MURGER, Henry (1822-1861), French man-of-letters, was born in February 1822 at Paris. His father was a concierge, with which employment he combined the trade of tailoring. At the age of fifteen Murger was sent into a lawyer’s office, but the occupation was very uncongenial to him, and his father’s trade still more so. He thus incurred the paternal displeasure, and in his devotion to literature and liberty began to meet with not a few of the hardships which he afterwards described. He was, however, for a time saved from actual want by the employment of secretary to the Russian Count Tolstoy, which was procured for him by Μ. de J ouy (an old academician of the classical faction, but a very kind friend to youthful literary aspirants) in the year 1838. For the next ten years little positive is known of Murger’s life except that it probably provided the experiences, and certainly supplied him with the ideas, of his most famous book. He made his first independent appearance as an author in 1843 with a book entitled Via Dolorosa, but it made no mark. He also tried journalism, and the paper Le Castor, which figures in the Vie de Bohème, and which combined devotion to the interests of the hat trade with recondite philosophy and elegant literature, is said to have been a fact, though a shortlived one. At length he was introduced to better work, either in the Corsaire, then a favourite organ of the second romantic generation, or in the Artiste ∙, for both stories are told. In 1848 appeared the collected sketches called the Vie de Bohème. This book, which is of its kind famous, describes the fortunes and misfortunes, the loves, studies, amusements, and sufferings, of a group of impecunious students, artists, and men of letters, of whom Rodolphe represents Murger himself, ...