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.