ned four and twenty that Rodolphe was
suddenly smitten with the passion that had such an influence upon his
life. At the time he met Mimi he was leading that broken and fantastic
existence that we have tried to describe in the preceding chapters of
this book. He was certainly one of the gayest endurers of poverty in the
world of Bohemia. When in course of the day he had made a poor dinner
and a smart remark, he walked more proudly in his black coat (pleading
for help through every gaping seam) along the pavement that often
promised to be his only resting place for the night, than an emperor in
his purple robe. In the group amongst whom Rodolphe lived, they
affected, after a fashion common enough amongst some young fellows, to
treat love as a thing of luxury, a pretext for jesting. Gustave Colline,
who had for a long time past been in intimate relations with a waistcoat
maker, whom he was rendering deformed in mind and body by obliging her
to sit day and night copying the manuscripts of his philosophical works,
asserted that love was a kind of purgative, good to take at the
beginning of each season in order to get rid of humors. Amidst all these
false sceptics Rodolphe was the only one who dared to talk of love with
some reverence, and when they had the misfortune to let him harp on
this string, he would go on for an hour plaintively wurbling elegies on
the happiness of being loved, the deep blue of the peaceful lake, the
song of the breeze, the harmony of the stars, &c., &c. This mania had
caused him to be nicknamed the harmonica by Schaunard. Marcel had also
made on this subject a very neat remark when, alluding to the
Teutonically sentimental tirades of Rodolphe and to his premature
calvity, he called him the bald forget-me-not. The real truth was this.
Rodolphe then seriously believed he had done with all things of youth
and love; he insolently chanted a _De profundis_ over his heart, which
he thought dead when it was only silent, yet still ready to awake, still
accessible to joy, and more susceptible than ever to all the sweet pangs
that he no longer hoped for, and that were now driving him to despair.
You would have it, Rodolphe, and we shall not pity you, for the disease
from which you are suffering is one of those we long for most, above all
when we know that we are cured of it forever.

Rodolphe then met Mimi, whom he had formerly known when she was the
mistress of one of his friends; and he made her his own. The