The Bohemians of the Latin Quarter

By Henri Murger, Ellen Marriage and Maurice Samuels

"Today, as of old, every man who enters on an artistic career, without any other means of livelihood than his art itself, will be forced to walk in the paths of Bohemia."—from the Preface

Based largely upon Henri Murger's own experiences and those of his fellow artists, The Bohemians of the Latin Quarter was originally produced as a play in 1849 and first appeared in book form in 1851. It was an immediate sensation. The novel consists of a series of interrelated episodes in the lives of a group of poor friends—a musician, a poet, a philosopher, a sculptor, and a painter—who attempt to maintain their artistic ideals while struggling for food, shelter, and sex.

Set in the ancient Latin Quarter, a vibrant and cosmopolitan area near the University of Paris, the novel is a masterful portrait of nineteenth-century Parisian artistic life. "Bohemian" soon became synonymous with "artist," and it is from Murger's novel that the word and concept entered the English language. Drawn from real-life characters and events, the themes of love, sacrifice, and "selling out" are immediately recognizable to the modern reader.

Capturing the heart, spirit, and bittersweet humor of the world of struggling artists, The Bohemians of the Latin Quarter is the universal story of one's attempt to leave a mark on the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Oct 9, 2013
• ISBN: 9780812200959

Henri Murger

Henri Murger (1822-1861) was a French novelist and poet. Born in Paris to a working-class family, Murger left school at 15 to find work in a lawyer’s office, writing poems and essays on the side. Discovered by prominent dramatist Étienne de Jouy, Murger gained a reputation as a leading young voice in French literature. Encouraged by Realist critic Champfleury to focus on fiction, Murger found success with Scenes of Bohemian Life (1851), an experimental novel based on his experience as an impoverished Parisian artist. He continued to publish his writing until his death at 38, brought on by recurring health problems exacerbated by a life in poverty. Scenes of Bohemian Life would inspire Puccini’s beloved opera La bohème (1896), itself source material for countless films, songs, and musicals.

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INTRODUCTION

Maurice Samuels

THANKS to the opera La Bohème (1896), Rodolfo and Mimi have entered the pantheon of our culture’s most famous lovers, alongside Paolo and Francesca and Romeo and Juliet. But if we’ve grown accustomed to imagining the nineteenth-century French poet as a portly Italian tenor, and his garret as a soaring stage set, the dimensions of the original text on which Puccini based his opera were far more modest. In Henry Murger’s depiction of the struggles of a group of bohemians, as poor intellectuals in the Latin Quarter of Paris were beginning to be known, we discover a grittier picture of what it meant to be an artist—or to love one—in Paris in the 1840s. Before he became Puccini’s Rodolfo, Murger’s Rodolphe incarnated the dreams and disappointments of a generation of Parisian writers and artists who would be the first to attempt to live by their pen or brush. On the border between late Romanticism and early Realism, Murger’s novel—really a collection of stories—did much to implant the myth of the artist in modern culture.

Henry Murger (1822–1861) originally published the stories comprising The Bohemians of the Latin Quarter (Scènes de la vie de Bohème) between 1845 and 1849 in one of the small satirical journals that proliferated in Paris during the July Monarchy (1830–1848), Le Corsaire-Satan (called Le Corsaire after 1847). Like the characters he portrayed, Murger at first remained obscure and penurious, appreciated only by a small coterie of like-minded young artistic laborers. Not until he reworked his stories into a play in 1849, and then into a novel in 1851, did he achieve anything like popular success: Murger was awarded the Legion of Honor in 1858, and became a well-known figure during the early years of the Second Empire (1852–1870). Nevertheless, and despite the fame he gained from his portrait of Bohemia, Murger was never destined to escape from it: the novel earned him only 500 francs, and he died alone in a hospital (a fate reserved for the poor) at the age of thirty-eight, much like his character Jacques, the lovelorn and penniless sculptor.

Though more realistic in its description of the hardships faced by this group of artists struggling to pay the rent while remaining true to their creative impulses, Murger’s novel is no less mythologizing than Puccini’s opera. Indeed, Murger is largely responsible for creating the myth of Bohemia. Bordered on the North by hope, work and gaiety, on the South by necessity and courage; on the West and East by slander and the hospital, Bohemia, as Murger charted it, is a land where the ideal meets the real, where dreams of glory confront the hard fact of modern materialism. Populated by poets, painters, musicians, and philosophers (all male), and by the women who share their lot, Bohemia has its own language, customs, and mores. Sustained more by fellowship than food, speaking a witty slang, dressing in ragged or outlandish costumes, the bohemians look forward to a great future but never know where their next meal will come from. Staring out at Parisian rooftops from their attic rooms, trying to stay warm by burning their furniture and even their manuscripts, Murger’s characters embody all that is joyful about youth, and also all that is tragic for those who fail to outgrow it. For, as Murger warned, Bohemia is the preface to the Academy, the Hospital or the Morgue.

In his original preface to the novel, Murger argued that Bohemia has existed everywhere and always and traced its illustrious origins to Greek poets and to minstrels of the Middle Ages. The word itself was originally used in French to designate Europe’s nomadic peoples who were believed to come from a province of what is now the Czech Republic (in English, the term gypsy refers to a no less fanciful Egyptian origin). According to historian Jerrold Seigel, the modern use of the term bohemian to refer to artists dates to a text by Félix Pyat from 1834, which drew an analogy between the unconventional lifestyle of nomads or gypsies and the bizarre costumes and comportment of the young denizens of the Romantic movement. But despite Pyat’s text, the term took time to gain currency. Romantic followers of Victor Hugo from the generation of 1830, such as Théophile Gautier and Gerard de Nerval, would later refer to their group living in around the rue du Doyenné, near Notre Dame Cathedral, as the First Bohemia. But they did not apply that term to themselves at the time. It was Murger’s sketches from the 1840s, and especially his later play and novel, that succeeded in implanting the term in the public consciousness.

Literary critics and historians have spent much energy hunting for the keys to Murger’s characters, and have identified many of the models in the writers and artists haunting the cafés of the Latin Quarter (including the real Café Momus) in the years leading up to the Revolution of 1848. The members of this Second Bohemia included such well-known figures as the photographer Nadar, the writer and critic Champfleury (who for a while shared rooms with Murger), and the poet Baudelaire. Murger’s characters, however, are based on lesser figures from the time. Jacques, the sculptor, is modeled on Joseph Desbrosses (1819–1844); the musician Schaunard is Alexandre Schanne (1823–1887); the painter Marcel is Léopold Tabar (1818–1869); the philosopher Colline is a composite of Jean Wallon (1821–1882) and Marc Trapadoux (1822–?). According to Loïc Chotard, the journalist Charles Barbara (1817–1866) never forgave Murger for his unflattering depiction as the slightly ridiculous Carolus Barbemuche. Rodolphe, of course, is a portrait of Murger himself.

Contradicting his claim that Bohemia is universal, Murger argued in his preface that it cannot exist outside Paris. Indeed, the imprint of the French capital is everywhere apparent in Murger’s universe. A densely populated place, in which poor artists live alongside pretty seamstresses in garret rooms on the fifth and sixth floors of apartment houses, Bohemia necessitates an urban setting in which boulevard strolling, or flânerie, encourages random encounters. The unique sociability of Murger’s world reflects the distinctive forms of Parisian urbanization. Although London, Vienna, and New York may have had artistic subcultures, Murger’s Bohemia is a product of the specific geographic and even climatic features of the Parisian landscape. In Murger’s Bohemia it is always winter, always cold and gray, and there is never enough wood for the fire. It would be hard to imagine the romance of Rodolphe and Mimi kindling in the more temperate climes of Rome or Naples.

The specifically Parisian nature of Murger’s Bohemia is also a function of deeper historical forces. Walter Benjamin termed Paris the capital of the nineteenth century for the way it starkly embodied the social trends of the entire era, and we find many of these trends at work under the glittering surface of Murger’s novel. The notion of Bohemia itself is intimately connected to the triumph of the middle class, or what is known in France as the bourgeoisie. Already an important force in the eighteenth century, this class had asserted its claims to political authority during the Revolution of 1789, but did not really come into its own until after 1830. By the time the Revolution of 1830 decisively wrested political power away from the declining aristocracy, the nascent Industrial Revolution had begun to reinforce bourgeois economic dominance. The supremacy of the bourgeoisie in the nineteenth century would have important ramifications for artists and writers, who formerly had relied for financial support on aristocratic patronage.

The Bohemians of the Latin Quarter bears witness to the painful process by which intellectual laborers had to submit to market forces to earn their keep. At the same time as nineteenth-century artists and writers found themselves forced to appeal to a nouveau riche bourgeoisie with more money than education, they also found themselves faced with increased competition. In the early decades of the nineteenth century in France, a more democratic educational system and rising literacy, coupled with an entrenched gerontocracy blocking career routes in administration and business, pushed increasing numbers of young men into the literary and artistic professions. In Murger’s work—as in Balzac’s Lost Illusions and Flaubert’s Sentimental Education—we see the effects of this process in the typical plot of the young man arriving in Paris from the provinces, armed with paintbrush or poem but little in the way of financial support from his family. Whereas some of the great writers of the period, such as Flaubert, were from the upper middle class and enjoyed a private income that alleviated the pressures of the market, freeing them to pursue their idiosyncratic visions, others, like Murger himself, the son of a concierge, were forced to live off an art that barely offered a living.

The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has described how the new market system proved liberating for those artists able to exploit it, but alienating for those who failed to succeed in either flattering the bourgeoisie or imposing their talent. Some members of this latter group expressed their alienation through the philosophy of l’art pour l’art, art for art’s sake, a radical notion of artistic autonomy that valorized exactly those aesthetic features (hermeticism, difficulty) least likely to prove accessible to a wide audience. We see this refusal of the market reflected in Murger’s Water Drinkers, the ascetic bunch who look down on Jacques when he consents to sculpt funerary monuments in order to pay for a tomb to his beloved Francine. Like Jacques, other alienated artists formed a new intellectual proletariat, selling their services in exchange for a meager existence. Most of Murger’s characters fall into this latter category, including Rodolphe, comically forced to write a manual for his uncle, a stove manufacturer, who locks his flighty nephew in an apartment and takes away his clothes in order to make sure that the poet will finish the work as ordered.

The middle decades of the nineteenth century were a time of intense artistic ferment in France. Big debates raged: the artistic scene was divided between Classics and Romantics, while partisans of art for art’s sake opposed proponents of a more socially committed or realist artistic practice. We find few echoes of these conflicts in Murger’s novel, however. Although, after overhearing the boisterous bohemians holding forth at the Café Momus, Barbemuche declares that he shares their tastes, we never learn what these tastes might be. The few glimpses Murger provides of the work produced by his characters—such as Schaunard’s imitative symphony for the piano, entitled The Influence of Blue in Art, or Marcel’s painting The Passing of the Red Sea, which he is willing to transform into a Napoleonic battle picture if it will gain him entrance into the Salon—verge on outright parody of Romantic tastes. A great deal of the novel’s comedy, and perhaps its pathos as well, derives from the reader’s suspicion that despite all the noble suffering for the sake of their art, Murger’s bohemians are really third rate.

Indeed, this novel is more about money than about art. The reader learns almost nothing about the aesthetic philosophy of the Romantic movement, but gains all sorts of insights into the cost of living in Paris in the 1840s, when an attic room rented for 25 francs a month and 40 sous (2 francs) bought bread, wine, cold cuts, tobacco, candles, and firewood. (Not the least interesting aspect of the novel’s financial focus is the evidence it provides of an economic gender gap: if a moderately successful play earned its male author 40 francs, a woman making artificial flowers, as Mimi does, had to work two days in order to purchase a single issue of a poetry journal in which her lover’s verse was printed. The poor remuneration of women’s work explains why the female characters in novels from the time are so dependent on men.) The plot of nearly every story centers around efforts to beg or borrow enough money to pay the rent, have dinner, buy some flowers, or consult a doctor. Whereas Murger’s characters seldom speak of their actual art or ideas, they dwell obsessively on material objects, food foremost among them. These bohemians are more moved by the sight of a dinde truffée in a caterer’s window, its pink skin affording visions of the Périgord tubercles with which it was stuffed, than by all the paintings on display at the Salon.

A particularly telling chapter, Floods of Pactolus, begins with Rodolphe receiving the princely sum of 500 francs. I have not trafficked in my pen, he assures a suspicious Marcel; the gold was given to him by a generous hand to allow him to gain an honorable position from his writing. Sheltered from the material embarrassments of life, I shall set to work seriously, he declares. Rodolphe’s first resolution is to renounce Bohemia. He will dress in a black frock coat like everybody else. He will husband his resources. Rodolphe and Marcel begin their existence as honest gentlemen by going out to dine at a good restaurant, for by dining well they save the added expense of supper afterward. Instead of paying to cross a toll bridge, they take a free but less direct route and are then obliged to hire a cab to get to their appointment on time. Pennywise and pound foolish, they hire a manservant to relieve them of domestic chores, but waste all day arguing with him and are unable to work. Within a week, all the money is gone. A hilarious scene of accounting ensues, and amid all sorts of ridiculous expenses, they discover that their servant has committed the unpardonable sin of paying the landlord. Their fortune squandered, the artists return to bohemian life.

This parody of bourgeois economy reflects the aristocratic pretensions of Bohemia. In their aversion to thrift, the bohemians practice a regal art de vivre that defies the frugal shopkeeper mentality that had come to define the nineteenth century. But despite their allergy to bourgeois proprieties, Murger’s bohemians are just as obsessed by money, just as materialistic, as their landlords. The opera, which was actually based on Murger’s play, ends on the pathetic note of Mimi’s death. The novel, however, strikes a different note. In the last story, written expressly for the novel, the characters renounce their bohemian ways once and for all, finally entering the official world of bourgeois convention. Marcel is accepted by the Salon and pays his debts by selling his pictures. Schaunard and Rodolphe likewise gain fame and fortune (one assumes by adapting their art to bourgeois tastes). In the last exchange of the novel, Rodolphe proposes returning to their old haunts, but Marcel refuses. I no longer care for anything but what is good and comfortable, he declares.

Are the bohemians hypocrites? Was Murger? In his first published poem, entitled Apostasy, Murger attacked a revolutionary who renounced the cause, but by the late 1840s the writer had moved away from radical politics. He wrote the last chapter of the novel in 1850, after the further disillusionment of the Revolution of 1848. (In an additional story, not included in the novel, entitled His Excellency Gustave Colline, Murger mocks the Revolution of 1848 by having the bohemians use it as a pretext for not paying their debts, and by showing Colline winning a post as ambassador for the revolutionary government on a bet.) Given his own mostly unsuccessful attempts to establish himself as an upstanding bourgeois, there is little doubt that Murger, like his characters, saw Bohemia as a stage, and one best left behind. Those who dally too long in its depths, whether through pride or poor luck, risk winding up in the Hospital or the Morgue rather than the Academy. Despite his own warnings, Murger would be one of Bohemia’s victims.

Perhaps, though, the opposition between bohemian and bourgeois is a false one. As Seigel explains, Bohemia is the place where members of the bourgeoisie work out their ambivalent relation to their own class status. Bohemians are not just financially dependent on the bourgeoisie, they are the bourgeoisie: the mysterious origins of Rodolphe’s 500 francs, along with his uncle the stove manufacturer, attest to the poet’s privileged social status. Through nonconformity, young bourgeois gentlemen like Rodolphe tested the limits of individualism, a notion as central to modern capitalism as to modern art. Murger betrayed Bohemia not because his characters sold out to the bourgeoisie, but because he exposed the material basis underpinning the ideologies of art in modern culture. The philosophy of art for art’s sake, and the entire bohemian subculture, turned out to be a myth hiding the artist’s link to economic reality. That his bohemians learn this lesson in the course of the novel earns Murger’s text a place alongside those other great nineteenth-century novels of education, such as Balzac’s Lost Illusions and Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, in which the would-be artist eventually comes to terms with the social world.

To the extent that our own world is still modern, still defined by the political, economic, and social realities that first took shape in nineteenth-century Paris, Murger’s novel remains relevant. Today, big business coopts alternative art almost as soon as it is produced, and artists and corporate CEOs might shop in the same stores and listen to the same music. But this is only the latest manifestation of the ambivalent relation between bohemian and bourgeois that stretches back a century and a half. Long before David Brooks described the bourgeois-bohemian or bobo, Murger realized that these seeming opposites were in fact two sides of the same coin.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bourdieu, Pierre. The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field. Trans. Susan Emanuel. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996.

Brooks, David. Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There. New York: Touchstone, 2000.

Chotard, Loïc. Introduction to Scènes de la vie de bohème. Paris: Gallimard, 1988.

Seigel, Jerrold. Bohemian Paris: Culture, Politics, and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Life, 1830–1930. New York: Viking, 1986.

PREFACE

THE Bohemians described in this book have nothing in common with the Bohemians of boulevard playwrights, who have used the word as a synonym for pickpocket and murderer; nor are they recruited from the ranks of bear-leaders, sword-eaters, vendors of key-rings, inventors of infallible systems, stock-brokers of doubtful antecedents and the followers of the thousand and one vague and mysterious callings in which the principal occupation is to have none whatever and to be ready at any time to do anything save that which is right.

The Bohemians of this book are by no means a race of to-day; they have existed all over the world ever since time began, and can lay claim to an illustrious descent. In the time of the ancient Greeks (not to pursue their genealogy any further) there was once a famous Bohemian who wandered about the fertile land of Ionia trusting to luck for a living, eating the bread of charity, stopping of nights by hospitable firesides where he hung the musical lyre to which the Loves of Helen had been sung and the Fall of Troy.

As we descend the course of ages we find forerunners of the modern Bohemian in every epoch famous for art or letters. Bohemia continues the tradition of Homer through the Middle Ages by the means of minstrel, improvisatori, les enfants du gai savoir, and all the melodious vagabonds from the lowlands of Touraine; all the muses errant who wandered with a beggar’s wallet and a trouvère’s harp over the fair and level land where the eglantine of Clémence Isaure should still flourish.

In the transition period, between the Age of Chivalry and the dawn of the Renascence, the Bohemian still frequents the highways of the realm, and is even found in Paris streets. Witness Master Pierre Gringoire, for instance, friend of vagrants and sworn foe to fasting, hungry and lean as a man may well be when his life is but one long Lent; there he goes, prowling along, head in air like a dog after game, snuffing up the odours from cookshop and kitchen; staring so hard at the hams hanging from the pork-butcher’s hooks, that they visibly shrink and lose weight under the covetous gaze of his glutton’s eyes; while he jingles in imagination (not, alas! in his pockets) those ten crowns promised him by their worships the aldermen for a right pious and devout sotie composed by him for the stage of the Salle of the Palais de Justice. And the chronicles of Bohemia can place another profile beside the melancholy and rueful visage of Esmeralda’s lover—a companion portrait of jollier aspect and less ascetic humour. This is Master François Villon, lover of la belle qui fut heaulmière—poet and vagabond par excellence, with a breadth of imagination in his poetry. A strange obsession appears in in it, caused no doubt by a presentiment of a kind which the ancients attribute to their poets. Villon is haunted by the idea of the gibbet; and indeed one day nearly wore a hempen cravat because he looked a little too closely at the colour of the king’s coinage. And this same Villon, who more than once outstripped the posse comitatus at his heels, this roistering frequenter at the low haunts in the Rue Pierre Lescot, this smell-feast at the court of the Duke of Egypt, this Salvator Rosa of poetry, wrote verse with a ring of heart-broken sincerity in it that touches the hardest hearts, so that at sight of his muse, her face wet with streaming tears, we forget the rogue, the vagabond and the rake.

François Villon, besides, has been honoured above all those poets whose work is little known to folk for whom French literature only begins when Malherbe came, for he has been more plundered than any of them, and even by some of the greatest names of the modern Parnassus. There has been a rush for the poor man’s field; people have struck the coin of glory for themselves out of his little hoard of treasure. Such and such a ballade, written in the gutter under the drip of the eaves some bitter day by the Bohemian poet, or some love-song improvised in the den where la belle qui fut heaulmière unclasped her girdle for all-comers, now makes its appearance, transformed to suit polite society and scented with ambergris and musk, in albums adorned with the armorial bearings of some aristocratic Chloris.

But now begins the grand age of the Renascence. Michel Angelo mounts the scaffolding in the Sixtine Chapel and looks thoughtful as young Rafael goes up the staircase of the Vatican with the sketches of the Loggie under his arm. Benvenuto is planning his Perseus and Ghiberti carving the bronze gates of the Baptistery, while Donatello rears his marble on the bridge across Arno. The city of the Medici rivals the city of Leo X. and Julius II. in the possession of masterpieces, while Titian and Paul Veronese adorn the city of the Doges—St. Mark competing with St. Peter.

The fever of genius suddenly broke out with the violence of an epidemic in Italy, and the splendid contagion spread through Europe. Art, the Creator’s rival, became the equal of kings. Charles V. stoops to pick up Titian’s brush, and Francis I. waits on the printer Etienne Dolet, who is busy correcting the proofs (it may be) of Pantagruel.

In the midst of this resurrection of the intellect the Bohemian seeks, as heretofore, for the poorest shelter and pittance of food—la pâtée et la niche, to use Balzac’s expression. Clément Marot, a familiar figure in the ante-chambers of the Louvre, is favoured by the fair Diane, who one day would be the favourite of a king, and lights three reigns with her smile; then the poet’s faithless muse will pass from the boudoir of Diane de Poitiers to the chamber of Marguerite de Valois, a dangerous honour, which Marot must pay for by imprisonment. Almost at the same time another Bohemian goes to the court of Ferrara, as Marot went to the court of Francis I. This is Tasso, whose lips were kissed by the epic muse in his childhood on the shore at Sorrento. But, less fortunate than the lover of Diane and Marguerite, the author of Gerusalemme must pay for his audacious love of a daughter of the House of Este with the loss of his reason and his genius.

The religious wars and political storms that broke out in France with the arrival of the Medici did not stay the flight of Art. Jean Goujon, after discovering anew the pagan art of Pheidias, might be struck down by a bullet on the scaffolding of the Innocents; but Ronsard would find Pindar’s lyre, and with the help of the Plèiade found the great French school of lyric poets. To this school of revival succeeded the reaction, thanks to Malherbe and his followers. They drove out all the exotic graces introduced into the language by their predecessors’ efforts to acclimatise them in poetry. And a Bohemian, Mathurin Régnier, was one of the last to defend the bulwarks of lyric poetry against the assault of the band of rhetoricians and grammarians who pronounced Rabelais to be a barbarian and Montaigne obscure. It was the same Mathurin Régnier, the cynic, who tied fresh knots in Horace’s scourge, and made indignant outcry against his age with Honour is an old-fashioned saint, and nobody keeps his day.

In the seventeenth century the enumeration of Bohemia includes some of the best known names in literature under Louis XIII. and Louis XIV. Bohemia counts wits of the Hôtel Rambouillet among its members and lends a hand in the weaving of the Guirlande de Julie. Bohemia has her entrées at the Palais Cardinal and writes the tragedy of Marianne in collaboration with the poet-minister, the Robespierre of monarchy. Bohemia strews Marion Delorme’s ruelle with pretty speeches and pays court to Ninon under the trees in the Place Royale, breakfasting of a morning at the Goinfres or the Epée Royale, supping of nights at the Duc de Joyeuse’s table and fighting duels under the street lamps for Uranie’s sonnet as against the sonnet of Job. Bohemia makes love and war, and even tries a hand at diplomacy; and in her old age, tired of adventures, perpetuates a metrical version of the Old and New Testaments, signing a receipt for a living on every page till at length, well fed with fat prebends, she seats herself on a bishop’s seat, or in an Academical armchair founded by one of her chosen children.

’Twas in the transition period between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that two mighty geniuses appeared, whose names are always brought forward by the nations to which they belong in any literary rivalry. Molière and Shakespeare are two famous Bohemians, with only too many resemblances in their destinies.

The most famous names in the literature of the eighteenth century are likewise to be found in the archives of Bohemia; Jean Jacques Rousseau and d’Alembert (the foundling left on the steps of Notre Dame) among the greatest; and, among the most obscure, Malfilâtre and Gilbert, these two much overrated persons, for the inspiration of the one was only a pale reflection of the pallid lyric fervour of Jean Baptiste Rousseau, while that of the other was a blend of incapacity and pride, with a hatred which had not even the excuse of initiative and sincerity, since it was only the paid instrument of party spirit and party rancour.

And here we bring our rapid summary of the illustrious history of Bohemia to a close. We have purposely set these prefatory remarks in the forefront of this book, so as to set the reader on his guard against any mistaken idea of the meaning of the word Bohemian which he might perhaps be inclined to entertain before reading it, for the class whose customs and language we have herein endeavoured to trace makes it a point of honour to differentiate itself from those strata of society to which the name of Bohemian has long been misapplied.

To-day, as in the past, any man who enters the path of Art, with his art as his sole means of support, is bound to pass by way of Bohemia. Those of our contemporaries who display the noblest shields in the chivalry of Art were most of them Bohemians once, and in the calm and prosperous glory of later life they often look back (perhaps with regret) to the days when they were climbing the green upward slope of youth, with no other fortune, in the sunlight of their twenty years, but courage (a young man’s virtue) and hope, the riches of the poor.

For the benefit of the nervous reader, the timorous Philistine, and that section of the public which cannot have too many dots on the i’s of a definition, we repeat in axiomatic form—

Bohemia is a stage of the artist’s career; it is the preface to the Academy, the Hospital or the Morgue.

Let us add that Bohemia neither exists nor can exist anywhere but in Paris.

Bohemia, like all ranks of society, comprises various shades and diverse species and subdivisions, which it may be worth while to enumerate and classify.

We will begin with Bohemia unknown to fame, by far the largest section of it. It is made up of the great clan of poor artists condemned by fate to preserve their incognito because for one reason or another they cannot find some little corner above the heads of the crowd, and so attest their own existence in Art and show by what they are already what they may be some day. A race of inveterate dreamers are they, for whom art is always a creed and not a craft, and enthusiasts by conviction. The bare sight of a masterpiece throws them into a fever; their loyal hearts beat high before anything beautiful: they do not ask to what school it belongs nor to what master. This Bohemia draws its recruits from among those young aspirants of whom it is said that they give promise as well as from those who fulfil the promise, yet by heedlessness, shyness, or ignorance of the practical, fancy that all is done when the work of art is finished and expect that fame and fortune will burst in on them by burglarious entry. These live on the outskirts of society, as it were, in loneliness and stagnation, till, fossilised in their art, they take the consecrated formulæ about the aureole round the poet’s brow as a literal statement of fact, and being persuaded that they shine in the shadow, expect people to come to look for them there. We once knew a little school of such originals, so quaint that it is hard to believe that they really existed; they called themselves disciples of art for Art’s sake. According to these simple and ingenuous beings, art for Art’s sake consisted in starting a mutual admiration society, in refraining from helping Chance, who did not so much as know their address, and waiting for pedestals to come to place themselves under their feet.

This, as everyone sees, is carrying stoicism to the point of absurdity. Well, let us assert it once more to be believed; in the depths of unknown Bohemia there are such beings as these, whose wretchedness demands a pitying sympathy which common sense is compelled to refuse; for put it to them quietly that we are living in the nineteenth century, that the five-franc piece is Empress of the human race, and that boots do not drop down ready varnished from the sky, and they will turn their backs upon you and abuse you for a Philistine.

Still, at any rate, their mad heroism is thoroughly carried out; they make no outcry, no complaint, submitting passively to the hard and obscure fate which they bring upon themselves. And for the most part they fall victims to the complaint which

Reviews for The Bohemians of the Latin Quarter

[jaarnitaival · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

On Wine and Hashish is a curious little book. It will hold value for those who have an interesting in literature inspired by drugs and alcohol and for us, who are interesting in 19th century French cultural history and birth of modernism.