e fear that he would lose during his absence his wretched
place as Count Tolstoy's secretary, and which, wretched as it was,
nevertheless was something,--was as a plank in the great ocean to one
who, it gone, saw nothing but water around him, and he no swimmer. He
did lose the situation, because one day he stayed at home to finish a
poem, instead of appearing at his desk. The misfortune came at the worst
possible time. It came when he owed two quarters' rent, fifteen dollars,
to his landlord, and ten dollars to other people. "I am half dead of
hunger. I am at the end of the rope. I must get a place somewhere, or
blow my brains out." The mental anguish and physical privation brought
back the _purpura_. He went to the hospital,--for the fifth time in
eleven months and seven days,--all his furniture was sold for rent, and
he knew not where he was to go when he quitted the hospital. Yet he did
not give up in despair. "Notwithstanding all this, I declare to you, my
dear friend," he wrote, "that, when I feel somewhat satisfied with what
I have written, I am ready to clap my hands at life.... Everything is
against me, and yet I shall none the less remain in the arena. The wild
beasts may devour me: so be it!"

After leaving the hospital, he formed the acquaintance of Monsieur Jules
Fleury, or, as he is better known to the world of letters, Monsieur
Champfleury,--for, with that license the French take with their names,
so this rising novelist styles himself. This acquaintance was of great
advantage to Henry Murger. Monsieur Champfleury was a young man of
energy and will, who took a practical view of life, and believed that a
pen could in good hands earn bread as well as a yardstick, and command,
what the latter cannot hope, fame. He believed that independence was
the first duty of a literary man, and that true dignity consists in
diligent labor rather than in indolent railing at fate and the scoffings
of "uncomprehended" genius. Monsieur Champfleury was no poet. He
detested poetry, and his accurate perception of the world showed him
that poetry is a good deal like paper money, which depends for its
current value rather upon the credit possessed by the issuer than upon
its own intrinsic value. He pressed Murger to abandon poetry and take to
prose. He was successful, and Murger labored to acquire bread and
reputation by his prose-compositions. He practised his hand in writing
vaudevilles, dramas, tales, and novels, and abandoned p