lived much of the next ten years in a country house outside Paris, dogged by financial problems and recurrent ill health. In 1859 he received the Légion d'honneur but within two years he was almost penniless and dying in a Paris hospital. Napoleon III's minister Count Walewski sent 500 francs to help pay his medical expenses, but it was too late. Henri Murger died on 28 January 1861 at the age of 38. The French government paid for his funeral, which from contemporary accounts in Le Figaro was a great public occasion attended by 250 luminaries from journalism, literature, theatre, and the arts. Le Figaro also started a fund to raise money for his monument. Hundreds of people contributed and within two months it had raised over 6500 francs. Spelling of the name Early in his career, in an effort to make himself appear more "elegant and noticeable", Murger signed his name as "Henry Mürger", the English-looking "y" and German-looking umlaut both being exotic in French. - though the spelling of Henry rather than Henri was also archaic French, having been standard orthography (along with such spellings as loy and roy) prior to c. 1775 and not totally supplanted by "i" until after 1790. After experimenting with other variations he eventually kept the former but dropped the latter, so that all of his best-known works were published under the name "Henry Murger". Works Scènes de la vie de bohème (1847–49). Scènes de la vie de jeunesse (1851). Le Pays latin (1851). Propos de ville et propos de théâtre (1853). Scènes de campagne (1854). Le Roman de toutes les femmes (1854). Ballades et Fantaisies (1854). Les Buveurs d'eau (1854). Le Dessous du panier (1855). Le Dernier rendez-vous (1856). Les Nuits d’hiver (1856). Les Vacances de Camille (1857). Le Sabot rouge (1860). Madame Olympe (1860). In English translation The Bohemians of the Latin Quarter (1888). Winter Nights (1923). References Bibliography Seigel, Jerrold (1999) Bohemian Paris: Culture, Politics, and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Life, 1830-1930, JHU Press. Further reading Baldick, Robert (1961). The First Bohemian: The Life of Henry Murger. London: Hamish Hamilton. Besant, Walter (1893). "Henry Murger." In: Essays and Historiettes. London: Chatto & Windus, pp. 170–196. Gauthier, Théophile (1901). "Henry Murger." In: Portraits of the Day. Cambridge: The Jenson Society, pp. 138–147. Lelioux, Adrien François; Noël, Léon; and Nadar (1862). Histoire de Mürger: pour a l'histoire de la vraie Bohéme, par