Bohemians of the Latin Quarter, The

Henri Murger, The Bohemians of the Latin Quarter. Trans. Ellen Marriage and John Selwyn. Introduction by Maurice Samuels. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. Pp. xxxiv + 392.

Henri Murger's The Bohemians of the Latin Quarter, first published as Scènes de la vie de bohème in France in 1851, is an important book to have available in English translation for several reasons: it is valuable as an account of nineteenth-century Parisian culture, for studies of the position of the artist in modern, urban societies, and its popularity among English-speaking readers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries makes it central to British and American cultural studies as well. The novel is a collection of stories that first appeared serially in Le Corsaire-Satan from 1845-1849. Murger is not known for being a great writer-his prose is often clumsy and he has the tendency to repeat details, even within the same sketch-but he succeeded in capturing a moment of youth that continues to intrigue readers today. This reprint of Marriage and Selwyn's 1901 translation offers a glimpse of the English reader's introduction to Bohemia at what was perhaps the height of its renown, just a few years after the appearance of Puccini's 1896 opera, La Bohème, which was based on Murger's stories. Puccini chose the subject due to its continued popularity, and was in fact in competition with another composer, Ruggero Leoncavallo, who was at work on the same subject.

Murger's sketches portray specific conditions of nineteenth-century Paris, for example the positions of the artist, student, and grisette, the combination of materialism and poverty that they balanced, and the spectacle that they performed in an urban setting where private and public spaces overlapped. As Maurice Samuels points out in his introduction to this edition, this book is valuable for what it tells us about the material conditions of the artist in the mid-nineteenth century, including what it costs to survive at a bare minimum and how these examples of the thousands of aspiring artists in Paris at the time lived day to day. This novel also contains a number of stereotypes and problems that surround the life of the modern artist both in nineteenth-century Paris and today: how to maintain artistic integrity and survive financially under com-mercial market conditions, and how to be productive while leading the life of an artist. Further, the concept of bohemia as a place and the bohemian as an urban personality are central to the modern cultural imagination and how modern subjects envision their place in society.

Murger's tales of bohemian life describe the fraternity of four young artists: a painter, a writer, a musician, and a philosopher. The plots center on their love lives, their precarious existence (they rarely knew when or where their next meal would appear), their extravagance whenever they did earn money, their disdain for all things bourgeois, and the cafés they patronized. The romances between Rodolphe and Mimi and Marcel and Musette are the most famous of Murger's sketches because of Puccini's opera; however, the late moment in which they appear in the novel shows that they are not the foundational influences of bohemian life. It is rather the community of artists and impetuous antics that are the most important elements of bohemia.

Though Murger did not invent the bohemian-the expression had been used by the popular press in Paris since at least 1834 to describe young, unconventional students and artists-he is responsible for the most enduring cultural representation of this figure that continues to entertain the popular imagination. Many important French novels of the nineteenth century feature bohemian characters (Balzac's Illusions perdues, Flaubert's L'Education sentimentale), but none inspired readers to sample bohemian life for themselves to the extent that Murger's work did. Murger's bohemian sketches were possibly more influential on English speakers than on their original, French audience, for it had a tangible effect on tourism in the form of British and American visitors to France, who certainly did their part to distribute and aggrandize the myth of bohemian life. Memoirs abound of American and British visitors in Paris who discuss their experiences with "la vie de bohème," often liberally borrowing from Murger's stories. Bohemia had become so symbolic of Paris that tourists could not claim to have "seen" Paris without stopping in on Bohemia.

The English speaker's fascination with Paris as a physical location that might be visited is reflected in the significant change in the title of the English translation, "Bohemians of the Latin Quarter." Not only does the French title not refer in any way to the Latin Quarter, but the Latin Quarter is only referenced three times in the book, and most of the locations specified in the text (including the Café Momus, which Murger made so famous that, according to legend, it was soon overrun by tourists and local curiosity seekers in search of bohemians) are on the right bank.