e,
sombre, pitiless, fatal, as it is in reality. A little patience, and
misery will come, in its gaunt, wolf-like shape, to harry and to harass.
Play not with fire!

Distress soon came. The young poet fell into bad company. He came home
late one night. His father scolded: 'tis a porter's infirmity to fret at
late-comers. Another night he came home later. The scolding became a
philippic. Again he did not come home at all. His father ordered him
never more to darken his doors. Murger took him at his word, and went to
share a friend's bed in another garret. The friend was little better off
in worldly goods; he lived in a chamber for which he paid twenty dollars
a year, and which was furnished "with one of those lots of furniture
which are the terror of landlords, especially when quarter-day comes."
Murger now began to know what it was to be poor, to go to bed without
having tasted a morsel of food the whole day, to be dressed ludicrously
shabby. He had never before known these horrors of poverty; for under
his father's roof the meals, though humble, were always regularly
served, and quarter-day never came. As eight dollars,--less by a great
deal than an ordinary servant earns by sweeping rooms and washing
dishes, besides being fed and lodged,--which Count Tolstoy gave his
secretary, was not enough to enable Murger to live, he tried to add
something to his income by his pen. He wrote petty tales for children's
magazines, and exerted himself to gain admission into other and more
profitable periodicals, but for a long time without success. Many and
many a sheet must be blotted before the apprentice-writer can merit even
the lowest honors of print: can it be called an honor to see printed
lines forgotten before the book is closed? Yet even this dubious honor
cannot be won until after days and nights have been given to literary
composition.

Murger was for some time uncertain what course to adopt. His father sent
him word that the best thing he could do would be to get the place of
body-servant to some gentleman or of waiter in some _cafe_! He himself
half determined, in his hours of depression, when despair was his only
hope, to ship as a sailor on board some man-of-war. He would at other
times return to his first love, and vow he would be a painter; then
music would solicit him; medicine next, and then surgery would tangle
his eyes. These excursions, which commonly lasted three months each,
were not fruitless; they increase