For the uneasy reader, for the timorous citizen, for all those for whom
an "i" can never be too plainly dotted in definition, we repeat as an
axiom: "Bohemia is a stage in artistic life; it is the preface to the
Academy, the Hôtel Dieu, or the Morgue."

We will add that Bohemia only exists and is only possible in Paris.

We will begin with unknown Bohemians, the largest class. It is made up
of the great family of poor artists, fatally condemned to the law of
incognito, because they cannot or do not know how to obtain a scrap of
publicity, to attest their existence in art, and by showing what they
are already prove what they may some day become. They are the race of
obstinate dreamers for whom art has remained a faith and not a
profession; enthusiastic folk of strong convictions, whom the sight of a
masterpiece is enough to throw into a fever, and whose loyal heart beats
high in presence of all that is beautiful, without asking the name of
the master and the school. This Bohemian is recruited from amongst those
young fellows of whom it is said that they give great hopes, and from
amongst those who realize the hopes given, but who, from carelessness,
timidity, or ignorance of practical life, imagine that everything is
done that can be when the work is completed, and wait for public
admiration and fortune to break in on them by escalade and burglary.
They live, so to say, on the outskirts of life, in isolation and
inertia. Petrified in art, they accept to the very letter the symbolism
of the academical dithyrambic, which places an aureola about the heads
of poets, and, persuaded that they are gleaming in their obscurity, wait
for others to come and seek them out. We used to know a small school
composed of men of this type, so strange, that one finds it hard to
believe in their existence; they styled themselves the disciples of art