
subjects, and _knows_ it can master them. As all of Murger's friends
were painters, except his father and mother, and they were illiterate,
his insane prose seemed as fine poetry as was ever written, because it
turned somersets on feet. Nobody noticed whether it was on five or six
or fifteen feet. His father, however, had heard what a dangerous disease
of the purse poetry was, and forbade his son from trying to catch
it,--vowing, that, if he heard again of its continued pursuit, he would