From Gérard's death, which Gustave Doré made more hideous in a ghoulish picture, it is a long cry back to the Impasse du Doyenné and the Pompadour _salon_ of which he was the discoverer. Yet I will end this chapter, as it was begun, with this once festive haunt. Not long did it outlive its Bohemian colony. The landlord, explosively wrathful at the sight of the wall paintings, at once covered the mess, as he no doubt called it, with a coating of distemper. The treasures might, even then, have been saved in part, had anyone but Gérard de Nerval bought from the demolishers Corot's panels, the pictures by Wattier, Chassériau, and Châtillon, and Rogier's portraits of Cydalise and Théophile Gautier. His hand was one to baulk destiny only for a little. This moonstruck captain of a rickety craft let his cargo fall needlessly into the seas while he contemplated the stars and allowed the waves to swing the rudder. So passed _la Bohème galante_, leaving only a gilded legend. IX SCHAUNARD AND COMPANY _La Bohème carottière et geignarde d'Henry Murger_ ... LEPELLETIER: "Verlaine" To follow the heroes into exile would be depressing as well as unprofitable. It is better to stand respectfully aside from the _Götterdämmerung_ and wait till Bohemia emerges again from the mists, when a lapse of years has wrought some patent changes, for it is easier to contemplate a result than to trace a process. By leaping forward some ten years from the dispersal of the brotherhood that sanctified by its presence the Impasse du Doyenné it is possible to steal a march on Time and anticipate with a rapid glance his changing hand. Yet to catch this later view it is necessary for the nonce to abandon the world of flesh and blood and to turn from the acts and reminiscences of actual mortals to the imaginary scenes and fictitious characters of a book of stories. The tide of life was too strong upon Théophile Gautier and Arsène Houssaye for them to pause and stamp out firmly the features of those precious days in _la Bohème galante_; they only caught fugitive impressions in retrospect. Henry Murger, less prodigal because less endowed, crystallized as it passed a moment of Bohemia, the Bohemia of common mortality, in "Scènes de la Vie de Bohème." As a confectioner encloses a fresh grape in a transparent coat of candied sugar, so he, even while he tasted, sour and sweet, the fruit of his days, caught stray berries in a light film of art and presented them as dessert to the readers of the _Corsaire_, a small but amusing journal. Sharp and savoury as they were, Time would have destroyed them, as he destroyed the ambrosial lusciousness of the Doyenné feasts, but for that light film. Nobody remembers reminiscences, but a well-told story preserves even the most trivial events.