ABSTRACT
The new literary ideals and the struggling, searching, voluble young men who were their natural protagonists joined together in Paris to make of intellectual discontent a cultural spectacle. They created la vie de bohème as a means of intruding into daily reality their willful and unpredictable energies, their thrust for novelty, and their colorful contempt for the established spiritual order. The language of Bohemia, said Henri de Mürger (who was to make his reputation as the chief chronicler of the garret) was a paradise to experimentalists and a hell to classicists. And Alexandre Dumas, when he felt like posing as a Bohemian, at once assumed the idiom of self-dramatized and shimmering sensitivity and the air of unstable, pulsing intellectual excitement; “a brush in one hand, a pen in the other, laughing, crying, scribbling.” 1 Balzac, on the other hand, in A Prince of Bohemia, saw Bohemian glamor and even Bohemian fun as the symbol of enforced failure, the spectacle of young intellectuals who had turned to iconoclasm and exhibitionism, because of their frustration before what he called the “gerontocracy” of the Restoration and Orleanist periods. If the Tsar would buy Bohemia and set it down in Odessa, Odessa would be Paris within a year. There were, he said, writers, administrators, soldiers, artists, and diplomats in Bohemia “quite capable of overturning Russia's designs, if they but felt the power of France at their backs.” 2
