delighted to escape
out of a somewhat dreary house and plunge instead into the rainbow city
of Paris. Every man has his own romance; mine clustered exclusively
about the practice of the arts, the life of Latin Quarter students, and
the world of Paris as depicted by that grimy wizard, the author of the
_Comedie Humaine_. I was not disappointed--I could not have been; for I
did not see the facts, I brought them with me ready-made. Z. Marcas
lived next door to me in my ungainly, ill-smelling hotel of the Rue
Racine; I dined at my villainous restaurant with Lousteau and with
Rastignac: if a curricle nearly ran me down at a street-crossing, Maxime
de Trailles would be the driver. I dined, I say, at a poor restaurant
and lived in a poor hotel; and this was not from need, but sentiment. My
father gave me a profuse allowance, and I might have lived (had I
chosen) in the Quartier de l'Etoile and driven to my studies daily. Had
I done so, the glamour must have fled: I should still have been but
Loudon Dodd; whereas now I was a Latin Quarter student, Murger's
successor, living in flesh and blood the life of one of those romances I
had loved to read, to re-read, and to dream over, among the woods of
Muskegon.

At this time we were all a little Murger-mad in the Latin Quarter. The
play of the _Vie de Boheme_ (a dreary, snivelling piece) had been
produced at the Odeon, had run an unconscionable time--for Paris--and
revived the freshness of the legend. The same business, you may say, or
there and thereabout, was being privately enacted in consequence in
every garret of the neighbourhood, and a good third of the students were
consciously impersonating Rodolphe or Schaunard, to their own
incommunicable satisfaction. Some of us went far, and some farther. I
always looked with awful envy (for instance) on a certain countryman of
my own who had a studio in the Rue Monsieur le Prince, wore boots, and
long hair in a net, and could be seen tramping off, in this guise, to
the worst eating-house of the quarter, followed by a Corsican model, his
mistress, in the conspicuous costume of her race and calling. It takes
some greatness of soul to carry even folly to such heights as these; and
for my own part, I had to content myself by pretending very arduously to
be poor, by wearing a smoking-cap on the streets, and by pursuing,
through a series of misadventures, that extinct mammal the grisette. The
most grievous part was the eating and the drinkin