Murger[28] was no son of a landed proprietor nor even sprung from a middle-class family, as most Bohemians naturally were, for the whole life of Bohemia presupposes a more or less literary education seldom vouchsafed to the children of lower social order. His father was a German tailor in the Rue des Trois Frères, who wished, not without reason, that his son should succeed him in his trade. Murger's early education was therefore confined to the rudiments, and his deficiencies in that respect were a burden upon him all his life. The career of a tailor, for all that, aroused his utmost aversion; through his two friends, Emile and Pierre Bisson, who became clerks, he acquired a violent taste for poetry, with the composition of which he judged the shears incompatible. His father took the rebellion hardly, but got him a place, since he liked pens and paper so much, as errand-boy to an _avoué_, an occupation in which he continued to cultivate his poetic inclinations. When seventeen years old, in 1839, through the interest of M. de Jouy, a critic and member of the Academy, he was appointed secretary to a Russian diplomat, M. de Tolstoi. His salary was only 40 francs a month, out of which he had to pay a small _pension_ to his father for board and lodging; still, he was happy. His duties were very light, and his employer, who also had a literary turn, took a certain amount of interest in him and gave him occasional presents of money. During the next two years he made the acquaintance of that group of friends on which he drew for his stories of Bohemia, and experienced two love affairs. The first object of his affections was "la cousine Angèle," the heroine of a chapter in "Scènes de la Vie de Bohème," in which Rodolphe in his draughty garret, by dint of burning his great tragedy in the stove, warms himself sufficiently to write the commemorative poem for the tombstone of a defunct _bourgeois_, buying with the proceeds a bunch of white violets for his disdainful cousin. The second was a certain Marie, who eventually ran away with one of his friends--a tragedy which he relates in "Scènes de la Vie de Jeunesse." By this time he had become a thoroughly developed Bohemian, intolerant of all restraint. He left his father's home, and even for a time gave up his post with M. de Tolstoi.