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