Even in those days the "boulevards"--the popular resort of the men of letters, artists, and musical folk--meant, as it does to-day, a somewhat restricted area in the immediate neighbourhood of the present Opera. At the corner of the Rue Lafitte was a tobacconist's shop, whose genius was a "splendid creature," of whom Alfred de Musset became so enamoured that his friends feared for an "imprudence on his part." The various elements of society and cliques had their favourite resorts and rendezvous; the actors under the trees in the courtyard of the Palais Royal; the _ouvrier_ and his family meandered in the Champs Elysées or journeyed countryward to Grenelle; while the soldiery mostly repaired to La Plaine de St. Denis. A sister to Thiers kept a small dining establishment in the Rue Drouet, and many journalistic and political gatherings were held at her _tables d'hôte_. When asked whether her delicious pheasants were of her illustrious brother's shooting, she shook her head, and replied: "No, M. the President of the Council has not the honour to supply my establishment." Bohemia, as Paris best knew it in the fifties, was not that pleasant land which lies between the Moravian and the Giant Mountains; neither were the Bohemians of Paris a Slavonic or Teutonic people of a strange, nomad race. But the history of the Bohemia of arts and letters--which rose to its greatest and most prophetic heights in the Paris of the nineteenth century--would no doubt prove to be as extensive a work as Buckle's "History of Civilization," though the recitation of tenets and principles of one would be the inevitable reverse of the other. The intellectual Bohemian--the artist, or the man of letters--has something in his make-up of the gipsy's love of the open road; the vagabond who instinctively rebels against the established rules of society, more because they are established than for any other reason. Henri Mürger is commonly supposed to have popularized the "Bohemia" of arts and letters, and it is to him we owe perhaps the most graphic pictures of the life which held forth in the _Quartier Latin_, notorious for centuries for its lack of discipline and its defiance of the laws of Church, state, and society. It was the very nursery of open thought and liberty against absolutism and the conventional proprieties. Gustave Nadaud described this "unknown land" in subtle verse, which loses not a little in attempted paraphrase: "There stands behind Ste. Geneviève, A city where no fancy paves With gold the narrow streets, But jovial youth, the landlady On gloomy stairs, in attic high, Gay hope, her tenant, meets. * * * * * 'Twas there that the Pays Latin stood, 'Twas there the world was _really_ good, 'Twas there that she was gay."