Walking a Lobster: Birth of La Bohème

bohemianism

Living a life of l’art pour l’art, flaunting conventions, embracing poverty and rejecting bourgeois values and comforts.

Part 1
Walking a Lobster: Birth of la Bohème 

In the 1830s, the poet Gerard de Nerval attached a blue silk leash to his pet lobster Thibault and walked him through the gardens of the Palais Royal. It is difficult today to appreciate the significance of this gesture. At the time, de Nerval, a poet’s poet among the young Parisian literati, was (with the participation of Thibault the lobster) making a shocking artistic and social statement. 

De Nerval was a bohemian.

This podcast was created by Roger Mummert for www.theparisproject.net.  

Transcript

bohemianism

Living a life of l’art pour l’art, flaunting conventions, embracing poverty and rejecting bourgeois values and comforts.

This podcast is part of theparisproject.net, an exploration of Paris as a City of Ideas. I’m Roger Mummert.

Part 1
Walking a Lobster: Birth of la Bohème 

In the 1830s, the poet Gerard de Nerval attached a blue silk leash to his pet lobster Thibault and walked him through the gardens of the Palais Royal. It is difficult today to appreciate the significance of this gesture. At the time, de Nerval, a poet’s poet among the young Parisian literati, was (with the participation of Thibault the lobster) making a shocking artistic and social statement. 

De Nerval was a bohemian. And as he told his friend and fellow bohemian poet Théophile Gautier: “Why should a lobster be any more ridiculous than a dog? ...or a cat, or a gazelle, or a lion, or any other animal that one chooses to take for a walk?”

Bohemianism rivals the Eiffel Tower as a symbol of Paris. Any young writer of literary ambition journeys to Paris for a bohemian apprenticeship. Live in a garret in the Quartier Latin, stroll the boulevards day and night, count up your change for a meager meal—and just write, freed from all worries, simply open a vein and let the ink bleed out in French bleu. 

The list Is long of those entranced by Bohemian Paris: Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, George Orwell, Henry Miller, James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, Patti Smith….

The lure of Bohemian is expressed in the song “Midnight in Paris” by the Unholy Modal Rounders:

“Come live the daring…bohemian life in Paris!

Life is short, art is long…Every day is a song,

Toujours, l’amour!”

Mais oui! Anyone with an airline ticket and some recollection of their high school French can be a Bohemian! And every Bohemian is indebted in some measure to a group of young writers in the 1830s who dedicated their lives to art, drunken revelry, and outrageous antics intended to shock and dismay the bourgeoisie. Naked parties, Renaissance garb, swords twirled aloft, drawings of naked women on walls, punch sipped from human skulls, and pipefuls of hashish to fuel poetic visions of darkness, death and damnation. 

Alors…what a group these Ur-Bohemians. They first were known as le Petite Cénacle, then les Jeunes France, then les Bouzingos, finally as La Bohème de Doyenné. The sum of their writing was sizable if not particularly memorable, but their bizarre lifestyle and belligerent attitude delights and inspires to this day. 

Here is a partial lineup of the founders of Bohemia:

Gerard de Nerval, who lived half in life /half in dreams. Of this entire group, his literary influence has been the most profound and sustained.

“Our dreams are a second life…the spirit world opens before us.”

Théophile Gautier, an unrepentant romantic, an abadonée who gave himself over to romantic ballets and ballerinas. 

“Brother, you ask me if I have ever loved. Yes. My story is a strange and terrible one…I scarcely dare to disturb the ashes of that memory.” 

Petrus Borel, le Lycanthrope or Wolfman. He was the ringleader, the sun around which the planets revolved. He resembled a Spanish nobleman, dressed all in black from boots to sombrero.

“Death to the Academy! Death to the Schools! Death to the University! We shall throw down our arms only when we have built for the Académie des Beaux Arts a grave with stones torn from the Palais des Quatre Nations!” 

Arsene Houssaye, l’enfant de la Boheme, just 17 when he arrived in Paris and fell in with this wild bunch. He later became a publisher and prospered.

“Have you not sometimes seen happiness? Yes, the happiness of others.”

Roger de Beauvoir, resplendent in a gold brocaded Venetian robe, pink waistcoat, red trousers, lilac gloves. His poetic contributions were sadly limited by his thirst for nightlife and Champagne. It was said of him: Every day he was drunk on wit and Champagne. 

Camile Rogier, an accomplished artist who favored Turkish robes and played host to it all in an enormous and dilapidated salon with a baroque-décor that became the Bohemian’s clubhouse.

No matter their differences, the Bohemians shared a common contempt for the bourgeoisie and all things bourgeois. 

“Épater la bourgeoisie,” was the Bohemian creed: shock, scandalize, flabbergast the bourgeois.

“A bourgeois…is someone not initiated in the arts and does not understand them.” —Théophile Gautier

Of course, the bourgeois returned the love: They denigrated Bohemians as listless, would-be artists, as empty of talent and ambition as they were full of wine and immaturity. 

From the very start, Bohemia was cloaked in myth and a kind of psycho-geography. Here are some definitions of Bohemia:

“An identifiable country with visible inhabitants, not marked on any map. To trace its frontiers was to cross constantly back and forth between reality and fantasy."— Gerald Siegel, author of Bohemian Paris

“Bohemia lies in a twilight zone between ingenuity and criminality.”

—Henri Murger, author of “Scenes de la Vie de Bohème”

“Bordered on the north by the cold, on the west by hunger, on the south by love, and on the east by hope.” —La Silhouette

“Bordered on the north by need, on the south by misery, on the east by illusion, and on the west by the infirmary.” 

—Alphonse de Calonne, royalist, founder of Le Revue Contemporaine

“…the whole domain of the unemployed, the debauched, and the useless…all this belongs to the realm of Bohemia.” — Gabriel Guillemot, La Bohème  

As to the characteristics of the Bohemian:

“Bohemians are defects of modern life.”

—Edmond and Jules Goncourt, noted anti-Bohemians 

“A Bohemian is a person with no occupation but who performs 50 professions.” —Eugene Sue, author of “Mysteries of Paris”

Indeed, Bohemia exists a bit in the ether, and its inhabitants live a paradox: 

“Those who wish to live in Bohemia idealize it; those who have lived in it boast of it, and those who might have lived in it, but did not, pretend that they did. Yet those who wish to live in it know nothing of it, and those who lived in it, for all their boasting, have left it. It seems to take place, like a mirage, only in prospect and retrospect.”—Orlo Williams, author of “Vie de Boheme”

A fond remembrance of Bohemian life is found in Charles Aznevour’s most famous song:

“La Bohème, la Bohème

On était jeunes, on était fous” (We were young, we were crazy)

To this day, the myth prevails of Bohemia and the Bohemian, with Paris as its eternal home:

“There will never be a last bohemian so long as there are poets living in Paris.” — Arsenne Houssaye