beer.

Henry Murger's gratitude, whenever we met, continued to exhale in
enthusiastic hymns. I lost sight of him for some time. I was told that
he lived somewhere in the Forest of Fontainebleau, to escape his
creditors' pursuit. At the critical moment of my literary life, I read
one morning in a petty newspaper a biting burlesque of which I was the
grotesque hero: I figured (my name was given in full) as a member of a
temperance society, whose members were pledged to total abstinence from
the use of ideas, wit, and style; at one of our monthly dinners, we were
said to have devoured Balzac at the first course, De Beranger for the
roast, Michelet for a side-dish, and George Sand for dessert. The next
day, and every day the petty paper appeared, the joke was renewed with
all sorts of variations. It was evidently a "rig" run on me. This joke
was signed every day "Marcel," which was the name of one of the heroes
of Henry Murger's novel, "La Vie de Boheme"; but I was very far indeed
from thinking that the man who was under so many "obligations" to me (as
Henry Murger always declared himself to be) should have joined the ranks
of my persecutors. A few days afterwards I heard, on the best authority,
that Henry Murger was the author of these articles. I felt a deep
chagrin at this discovery. Literary men constantly call Philistines and
Prudhommes those who lay great stress upon the absence of moral sense as
one of the great defects of the school of literature and art to which
Murger and his friends belong; and yet there should be a name for such
conduct as this, if for no other reason, for the sake of the culprits
themselves,--as, when poor Murger acted in this way to me, he was as
unconscious of what he did as when he raised heaven and earth to hunt
down a dollar. He was not guilty of a black heart, it was only absolute
deficiency of everything like moral sense. Henry Murger was under
obligations to me, as he said constantly; I had introduced and
recommended him to a man and a magazine that are, as of right, difficult
in the choice of their contributors; I had, for his sake, conquered
their prejudices, borne their reproaches. Whenever his novels appeared,
I treated them with indulgence, and gave them praise without examining
too particularly into their moral tendency, to the great scandal of my
usual readers, and despite the scoldings Monsieur Louis Veuillot gave
me. There never was the least coolness between Henry Murger and