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Puccini stopped with La Bohème, all the rest is repetition and not altogether admirable repetition. That he has been the hero of many phonographs has nothing to do with his intrinsic merits.
What is it?" she asked herself impatiently. "Why, of course! It's from 'Bohême'!" She smiled as she felt he was playing to her. With the thrill now so familiar, she felt her power over him. She remembered little tussles in which she had been victorious. They had all been over his business. But Ethel was putting an end to that.
On other points connected with that old life on the borders of Bohemia, I need not touch; it has all been so well done already by Murger, in the Vie de Bohème, and it will not bear translation into contemporary English. There were cakes and ale, pipes and beer, and ginger was hot in the mouth too! Et ego fui in Bohemiâ!
As that Italian music rose, all at once she wanted to give herself, "To give and give and give him all!" The tears welled up in her happy eyes. "However! To be very gay!" Later that evening in a café she leaned across the table and asked excited questions about "Bohême" and Paris. What was Paris really like? The Latin Quarter, the Beaux Arts? What did he do there, how did he live?
He may have been superseded by this time. I do not know. I was paying no attention, but the name Meline struck me. It recalled, I do not exactly know why, the 'Scenes de la vie de boheme'. I thought it was about some grisette. That shows how scraps of the speech entered my mind.
With 'La Tosca, which was produced in 1899, Puccini won another success, though for very different reasons from those which made 'La Bohème' so conspicuous a triumph. The libretto is a clever condensation of Sardou's famous drama. The scene is laid in Rome in the year 1800.
But no, it is devoted to a strange cult called the Religion of Business, which meets there on Sundays. Before that, there was a Korean congress there. There is a lovely green room in this theatre, but not much long green in the box office. Philadelphia prefers Al Jolson to Hank Ibsen. We have our tincture of vie de Bohème, though, in our little French table d'hôte, a thoroughly atmospheric place.
Music was the only point at which he touched the culture of the times, like so many business men; but it pleased him also to pose as a patron of local art; so that when Rose went to stay with her childless uncle and aunt, she found long-haired artists and fiery musicians about the place, who excited and encouraged her musical gift, who sketched her while she played, and talked to the pretty, clever, unformed creature of London and Paris, and Italy, and set her pining for that golden vie de Bohême which she alone apparently of all artists was destined never to know.
The Petit Cénacle was dead and buried; Murger and his crew of sponging vagabonds were all at rest from their expedients; the tradition of their real life was nearly lost; and the petrified legend of the Vie de Bohême had become a sort of gospel, and still gave the cue to zealous imitators.
It was quite a different public from what one saw anywhere else, many students of both sexes carrying books, small easels, and campstools, some of the men such evident Bohemians, with long hair, sweeping moustache, and soft felt hat, quite the type one sees in the pictures or plays of "La Vie de Boheme."
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