Bohemians of the Latin Quarter | Page 6

to lend
them money, and have found truffles on the raft of the "Medusa." At
need, too, they know how to practice abstinence with all the virtue of
an anchorite, but if a slice of fortune falls into their hands you will see
them at once mounted on the most ruinous fancies, loving the youngest
and prettiest, drinking the oldest and best, and never finding sufficient
windows to throw their money out of. Then, when their last crown is
dead and buried, they begin to dine again at that table spread by chance,
at which their place is always laid, and, preceded by a pack of tricks, go
poaching on all the callings that have any connection with art, hunting
from morn till night that wild beast called a five-franc piece.
The Bohemians know everything and go everywhere, according as they
have patent leather pumps or burst boots. They are to be met one day

leaning against the mantel-shelf in a fashionable drawing room, and the
next seated in the arbor of some suburban dancing place. They cannot
take ten steps on the Boulevard without meeting a friend, and thirty, no
matter where, without encountering a creditor.
Bohemians speak amongst themselves a special language borrowed
from the conversation of the studios, the jargon of behind the scenes,
and the discussions of the editor's room. All the eclecticisms of style
are met with in this unheard of idiom, in which apocalyptic phrases
jostle cock and bull stories, in which the rusticity of a popular saying is
wedded to extravagant periods from the same mold in which Cyrano de
Bergerac cast his tirades; in which the paradox, that spoilt child of
modern literature, treats reason as the pantaloon is treated in a
pantomime; in which irony has the intensity of the strongest acids and
the skill of those marksmen who can hit the bull's-eye blindfold; a slang
intelligent, though unintelligible to those who have not its key, and the
audacity of which surpasses that of the freest tongues. This Bohemian
vocabulary is the hell of rhetoric and the paradise of neologism.
Such is in brief that Bohemian life, badly known to the puritans of
society, decried by the puritans of art, insulted by all the timorous and
jealous mediocrities who cannot find enough of outcries, lies, and
calumnies to drown the voices and the names of those who arrive
through the vestibule to renown by harnessing audacity to their talent.
A life of patience, of courage, in which one cannot fight unless clad in
a strong armour of indifference impervious to the attacks of fools and
the envious, in which one must not, if one would not stumble on the
road, quit for a single moment that pride in oneself which serves as a
leaning staff; a charming and a terrible life, which has conquerors and
its martyrs, and on which one should not enter save in resigning oneself
in advance to submit to the pitiless law væ victis.
H. M.
CHAPTER I
HOW THE BOHEMIAN CLUB WAS FORMED

One morning--it was the eighth of April--Alexander Schaunard, who
cultivated the two liberal arts of painting and music, was rudely
awakened by the peal of a neighbouring cock, which served him for an
alarm.
"By Jove!" exclaimed Schaunard, "my feathered clock goes too fast: it
cannot possibly be today yet!" So saying, he leaped precipitately out of
a piece of furniture of his own ingenious contrivance, which, sustaining
the part of bed by night, (sustaining it badly enough too,) did duty by
day for all the rest of the furniture which was absent by reason of the
severe cold for which the past winter had been noted.
To protect himself against the biting north-wind, Schaunard slipped on
in haste a pink satin petticoat with spangled stars, which served him for
dressing-gown. This gay garment had been left at the artist's lodging,
one masked-ball night, by a folie, who was fool enough to let herself be
entrapped by the deceitful promises of Schaunard when, disguised as a
marquis, he rattled in his pocket a seducingly sonorous dozen of
crowns--theatrical money punched out of a lead plate and borrowed of
a property-man. Having thus made his home toilette, the artist
proceeded to open his blind and window. A solar ray, like an arrow of
light, flashed suddenly into the room, and compelled him to open his
eyes that were still veiled by the mists of sleep. At the same moment
the clock of a neighbouring church struck five.
"It is the Morn herself!" muttered Schaunard; "astonishing, but"--and
he consulted an almanac nailed to the wall--"not the less a mistake. The
results of science affirm that at this season of the year the sun ought not
to rise till half-past five: it is only five o'clock, and there