administrators, soldiers, and artists in Bohemia; every faculty, every
kind of brain is represented there. Bohemia is a microcosm. If the
Czar would buy Bohemia for a score of millions and set its population
down in Odessa--always supposing that they consented to leave the
asphalt of the boulevards--Odessa would be Paris with the year. In
Bohemia, you find the flower doomed to wither and come to nothing; the
flower of the wonderful young manhood of France, so sought after by
Napoleon and Louis XIV., so neglected for the last thirty years by the
modern Gerontocracy that is blighting everything else--that splendid
young manhood of whom a witness so little prejudiced as Professor
Tissot wrote, 'On all sides the Emperor employed a younger generation
in every way worthy of him; in his councils, in the general
administration, in negotiations bristling with difficulties or full of
danger, in the government of conquered countries; and in all places
Youth responded to his demands upon it. Young men were for Napoleon
the _missi hominici_ of Charlemagne.'

"The word Bohemia tells you everything. Bohemia has nothing and lives
upon what it has. Hope is its religion; faith (in oneself) its creed;
and charity is supposed to be its budget. All these young men are
greater than their misfortune; they are under the feet of Fortune, yet
more than equal to Fate. Always ready to mount and ride an _if_, witty
as a _feuilleton_, blithe as only those can be that are deep in debt
and drink deep to match, and finally--for here I come to my point--hot
lovers and what lovers! Picture to yourself Lovelace, and Henri
Quatre, and the Regent, and Werther, and Saint-Preux, and Rene, and
the Marechal de Richelieu--think of all these in a single man, and you
will have some idea of their way of love. What lovers! Eclectic of all
things in love, they will serve up a passion to a woman's order; their
hearts are like a bill of fare in a restaurant. Perhaps they have