The sportsman became a poacher. Pierre and Emile Bisson
quitted the attorney's office and opened a studio: they were painters
now. Henry Murger managed to filch an hour every day from the time
allotted to the errands of the office about Paris to spend in the studio
of his friends, where he would write his poetry and hide his
manuscripts. Here he made the acquaintance of artists and literary young
men as unfledged as himself, but who possessed the advantages of a
regular scholastic education. They taught him the rules of prosody and
the exercises proper to overcome the mere mechanical difficulties of
versification. This society made Murger more than ever ambitious; a
secret instinct told him that the pen was the arm with which he would
win fame and fortune. He determined to abandon the law-office.
His father was furious enough at this resolution, and more than one
painful scene took place between them. The boy was within an ace of
bring kicked out of doors, when his troubles reached the ears of a
literary tenant of the house: this was no other than Monsieur de Jouy, a
member of the French Academy, and quite famous in his day for "L'Ermite
de la Chaussee d'Antin," and a tragedy, "Sylla," which Talma's genius
threw such beams upon as made it radiant, and for an imprisonment for
political offences, a condiment without which French reputations seem to
lack savor.
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