pours out a passionate complaint that poets have too long been under the yoke of governments and codes of law. The evening closes with a violent tumult. The punch has done its work, and the cénacle is a-screaming with the ecstasy of energumens.
Ce fut un long chaos de jurons, de boutades,
De hurrahs, de tollés et de rhodomontades.
They danced and sang like the demon crew in the master's "Ronde du Sabbat,"
Et jusques au matin les damnés Jeune-Frances
Nagèrent dans un flux d'indicibles démences.
It is to be hoped that the worthy fruiterer was sleeping quietly in another part of Paris, and only the potatoes were kept awake and sleep banished from the pears.
If at this point our reader feels inclined to throw up his hands and exclaim "How disgusting!" he will be well advised to put down the book. One cannot approach Bohemia without a certain sympathy for youthful excesses, howsoever opposed they may be to one's personal predilections. If the cénacle indulged in occasional orgies—which, even allowing a good deal for "local colour" in O'Neddy's "Pandæmonium," they certainly did—they had a great many compensating virtues, such as complete disinterestedness and a consuming love of art, which were not conspicuous in Paris at the time. Maxime du Camp in his memoir on Gautier sets the extreme limit to which reasonable criticism of them can go when, after remarking on the promise given by a violent youth for a fruitful middle age, he says:
"From that should we conclude that the young men who composed the cénacle were all destined to become great men? Certainly not; there were among them dreamers with illusions about themselves, sterile dupes of the comedy that they played, failures in whose case the brilliant future which they promised themselves fell naturally into obscurity. To more than one of them the saying of Rivarol could have been applied: 'It is a terrible advantage never to have done anything, but it should not be abused.' In short, only one of them has made a name that will not perish: Théophile Gautier. Gérard de Nerval, by whom he had been distanced at the beginning of his life, never passed a very moderate level, did not push his way in the crowd, and came early to grief. On the other hand, most of them were celebrated in the group, I might say in the coterie, to which they belonged, but their reputation never went beyond the circle in which they lived."
Maxime du Camp takes a very superior point of view which is less than just. The members of the cénacle, it may be admitted, overrated one another's talents and were ready, in some instances, to take posturing for performance; but Bohemia is not to be blamed because all her children were not great men any more than Eton because all her alumni are not scholars. As a matter of fact, in this first Bohemia of the cénacle there were very few of whom it could be said that their lives were ruined. Gérard died a violent death, but he was afflicted with mental disease. Apart from his eccentricity he was a scholar and a gentleman whose attainments equalled those of Gautier himself, though he could not bring himself to exploit them. Pétrus Borel was the one real failure, the poseur who inevitably came to grief. His Bohemian career reached its apogee at his masked ball in 1832—a caricature of Dumas' own famous ball—held at his lodgings in the Rue d'Enfer, an appropriate address. He left Paris shortly afterwards, and, after earning for some years a precarious livelihood and publishing "Madame Putiphar," he became an inspector of Mostaganem, in Algeria, in which country he died wretchedly. The rest, though they did not quite achieve their proud dreams, continued, most of them, in the paths of art with rectitude and some success, Bouchardy and Maquet as dramatists, du Seigneur as a sculptor, Nanteuil as an artist. O'Neddy, once the cénacle dissolved, as it did towards 1833, found poetry a resource in solitude, and poor Vabre, if he made no figure in the world, at least set himself the highest of ideals in devoting his life to the study of Shakespeare.
The first Bohemia, for what that is worth, was singularly respectable in its results. Even had they been far worse, sufficient praise to stifle carping would be found in the indelibly beautiful memory which it left on the minds of its members. In 1857 Bouchardy wrote of it to Gautier in these words:
"It was a holy and beautiful comradeship, my dear Théo, in which each was the loving brother, the devoted friend, the fellow-traveller who makes his friend forget the length and the fatigue of the road. It was a more beautiful comradeship than one can say, in which all wished the success of all without insensate exaggeration and without collective vanity, in which each of us offered to lend his shoulder to the foot of him who wished to climb and to reach his goal.... It was a happy time, dear Théophile, of which we ought to be proud, for when one has traversed this life so often saddened by so much bitterness, we ought to be proud of having found in it some hours of joy, we ought to boast of having been happy!"