We may now pass from the author to his volume, on the title-page of which he might well have written the famous _quorum pars magna fui_ of Virgil’s hero. “Murger, c’est la Bohème, comme la Bohème fut Murger,” was the declaration of one of his personal friends; and the stuff of his wonderful scenes, with all their extravagance and rollicking absurdity, with all their poignant pathos and whimsical humor, is, as we have said, stuff furnished by close observation and intimate experience, though the crude material is transmuted into gold by the secret alchemy of genius. It has been said that many of Murger’s chapters were actually written—in the French phrase, for which we have no satisfactory equivalent—_au jour le jour_; that he made the scenes of his Bohemian life into literature, so to speak, while they were still being enacted. To this effect Théophile de Banville reported that “that which was done by Rodolphe”—who, as we shall presently see, is generally to be identified with Murger himself—“during the month when he was Mademoiselle Mimi’s neighbor, has perhaps had no parallel since letters began. His days he passed in composing verses, sketching plots of plays, and covering Mimi’s hands with kisses as with a glove; but his daily bread was his _feuilleton_ for the ‘Corsaire,’ and as Rodolphe had neither money nor books to invent anything but his own life, each evening he wrote as a _feuilleton_ for the ‘Corsaire’ the life of that day, and each day he lived the _feuilleton_ for the next. It was thus that the morrow of I know not what quarrel, after the fashion of the lovers of Horace, Mimi, leaning on her lover’s arm, was bowed to in the Luxembourg by the poet of the ‘Feuilles d’Automne,’ and returned home quite proud to the _Rue des Canettes_; and that same evening Rodolphe wrote on this theme one of his most delightful chapters.”[25] This account of the connection between Murger’s book and his daily life, probably overstates the matter, or is to be accepted as approximately true only in regard to exceptional occurrences, like the one directly referred to. But that the substance of the volume was throughout furnished by experience is certain. The principal characters, and even some of the minor ones, have long since been traced back to their archetypes; the spots rendered famous by many a memorable scene—such as the Café Momus and the shop of the old Jewish bric-a-brac dealer, Father Médicis—are known to have actually existed in the old Latin Quarter, though in the evolution of modern Paris the historic landmarks have been swept away; while there is no question that in most of his stories Murger either drew immediately upon actual circumstances, or at least built his superstructure of fancy upon a very solid foundation of fact.