Bohemians of the Latin Quarter | Page 2

hempen collar for having looked too closely at the
color of the king's crowns. This same Villon, who more than once
outran the watch started in his pursuit, this noisy guest at the dens of
the Rue Pierre Lescot, this spunger at the court of the Duke of Egypt,
this Salvator Rosa of poesy, has strung together elegies the
heartbreaking sentiment and truthful accents of which move the most
pitiless and make them forget the ruffian, the vagabond and the
debauchee, before this muse drowned in her own tears.
Besides, amongst all those whose but little known work has only been
familiar to men for whom French literature does not begin the day
when "Malherbe came," François Villon has had the honor of being the
most pillaged, even by the big-wigs of modern Parnassus. They threw
themselves upon the poor man's field and coined glory from his humble
treasure. There are ballads scribbled under a penthouse at the street
corner on a cold day by the Bohemian rhapsodist, stanzas improvised in
the hovel in which the "belle qui fut haultmire" loosened her gilt girdle
to all comers, which now-a-days metamorphosed into dainty gallantries
scented with musk and amber, figure in the armorial bearing enriched
album of some aristocratic Chloris.
But behold the grand century of the Renaissance opens, Michaelangelo
ascends the scaffolds of the Sistine Chapel and watches with anxious
air young Raphael mounting the steps of the Vatican with the cartoon
of the Loggie under his arm. Benvenuto Cellini is meditating his
Perseus, Ghiberti is carving the Baptistery doors at the same time that
Donatello is rearing his marbles on the bridges of the Arno; and whilst
the city of the Medici is staking masterpieces against that of Leo X and
Julius II, Titian and Paul Veronese are rendering the home of Doges

illustrious. Saint Mark's competes with Saint Peter's.
This fever of genius that had broken out suddenly in the Italian
peninsula with epidemic violence spreads its glorious contagion
throughout Europe. Art, the rival of God, strides on, the equal of kings.
Charles V stoops to pick up Titian's brush, and Francis I dances
attendance at the printing office where Etienne Dolet is perhaps
correcting the proofs of "Pantagruel."
Amidst this resurrection of intelligence, Bohemia continued as in the
past to seek, according to Balzac's expression, a bone and a kennel.
Clement Marot, the familiar of the ante-chamber of the Louvre, became,
even before she was a monarch's mistress, the favorite of that fair
Diana, whose smile lit up three reigns. From the boudoir of Diane de
Poitiers, the faithless muse of the poet passed to that of Marguerite de
Valois, a dangerous favor that Marot paid for by imprisonment. Almost
at the same epoch another Bohemian, whose childhood on the shores of
Sorrento had been caressed by the kisses of an epic muse, Tasso,
entered the court of the Duke of Ferrara as Marot had that of Francis I.
But less fortunate than the lover of Diane and Marguerite, the author of
"Jerusalem Delivered" paid with his reason and the loss of his genius
the audacity of his love for a daughter of the house of Este.
The religious contests and political storms that marked the arrival of
Medicis in France did not check the soaring flight of art. At the
moment when a ball struck on the scaffold of the Fontaine des
Innocents Jean Goujon who had found the Pagan chisel of Phidias,
Ronsard discovered the lyre of Pindar and founded, aided by his pleiad,
the great French lyric school. To this school succeeded the reaction of
Malherbe and his fellows, who sought to drive from the French tongue
all the exotic graces that their predecessors had tried to nationalize on
Parnassus. It was a Bohemian, Mathurin Regnier, who was one of the
last defenders of the bulwarks of poetry, assailed by the phalanx of
rhetoricians and grammarians who declared Rabelais barbarous and
Montaigne obscure. It was this same cynic, Mathurin Regnier, who,
adding fresh knots to the satiric whip of Horace, exclaimed, in
indignation at the manners of his day, "Honor is an old saint past

praying to."
The roll call of Bohemia during the seventeenth century contains a
portion of the names belonging to the literature of the reigns of Louis
XIII and Louis XIV, it reckons members amongst the wits of the Hôtel
Rambouillet, where it takes its share in the production of the
"Guirlande de Julie," it has its entries into the Palais Cardinal, where it
collaborates, in the tragedy of "Marianne," with the poet-minister who
was the Robespierre of the monarchy. It bestrews the couch of Marion
Delorme with madrigals, and woos Ninon de l'Enclos beneath the trees
of the Place Royal; it breakfasts in the morning at the tavern of the
Goinfres