r with rolls and a herring for their meal. They have a wild time
and are dancing and singing when Musetta enters and tells them that
Mimi is outside so weak and ill that she can go no further. They make
up a bed on the couch for her and bring her in. She clings to Rudolph
and implores him not to leave her. Mimi reconciles Marcel and Musetta.
Musetta tells her old friends that Mimi is dying and gives them her
earrings to sell, asking them to get a doctor for Mimi. They all go
out leaving Rudolph alone with Mimi. He holds her in his arms and
recalls their love. Mimi is seized with a fit of coughing and falls
back in a faint. Musetta returns with medicine. Mimi regains
consciousness and turning to Rudolph tells him of her love. Musetta
falls upon her knees in prayer and Mimi passes away in Rudolph's arms.

_...rain or dust, cold or heat, nothing stops these bold adventurers.

Their existence of every day is a work of genius, a daily problem
which they always contrive to solve with the aid of bold mathematics.

When want presses them, abstemious as anchorites--but, if a little
fortune falls into their hands, see them ride forth on the most
ruinous fancies, loving the fairest and youngest, drinking the oldest
and best wines, and not finding enough windows whence to throw their
money; then--the last crown dead and buried--they begin again to dine
at the table d'hote of chance, where their cover is always laid;
smugglers of all the industries which spring from art; in chase, from
morning till night, of that wild animal which is called the crown.

"Bohemia" has a special dialect, a distinct jargon of its own. This
vocabulary is the hell of rhetoric and the paradise of neologism_.

_A gay life; yet a terrible one_!

(Il. MURGER, preface to "Vie de Boheme")[1]

[Footnote 1: Rather than follow MURGER'S novel step by step, the
authors of the present libretto, both for reasons of musical and
dramatic effect, have sought to derive inspiration from the French
writer's admirable preface.

Although they have faithfully portrayed the characters, even
displaying a certain fastidiousness as to sundry local details; albeit
in the scenic development of the opera they have followed Murger's
method of dividing the libretto into four separate acts, in the
dramatic and comic episodes they have claimed that ample and entire
freedom of action, which, rightly or wrongly, they deemed necessary to
the proper scenic presentment of a