Page:The Bohemians of the Latin Quarter.djvu/53

composed of young fellows who have been deceived, or who have deceived themselves. They mistake a fancy for a vocation, and impelled by 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, Malfilâtre, Chatterton, and Moreau have been too often, too imprudently, and, above all, too uselessly uttered. The tomb of these unfortunates has been converted into a pulpit, from whence has been preached the martyrdom of art and poetry.

This despairing song of Victor Escousse, stifled by the pride which had been implanted in him by a factitious triumph, was for a time the “Marseillaise” of the volunteers of art who were bent on inscribing their names on the martyrology of mediocrity.

For these funereal apotheoses, these encomiastic requiems, having all the attraction of the abyss for weak minds and ambitious vanities, many of these yielding to this attraction have thought that fatality was the half of genius; many have dreamt of the hospital bed on which Gilbert died, hoping that they would become poets, as he did a quarter of an hour before dying, and believing that it was an obligatory stage in order to arrive at glory.