The intellectual Bohemian—the artist, or the man of letters—has something in his make-up of the gipsy’s love of the open road; the vagabond who instinctively rebels against the established rules of society, more because they are established than for any other reason.
Henri Mürger is commonly supposed to have popularized the “Bohemia” of arts and letters, and it is to him we owe perhaps the most graphic pictures of the life which held forth in the Quartier Latin, notorious for centuries for its lack of discipline and its defiance of the laws of Church, state, and society. It was the very nursery of open thought and liberty against absolutism and the conventional proprieties.
Gustave Nadaud described this “unknown land” in subtle verse, which loses not a little in attempted paraphrase:
“There stands behind Ste. Geneviève,
A city where no fancy paves
With gold the narrow streets,
But jovial youth, the landlady
On gloomy stairs, in attic high,
Gay hope, her tenant, meets.
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’Twas there that the Pays Latin stood,
’Twas there the world was really good,
’Twas there that she was gay.”
Of the freedom and the unconventionally of the life of the Bohemian world of Paris, where the lives of literature and art blended in an almost imperceptible manner, and the gay indifference of its inhabitants, one has but to recall the incident where George Sand went to the studio of the painter Delacroix to tell him that she had sad news for him; that she could never love him; and more of the same sort. “Indeed,” said Delacroix, who kept on painting.—“You are angry with me, are you not? You will never forgive me?”—“Certainly I will,” said the painter, who was still at his work, “but I’ve got a bit of sky here that has caused me a deal of trouble and is just coming right. Go away, or sit down, and I will be through in ten minutes.” She went, and of course did not return, and so the affaire closed.
Dumas was hardly of the Pays Latin. He had little in common with the Bohemianism of the poseur, and the Bohemia of letters and art has been largely made up of that sort of thing.
More particularly Dumas’ life was that of the boulevards, of the journalist, of tremendous energy and output rather than that of the dilettante, and so he has but little interest in the south bank of the Seine.
Michelet, while proclaiming loudly for French literature and life in Le Peuple, published in 1846, desponds somewhat of his country from the fact that the overwhelming genius of the popular novelists of that day—and who shall not say since then, as well—have sought their models, too often, in dingy cabarets, vile dens of iniquity, or even in the prisons themselves.
He said: “This mania of slandering oneself, of exhibiting one’s sores, and going, as it were, to look for shame, will be mortal in the course of time.”