. 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 drinking. I was born with
a dainty tooth and a palate for wine; and only a genuine devotion to
romance could have supported me under the cat-civets that I had to
swallow, and the red ink of Bercy I must wash them down withal. Every
now and again, after a hard day at the studio, where I was steadily and
far from unsuccessfully industrious, a wave of distaste would overbear
me; I would slink away from my haunts and companions, indemnify myself
for weeks of self-denial with fine wines and dainty dishes; seated
perhaps on a terrace, perhaps in an arbour in a garden, with a volume
of one of my favourite authors propped open in front of me, and now
consulted awhile, and now forgotten:--s