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 drinking. I was born with

a dainty tooth and a palate for wine; and only a genuine devotion to

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