The class of Bohemians referred to in this book are not a race of today,
they have existed in all climes and ages, and can claim an illustrious
descent. In ancient Greece, to go no farther back in this genealogy,
there existed a celebrated Bohemian, who lived from hand to mouth round
the fertile country of Ionia, eating the bread of charity, and halting
in the evening to tune beside some hospitable hearth the harmonious lyre
that had sung the loves of Helen and the fall of Troy. Descending the
steps of time modern Bohemia finds ancestors at every artistic and
literary epoch. In the Middle Ages it perpetuates the Homeric tradition
with its minstrels and ballad makers, the children of the gay science,
all the melodious vagabonds of Touraine, all the errant songsters who,
with the beggar's wallet and the trouvere's harp slung at their backs,
traversed, singing as they went, the plains of the beautiful land where
the eglantine of Clemence Isaure flourished.

At the transitional period between the days of chivalry and the dawn of
the Renaissance, Bohemia continued to stroll along all the highways of
the kingdom, and already to some extent about the streets of Paris.
There is Master Pierre Gringoire, friend of the vagrants and foe to
fasting. Lean and famished as a man whose very existence is one long
Lent, he lounges about the town, his nose in the air like a pointer's,
sniffing the odor from kitchen and cook shop. His eyes glittering
with covetous gluttony cause the hams hung outside the pork
butcher's to shrink by merely looking at them, whilst he jingles in
imagination--alas! and not in his pockets--the ten crowns promised him
by the echevins in payment of the pious and devout fare he has composed
for the theater in the hall of the Palais de Justice. Beside the doleful
and melancholy figure of the lover of Esmeralda, the chronicles of
Bohemia can evoke a companion of less ascetic humor and more cheerful
face--Master François Villon, par excellence, is this latter, and one