ie for the most part, decimated by
that disease to which science does not dare give its real name, want. If
they would, however, many could escape from this fatal _denouement_
which suddenly terminates their life at an age when ordinary life is
only beginning. It would suffice for that for them to make a few
concessions to the stern laws of necessity; for them to know how to
duplicate their being, to have within themselves two natures, the poet
ever dreaming on the lofty summits where the choir of inspired voices
are warbling, and the man, worker-out of his life, able to knead his
daily bread, but this duality which almost always exists among strongly
tempered natures, of whom it is one of the distinctive characteristics,
is not met with amongst the greater number of these young fellows, whom
pride, a bastard pride, has rendered invulnerable to all the advice of
reason. Thus they die young, leaving sometimes behind them a work which
the world admires later on and which it would no doubt have applauded
sooner if it had not remained invisible.

In artistic struggles it is almost the same as in war, the whole of the
glory acquired falls to the leaders; the army shares as its reward the
few lines in a dispatch. As to the soldiers struck down in battle, they
are buried where they fall, and one epitaph serves for twenty thousand
dead.

So, too, the crowd, which always has its eyes fixed on the rising sun,
never lowers its glance towards that underground world where the obscure
workers are struggling; their existence finishes unknown and without
sometimes even having had the consolation of smiling at an accomplished
task, they depart from this life, enwrapped in a shroud of indifference.

There exists in ignored Bohemia another fraction; it is composed of
young fellows who have been deceived, or have deceived themselves. They
mistake a fancy for a vocation, and impelled by a homicidal fatality,
they die, some the victims of a perpetual fit of pride, others
worshippers of a chimera.

The paths of art, so choked and so dangerous, are, despite encumberment
and obstacles, day by day more crowded, and consequently Bohemians were
never more numerous.

If one sought out all the causes that have led to this influx, one might
perhaps come across the following.

Many young fellows have taken the declamations made on the subject of
unfortunate poets and artists quite seriously. The names of Gilbert,
Malfilatre, Chatterton, and Mor