s speak amongst themselves a special language borrowed from the
conversation of the studios, the jargon of behind the scenes, and the
discussions of the editor's room. All the eclecticisms of style are met
with in this unheard of idiom, in which apocalyptic phrases jostle cock
and bull stories, in which the rusticity of a popular saying is wedded
to extravagant periods from the same mold in which Cyrano de Bergerac
cast his tirades; in which the paradox, that spoilt child of modern
literature, treats reason as the pantaloon is treated in a pantomime; in
which irony has the intensity of the strongest acids and the skill of
those marksmen who can hit the bull's-eye blindfold; a slang
intelligent, though unintelligible to those who have not its key, and
the audacity of which surpasses that of the freest tongues. This
Bohemian vocabulary is the hell of rhetoric and the paradise of
neologism.

Such is in brief that Bohemian life, badly known to the puritans of
society, decried by the puritans of art, insulted by all the timorous
and jealous mediocrities who cannot find enough of outcries, lies, and
calumnies to drown the voices and the names of those who arrive through
the vestibule to renown by harnessing audacity to their talent.

A life of patience, of courage, in which one cannot fight unless clad in
a strong armour of indifference impervious to the attacks of fools and
the envious, in which one must not, if one would not stumble on the
road, quit for a single moment that pride in oneself which serves as a
leaning staff; a charming and a terrible life, which has conquerors and
its martyrs, and on which one should not enter save in resigning oneself
in advance to submit to the pitiless law _vae victis_.

H. M.

CHAPTER I

HOW THE BOHEMIAN CLUB WAS FORMED

One morning--it was the eighth of April--Alexander Schaunard, who
cultivated the two liberal arts of painting and music, was rudely
awakened by the peal of a neighbouring cock, which served him for an
alarm.

"By Jove!" exclaimed Schaunard, "my feathered clock goes too fast: it
cannot possibly be today yet!" So saying, he leaped precipitately out of
a piece of furniture of his own ingenious contrivance, which, sustaining
the part of bed by night, (sustaining it badly enough too,) did duty by
day for all the rest of the furniture which was absent by reason of the
severe cold for which the past winter had been noted.

To protect himself against the biting