Bohemians of the Latin Quarter | Page 5

and art an executioner.
All truly powerful minds have their word to say, and, indeed, utter it
sooner or later. Genius or talent are not unforeseen accidents in
humanity; they have a cause of existence, and for that reason cannot
always remain in obscurity, for, if the crowd does not come to seek
them, they know how to reach it. Genius is the sun, everyone sees it.
Talent is the diamond that may for a long time remain hidden in
obscurity, but which is always perceived by some one. It is, therefore,
wrong to be moved to pity over the lamentations and stock phrases of
that class of intruders and inutilities entered upon an artistic career in
which idleness, debauchery, and parasitism form the foundations of
manners.
Axiom, "Unknown Bohemianism is not a path, it is a blind alley."

Indeed, this life is something that does not lead to anything. It is a
stultified wretchedness, amidst which intelligence dies out like a lamp
in a place without air, in which the heart grows petrified in a fierce
misanthropy, and in which the best natures become the worst. If one
has the misfortune to remain too long and to advance too far in this
blind alley one can no longer get out, or one emerges by dangerous
breaches and only to fall into an adjacent Bohemia, the manners of
which belong to another jurisdiction than that of literary physiology.
We will also cite a singular variety of Bohemians who might be called
amateurs. They are not the least curious. They find in Bohemian life an
existence full of seductions, not to dine every day, to sleep in the open
air on wet nights, and to dress in nankeen in the month of December
seems to them the paradise of human felicity, and to enter it some
abandon the family home, and others the study which leads to an
assured result. They suddenly turn their backs upon an honorable future
to seek the adventure of a hazardous career. But as the most robust
cannot stand a mode of living that would render Hercules consumptive,
they soon give up the game, and, hastening back to the paternal roast
joint, marry their little cousins, set up as a notary in a town of thirty
thousand inhabitants, and by their fireside of an evening have the
satisfaction of relating their artistic misery with the magniloquence of a
traveller narrating a tiger hunt. Others persist and put their self-esteem
in it, but when once they have exhausted those resources of credit
which a young fellow with well-to-do relatives can always find, they
are more wretched than the real Bohemians, who, never having had any
other resources, have at least those of intelligence. We knew one of
these amateur Bohemians who, after having remained three years in
Bohemia and quarrelled with his family, died one morning, and was
taken to the common grave in a pauper's hearse. He had ten thousand
francs a year.
It is needless to say that these Bohemians have nothing whatever in
common with art, and that they are the most obscure amongst the least
known of ignored Bohemia.
We now come to the real Bohemia, to that which forms, in part, the

subject of this book. Those who compose it are really amongst those
called by art, and have the chance of being also amongst its elect. This
Bohemia, like the others, bristles with perils, two abysses flank it on
either side--poverty and doubt. But between these two gulfs there is at
least a road leading to a goal which the Bohemians can see with their
eyes, pending the time when they shall touch it with their hand.
It is official Bohemia so-called because those who form part of it have
publicly proved their existence, have signalised their presence in the
world elsewhere than on a census list, have, to employ one of their own
expressions, "their name in the bill," who are known in the literary and
artistic market, and whose products, bearing their stamp, are current
there, at moderate rates it is true.
To arrive at their goal, which is a settled one, all roads serve, and the
Bohemians know how to profit by even the accidents of the route. Rain
or dust, cloud or sunshine, nothing checks these bold adventurers,
whose sins are backed by virtue. Their mind is kept ever on the alert by
their ambition, which sounds a charge in front and urges them to the
assault of the future; incessantly at war with necessity, their invention
always marching with lighted match blows up the obstacle almost
before it incommodes them. Their daily existence is a work of genius, a
daily problem which they always succeed in solving by the aid of
audacious mathematics. They would have forced Harpagon