e 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
for art's sake. According to these simpletons, art for art's sake
consisted of deifying one another, in abstaining from helping chance,
who did not even know their address, and in waiting for pedestals to
come of their own accord and place themselves under them.

It is, as one sees, the ridiculousness of stoicism. Well, then we again
affirm, there exist in the heart of unknown Bohemia, similar beings
whose poverty excites a sympathetic pity which common sense obliges you
to go back on, for if you quietly remark to them that we live in the
nineteenth century, that the five-franc piece is the empress of
humanity, and that boots do not drop already blacked from heaven, they
turn their backs on you and call you a tradesman.

For the rest, they are logical in their mad heroism, they utter neither
cries nor complainings, and passively undergo the obscure and rigorous
fate they make for themselves. They d