d his stock of information, and
supplied him with some of his most striking images. He became joyous
about this period, and his hilarity _broke out_ all at once. One night
Count Tolstoy had ordered Murger to color several thousand strategic
maps, and, after he had postponed the labor repeatedly, he asked several
of his friends to aid him. They sat up all night. He suddenly became
very gay, and told story after story in a most vivid and humorous
manner. His friends roared with laughter, and one of them begged him to
abandon poetry and become a prose-writer, predicting for him a most
brilliant career. But poetry has its peculiar fascinations, and is not
relinquished without painful throes. Murger refused to cease versifying.

He had pernicious habits of labor. He never rose until three o'clock in
the afternoon, and never began to write until after the lamp was
lighted. He wrote until daybreak. If sleep came, if inspiration lagged,
he would resort to coffee, and drink it in enormous quantities. One may
turn night into day without great danger, upon condition of leading a
temperate and regular life; for Nature has wonderful power of adapting
herself to all circumstances, upon condition that irregularity itself he
regular in its irregularity. He fell into this habit from poverty. He
was too poor to buy fuel and comfortable clothes, so he lay in bed to
keep warm; he worked in bed,--reading, writing, correcting, buried under
the comfortable bedclothes. He would sometimes drink "as many as six
ounces of coffee." "I am literally killing myself," he said. "You must
care me of drinking coffee; I reckon upon you." His room-mate suggested
to him that they should close the windows, draw the curtains, and light
the lamp in the daytime, to deceive habit by counterfeiting night. They
made the attempt in vain. The roar of a great city penetrates through
wall and curtain. They could not work. Inspiration ceased to flow.
Murger returned to his protracted vigils, and to the stimulus of coffee,
and never more attempted to break away from them. This sort of life, his
frequent privations, his innumerable disappointments, drove him in good
earnest to the hospital. He announces it in this way to a friend:--

"_Hospital Saint Louis, 23 May, 1842_.

"MY DEAR FRIEND,--Here I am again at the hospital. Two days after
I sent you my last letter I woke up feeling as if my whole body
were on fire. I felt as if I were enveloped in flames.