Here Murger purchased all the volumes of new poems he could
discover. When his friends jested him upon his wasteful extravagance in
buying verse good for nothing but to cheapen the value of the paper on
which it was printed, he replied, that a poet should keep himself
informed of the progress of Art. He has since confessed that his object
in buying this trash was simply to compare his efforts with those which
had been deemed worthy to see print. His ambition then was to be pale,
consumptive, to drink the dregs of poverty's poisoned chalice, and to
toss on a hospital-bed. He found it hard work to gratify these desires.
His plethoric person, his rubicund cheeks and high health, gave him much
more the appearance of a jovial monk of Bolton Abbey than of a Werther
or a Chatterton or a Lara. But as he was determined to look the poet of
the Byron school, for a fortnight he followed a regimen "which would
have given phthisis to Mount Atlas"; he studied in some medical treatise
the symptoms of the consumption, and, after wading through thirty miles
of the mud and mire to be found in the environs of Paris, drenched to
the skin by an autumnal rain, he went to the hospital and was admitted.
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