They considered themselves to be above the common need to earn a living, beyond the need to serve the community. They were men who never accepted maturity, who were frightened by life almost before they had begun to live. They were the 'drop-outs' of their day. But there was no welfare state in nineteenth-century France to subsidise their chosen idleness. Their only glimpse of an ordered existence, of security, was a period in hospital.
Modern life is more active, more urgent and more feverish.
Modern life was too exacting to allow the young to pause a while in the dream world of Bohemia. They were the poorer for missing this moment. For if Bohemia had given an escape to many wastrels, it had also given some true artists a green oasis in their lives, an evergreen oasis like the Impasse du Doyenne. There, indeed, was the ideal Bohemia, 'the motherland of all Bohemias', the radiant Bohemia where artist, .poet and novelist lived and worked together. There had been brilliance, too, about the Hotel Pimodan, the palatial Bohemia of the Ile Saint-Louis, where Baudelaire had first met Gaufier, and Roger de Beauvoir had drunk champagne in the shadow of suits of armour.