Bohemians of the Latin Quarter | Page 4

the ridiculousness of stoicism. Well, then we again
affirm, there exist in the heart of unknown Bohemia, similar beings
whose poverty excites a sympathetic pity which common sense obliges
you to go back on, for if you quietly remark to them that we live in the
nineteenth century, that the five-franc piece is the empress of humanity,
and that boots do not drop already blacked from heaven, they turn their
backs on you and call you a tradesman.
For the rest, they are logical in their mad heroism, they utter neither
cries nor complainings, and passively undergo the obscure and rigorous
fate they make for themselves. They die for the most part, decimated by
that disease to which science does not dare give its real name, want. If
they would, however, many could escape from this fatal denouement
which suddenly terminates their life at an age when ordinary life is only
beginning. It would suffice for that for them to make a few concessions
to the stern laws of necessity; for them to know how to duplicate their
being, to have within themselves two natures, the poet ever dreaming
on the lofty summits where the choir of inspired voices are warbling,
and the man, worker-out of his life, able to knead his daily bread, but
this duality which almost always exists among strongly tempered
natures, of whom it is one of the distinctive characteristics, is not met
with amongst the greater number of these young fellows, whom pride,
a bastard pride, has rendered invulnerable to all the advice of reason.
Thus they die young, leaving sometimes behind them a work which the
world admires later on and which it would no doubt have applauded
sooner if it had not remained invisible.

In artistic struggles it is almost the same as in war, the whole of the
glory acquired falls to the leaders; the army shares as its reward the few
lines in a dispatch. As to the soldiers struck down in battle, they are
buried where they fall, and one epitaph serves for twenty thousand
dead.
So, too, the crowd, which always has its eyes fixed on the rising sun,
never lowers its glance towards that underground world where the
obscure workers are struggling; their existence finishes unknown and
without sometimes even having had the consolation of smiling at an
accomplished task, they depart from this life, enwrapped in a shroud of
indifference.
There exists in ignored Bohemia another fraction; it is composed of
young fellows who have been deceived, or have deceived themselves.
They mistake a fancy for a vocation, and impelled by a homicidal
fatality, they die, some the victims of a perpetual fit of pride, others
worshippers of a chimera.
The paths of art, so choked and so dangerous, are, despite
encumberment and obstacles, day by day more crowded, and
consequently Bohemians were never more numerous.
If one sought out all the causes that have led to this influx, one might
perhaps come across the following.
Many young fellows have taken the declamations made on the subject
of unfortunate poets and artists quite seriously. The names of Gilbert,
Malfilâtre, Chatterton, and Moreau have been too often, too
imprudently, and, above all, too uselessly uttered. The tomb of these
unfortunates has been converted into a pulpit, from whence has been
preached the martyrdom of art and poetry,
"Farewell mankind, ye stony-hearted host, Flint-bosomed earth and sun
with frozen ray, From out amidst you, solitary ghost I glide unseen
away."
This despairing song of Victor Escousse, stifled by the pride which had

been implanted in him by a factitious triumph, was for a time the
"Marseillaise" of the volunteers of art who were bent on inscribing their
names on the martyrology of mediocrity.
For these funereal apotheoses, these encomiastic requiems, having all
the attraction of the abyss for weak minds and ambitious vanities, many
of these yielding to this attraction have thought that fatality was the half
of genius; many have dreamt of the hospital bed on which Gilbert died,
hoping that they would become poets, as he did a quarter of an hour
before dying, and believing that it was an obligatory stage in order to
arrive at glory.
Too much blame cannot be attached to these immortal falsehoods,
these deadly paradoxes, which turn aside from the path in which they
might have succeeded so many people who come to a wretched ending
in a career in which they incommode those to whom a true vocation
only gives the right of entering on it.
It is these dangerous preachings, this useless posthumous exaltations,
that have created the ridiculous race of the unappreciated, the whining
poets whose muse has always red eyes and ill-combed locks, and all the
mediocrities of impotence who, doomed to non-publication, call the
muse a harsh stepmother,