We had in New York some years ago a dozen or two of young fellows, more or less connected with the press, most of them of foreign origin, who cherished the delusion that eating a bad supper in a cellar late at night, and uttering or singing semi-drunken nonsense, was an exceedingly noble, high-spirited, and literary way of consuming a weakly constitution and a small salary. They thought they were doing something in the manner of Dr. Johnson and Charles Lamb. Any one who should have judged New York in the year 1855 by the writings of these young gentlemen would have supposed that we were wholly given up to silly, vulgar, and reckless dissipation. But, in truth, the "Bohemians," as they were proud to be styled, were both few and insignificant; their morning scribblings expressed nothing but the looseness of their own lives, and that was half pretense. Two admiring friends have written the life of Gavarni, the incomparable caricaturist of _la femme_; and they tell us just how and where and when the artist acquired his "subtle and profound knowledge" of the sex. It is but too plain that he knew but one class of women, the class that lives by deluding fools. "During all one year, 1835," say these admiring biographers, "it seems that in the life, the days, the thoughts of Gavarni, there was nothing but _la femme_. According to his own expression, woman was his 'grand affair.'" He was in love, then? By no means. Our admiring authors proceed to describe this year of devotion to _la femme_ as a period when "intrigues were mingled together, crossed and entangled with one another; when passing inclinations, the fancies of an evening, started into being together with new passions; when rendezvous pressed upon rendezvous; when there fell upon Gavarni a rain of perfumed notes from the loves of yesterday, from the forgotten loves of last month, which he inclosed in one envelope, as he said, 'like dead friends in the same coffin.'"[24] [Footnote 24: "Gavarni, l'Homme et l'Oeuvre," par Edmond et Jules de Goncourt, Paris, 1873.] The authors enlarge upon this congenial theme, describing their hero as going forth upon _le pavé de_ Paris in quest of _la femme_ as a keen hunter takes to the forest for the plump partridge or the bounding deer. Some he brought down with the resistless magnetism of his eye. "It was for him a veritable rapture, as well as the exertion of a power which he loved to try, to magnetize with his eye and make his own the first woman whom he chanced to meet in the throng." The substance of the chapter is that Gavarni, casting aside all the restraints of civilization and decency, lived in Paris the life of a low and dirty animal; and when, in consequence of so living, he found himself in Clichy for debt, he replenished his purse by delineating, as the _fourberies de femmes_, the tricks of the dissolute women who had got his money. That, at least, is the blunt American of our authors' dainty and elegant French.