The Bohemians

INTRODUCTION

introduction Robert Darnton While the marquis de Sade was drafting The 120 Days of Sodom in the Bastille, another libertine marquis in a nearby cell was writing another novel—one equally outrageous, full of sex and slander, and more revealing for what it had to say about the conditions of writers and writing itself. Yet Sade’s neighbor, the marquis de Pelleport, is completely unknown today, and his novel, Les Boh émiens, has nearly vanished. Only a half-dozen copies are available in libraries throughout the world. This edition, the first since 1790, makes a major work of eighteenth-century libertinism accessible, and it also opens a window into the world of garret poets, literary adventurers, down-and-out philosophers, and Grub Street hacks. More than a century before La Bohème, it shows how bohemianism came into being. Bohemianism belongs to the Belle Epoque. Puccini set it to music and fixed it firmly in late nineteenth-century Paris. But La Bohème, first performed in 1896, looked back to an earlier era, the pre-Haussmann Paris of Henry Murger’s Scènes de la vie de Bohème (Scenes from Life in Bohemia) first published in 1848. Murger drew on themes that echoed from the Paris of Balzac’s Illusions perdues (Lost Illusions, first part published in 1837), and Balzac’s imagination stretched back to the Ancien Régime, where it all began. But how did it begin? The earliest bohemians inhabited a rich cultural landscape, which has never been explored. In the eighteenth century, the term Bohémiens generally referred to the inhabitants of Bohemia or, by extension, to Gypsies (Romany), but it had begun to acquire a figurative meaning, which denoted drifters who lived by their wits.1 Many pretended to be men of letters.2 In fact, by 1789, France had developed an enormous population of indigent authors—672 poets alone, ac- x introduction cording to one contemporary estimate.3 Most of them lived down and out in Paris, surviving as best they could by hack work and scraps of patronage. Although they crossed paths with grisettes like Manon Lescaut, there was nothing romantic or operatic about their lives. They lived like Rameau’s nephew, not Rameau. Their world was bounded by Grub Street. Of course, Grub Street, both as an expression and as a milieu, refers to London. The street itself, which ran through the miserable, crime-infested ward of Cripplegate, had attracted hack writers since Elizabethan times. By the eighteenth century, the hacks had moved to other addresses, most of them closer to the bookshops, coffeehouses, and theaters of St. Paul’s Churchyard, Fleet Street, Drury Lane, and Covent Garden. But the Grub-Street Journal (1730–1737) perpetuated a mythical version of the milieu, and the myth continued to spread through works like Alexander Pope’s Dunciad, John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera, Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, Jonathan Swift’s Tale of a Tub, and Samuel Johnson’s Life of Mr. Richard Savage. Did nothing comparable exist in Paris? Certainly—Paris had an even larger population of scribblers, but they were scattered in garrets throughout the city, not in any distinct neighborhood, and they never dramatized or satirized their lot in works that captured the imagination of posterity.4 True, Diderot’s Neveu de Rameau (Rameau ’s Nephew), Voltaire’s Pauvre Diable (Poor Devil), and parts of Rousseau’s Confessions evoked the life of Grub Street, Paris, and Paris’s Scriblerian culture permeates less-known works such as Mercier’s Tableau de Paris.5 Yet not before Balzac and Murger did any writer bring la Bohème to life— no one, that is, except the marquis de Pelleport. His novel, published in two volumes in 1790, deserves to be rescued from oblivion, because it provides an inside tour of the most colorful but least familiar zones of literary life. It is also a very good read. I believe it deserves a place next to, or on a shelf just below, the masterpieces that inspired it: Don Quixote and Tristram Shandy—and I would place it several shelves above the works of Sade. But readers will judge for themselves. Thanks to a superb translation by Vivian Folkenflik, they now have access to Pelleport’s novel in an English version that conveys all the wit and brio of the original. But first, a warning: in recommending The Bohemians, I may be succumbing to a case of biographical enthusiasm. I stumbled upon the book while trying...