immediately make a tailor of him. Of course, the threat did not deter
Murger from the chase; but instead of pursuing it openly, he pursued it
by stealth. The sportsman became a poacher. Pierre and Emile Bisson
quitted the attorney's office and opened a studio: they were painters
now. Henry Murger managed to filch an hour every day from the time
allotted to the errands of the office about Paris to spend in the studio
of his friends, where he would write his poetry and hide his
manuscripts. Here he made the acquaintance of artists and literary young
men as unfledged as himself, but who possessed the advantages of a
regular scholastic education. They taught him the rules of prosody and
the exercises proper to overcome the mere mechanical difficulties of
versification. This society made Murger more than ever ambitious; a
secret instinct told him that the pen was the arm with which he would
win fame and fortune. He determined to abandon the law-office.

His father was furious enough at this resolution, and more than one
painful scene took place between them. The boy was within an ace of
bring kicked out of doors, when his troubles reached the ears of a
literary tenant of the house: this was no other than Monsieur de Jouy, a
member of the French Academy, and quite famous in his day for "L'Ermite
de la Chaussee d'Antin," and a tragedy, "Sylla," which Talma's genius
threw such beams upon as made it radiant, and for an imprisonment for
political offences, a condiment without which French reputations seem to
lack savor. Heaven knows what would have become of the poor boy but for
this intervention, as his mother was dead and he was all friendless.
Monsieur de Jouy procured him the place of private secretary to Count
Tolstoy, a Russian nobleman established by the Czar in Paris as his
political correspondent. The salary given was meagre enough, but in this
world all things have a relative as well as an intrinsic value, and
eight dollars a month seemed to the poor lad, who had never yet earned
a cent, a fragment of El Dorado or of Peru. It gave him independence.
His contemporaries have described him as gay, free, easy, and happy at
this period. He had ceased to be dependent upon anybody; he lived upon
his own earnings; he was in the full bloom of health and youth; and the
horizon before him, even though clouded, wore all the colors of the
rainbow. His father gave him a garret in the house, and continued to
allow him a seat at the ta