the soul soars in her native majes"----

I was declaiming with fire, my enthusiasm was becoming more and more
heated, when Henry Murger interrupted me by asking,--"Do you think
Monsieur Buloz will pay me in advance?"

This question produced on my missionary's enthusiasm the same effect a
tub of cold water would have upon an excited poodle-dog.

"Monsieur Murger," I replied, without being too much disconcerted, "you
will arrange those details with Monsieur Buloz. All I can do is to
introduce you."

We reached the office. I was afraid I might embarrass Monsieur Buloz and
Monsieur Murger, if I remained with them; I therefore took a book and
went into the garden. I was called back in twenty minutes, and was
briefly told that Henry Murger had engaged to write a novel for the
"Revue." We went out together; but we had scarcely passed three doors,
when Murger said hurriedly to me,--"I beg your pardon, I have forgotten
something!"--and he went back to the office. I afterwards found out
that this "something" was an advance of money which he asked for upon a
novel whose first syllable he had not yet written.

If I dwell upon these miserable details, it is not (God forbid!) to
insult laborious poverty, or talent forced to struggle against the
hardships of life or the embarrassments of improvident, careless youth.
No,--but there was here, and this is the reason I speak of it, the
_trade-mark_ of that literary living-by-the wits which had taken entire
possession of Henry Murger, against which he had struggled in vain all
his life long, and which at last crushed him in its feverish grasp.
Living by the wits was to Henry Murger what _roulette_ is to the
gambler, what brandy is to the drunkard, what the traps of the police
are to the knave and the burglar: he cursed it, but he could not quit
it; he lived in it, he lived by it, he died of it. The first time I
talked with Murger, and every subsequent conversation I had with him,
brought up money incessantly, in every tone, in every form; and when,
having become more familiar with what he called my squeamishness, he
talked more frankly to me, I saw that he required to support him a sum
of money three times greater than the annual income of which a whole
family of office-holders in the country, or even in Paris, live with
ease. This brought on him protests, bailiffs, constables, incredible
complications, continual uneasiness, a hankering after pecuniary
success, eternal complaints aga