The Arcades Project - Operi

only the hanknotes of paradise, and the shopkeepers of this world would nail this
money to their counter like a coin fallen from the hands of a counterfeiter. " Alexandre
Guerin, I'Les Mansardes," Le Boheme, 1, no. 7 (May 13, 1855). [U7a,2]
From a confrontation between the underclass intellectuals and the ruling-class
intellectuals: "You princes of thought, jewels of the intellect . .. , since you have
moved to disown us, we in turn have abjured your paternity; we have disdained
your crowns and impugned your coats of arms. We have cast aside the grandiose
titles you formerly sought for your labors: we arc no longer "The Elan," "The
Star," or "The Will-o'-the-'Wisp," . .. but instead are "The Pretentious Fool,"
"The Penniless,H "The Promised Land," "The Enfant Terrible," "The Tragic
Pariah," or "The Bohemian," and thus we protest . .. your egotistical authority."
Charles Pratlier, "Peres et fils," Le Boheme, 1, no. 5 (April 29, 1855). [U7a,3]
Le Boheme, in its first issue, bears the subtitle Nonpolitical Newspaper. [UB,!]
"Do me the kindness of walking through the gambling dens, the little restaurants
ncar the Pantheon or the Medical School. There you will find . .. poets who are
moved only by envy and all the lowest passions, the self-proclaimed martyrs of the
sacred cause of progress, who . . . smoke many a pipe . . . without doing anything
. . . ; whereas Piconel, whose beautiful lines yon have cited, Piconel the
garment worker, who carns four and a half francs a day to feed eight people, is
registered at the charity office!! ... I have no , .. wish, paradoxical as it might
seem, to commend the hoasting of Dumas pere or to excuse the indifference of
some of his friends toward younger writers; but I declare to you that the greatest
enemies of those who have heen deprived of a literary legacy are not the writers of
renown, the monopolizers of the daily feuilleton, but rather the falsely disinherited,
those who do nothing but hurl insults, drink, and scandalize honest people,
and all this from the vantage point of art." Eric Isoard, "Les Faux Bohbnes," Le
Boheme, 1, no. 6 (May 6, 1855). [UB,2]
It is significant that Le Bohiime, which looks after the rights of the literary proletariat-who
sympathize, to some extent, with the industrial proletariat-would see
fit, in an article entitled "Du Roman en general et du romancier moderne en
particulier" , by
Paul Saulnier (vol. 1, no. 5), to condemn the practice of "slavers;' Monsieur de
Santis, as the novelist in vogue is named here, returns hOllle after a day spent in
idleness. "Directly upon his arrival home, Monsieur de Santis locks himself in ...
and goes to open a little door hidden behind his bookcase.-He finds himself,
then, in a sort of little study, dirty and quite poorly lit. Here, with a long goose
quill in his hand, with his hair standing on end, is a man with a face at once
sinister and unctuous,-Oho! with this one, you can tell froll1 a mile away he's a
novelist-even if he is only a former employee of tl,e ministry who learned tl,e
art of Balzac from the serials in Le Constitutiannel. It is the veritable author of 17"
Chamber afSkulls!It is the novelist!" [UB,3]