For Opera Lovers - After La Boheme
A short story about what happened to the characters after the curtain came down - by Blair McDowell
ter the curtain came down on Mimi’s death in the last act. At long last, due to some papers that recently came into my hands I can satisfy your curiosity. Schaunard, you remember, was the musician. Shortly after Mimi’s death he was offered a position as second horn at the Opera. In that capacity he met and fell madly in love with a young man who was in the corps de ballet, Anton de Vigny. The two moved into a flat in Montmartre, which they decorated with Persian rugs, yards of velvet, pseudo Greek statues, and a small French Poodle named Giselle. They lived together happily for 33 years until Schaunard caught a cold, which turned into pneumonia and carried him off.
Colline, the philosopher who you may recall sold his coat to buy medicine for Mimi in the last act, was so touched by Rodolfo’s and Mimi’s last moments together, that he wrote a treatise about the experience. Life as an Overcoat took the staid world of philosophic thought by storm. For some months Colline was invited to speak at coffee houses and cafes. As his reputation grew, the establishment began to take notice of him and his revolutionary existential ideas. He was offered a chair in philosophy at the Sorbonne, which he delightedly accepted. He was given a musty office which with his newfound financial security, he filled with books. There he met regularly with a small but select group of graduate students who became known throughout philosophic circles as the Overcoaters.
His friends at the garret having all moved out, he stayed on there by himself. He was generally unaware of his physical surroundings and so made no improvements other than to buy a larger, more efficient wood stove and many bookcases. But however many bookcases he bought, they were never quite enough to keep up with the books, which were always piled precariously on every available surface. Colline lived and died a happy man.
Rodolfo, poor Rodolfo. He never really recovered from Mimi’s death. Initially, he seemed simply absent from his surroundings — in some other space. Unable to cope emotionally with the antics of his high-spirited friends, he was the first to move out of their meager shared accommodation. He lived for a time in Mimi’s small attic room, eating only sporadically and becoming more and more morose.
One day a letter arrived from a solicitor. His uncle, the one he had referred to in jest on that Christmas Eve when he had bought a bonnet for Mimi on the occasion of their first evening together, had died suddenly and left everything to him. Everything consisted of considerable money and a chateau surrounded by vineyards in the Loire Valley. There was a caveat, however. He must give up his foolish fantasy of becoming a published poet and take over the day-to-day operation of the vineyards. Rodolfo had not been able to write a word since Mimi’s death and did not think he would ever write again. He finally admitted to himself that he was not really a very good poet anyway. Running a vineyard seemed somehow preferable to staring at the four walls of Mimi’s little room. Thus, he found himself the owner of one of the most prestigious vineyards in the Loire.
Over the next five years he discovered that he had some talent as a vintner, and his life, if not happy, settled into a sort of contentment. During his seventh year in the Loire, he married the young daughter of a neighbor whose vineyards bordered his own, thereby becoming one of the largest landowners in the area. The couple was blessed with three daughters, the youngest of whom, Lucia, he insisted on calling “Mimi”, much to his wife’s confusion.
He was a good husband and father, gentle and considerate. But every year, in the second week of December, he traveled to Paris alone. There he sat drinking pastis on the terrace at Café Momus and visited the Pere Lachine Cemetery to leave a small bouquet of the violets she had so loved on Mimi’s grave.
I have left for last, Marcello, the painter. He stayed on for a while in the garret with Colline, painting, having his daily bottle of wine at Café Momus, alternately laughing, loving and fighting with his sweetheart, Musetta. In April, unable to pay his bar tab at the café, he offered the proprietor, Henri Dubois, one of his nude paintings of Musetta instead. The painting was hung over the bar, where it was seen a few weeks later by an eccentric New York gallery owner, Amos Levine. Levine was so struck by it that he enquired of Dubois where he might find the artist. As luck would have it, Marcello was sitting at the bar, nursing a calvados. The result of that fortuitous meeting, as the entire art world knows, was Levine’s offer of a one-man show in New York. Marcello’s fame and fortune grew from that moment. He moved with Musetta to New York, where he bought a brownstone in Greenwich Village and turned the entire top floor into a studio. Musetta continued to pose for him and together they continued to laugh, love, and fight as they always had.
The story might have ended there, and I would never have known any of this story I have recounted to you but for a strange twist of fate.
When Marcello was in his early forties, he was given an important commission to paint a mural for the entrance salon of a new opera house then under construction. It was to depict St. Cecelia, patron saint of music, giving her gift of music to the waiting world.
Somehow, Marcello could not quite see Musetta as a saint. He embarked on a fruitless search for many months for the right model. When he was beginning to despair, his laundress happened to send her young daughter to his house with his shirts. One glance at her slender form, her luminous brown eyes and her wheat-gold hair told Marcello that he had found his Saint Cecelia. Six months later, immediately after the unveiling, to great acclaim, of the mural, Marcello and his “saint” took off for Paris. There he lived and worked for another 37 years, with a succession of models, sometimes several at a time.
Musetta, deserted in New York, was despondent at first, but never able to be sad for long, she soon resumed her life of theater, parties and cafes. It was at a gallery opening that she met Theodosius Beauregard of the Dallas Beauregards of oil fame and wealth. Theo swept her off her feet. Within six weeks they were wed and on their way to his ranch near Dallas. They had six children in as many years, and Musetta amused herself by serving on opera and museum boards and hospital committees. She became the most proper, most envied and most feared dowager in that city of fearsome dowagers.
She lived to the venerable age of eighty-seven, surrounded by children, grand children, and great grand children.
Some years after her death, I went with my father, Musetta’s great grandson, to the ranch. It was being sold and my father was there to remove the last of the family memorabilia. I was left to my own devises to explore. In a storage cupboard under a stairwell I found an old trunk. In it I discovered a pink silk bonnet, (which I believe to be the one Rodolfo gave Mimi on that long ago Christmas Eve), a soft white muff, a bit the worse for wear, and, inside the muff, a journal. Thumbing through the faded spidery writing on pages of the latter, I was astounded to see my great, great grandmother’s signature affixed to the last page, and the date, 1887.It is from those pages that I learned all that I have recounted here.
Theodora Musetta Beauregard
Dallas
1976