The traditions of subservience that they left were not to be shaken off, in spite of revolutions and occasional canters down the wild road of anarchy. There dwell permanently in the race a terror and distrust of individualism and initiative. Since it has shaken off the shackles of kings and dictators, it must walk in willing servitude to the countless smaller, and, it must be admitted, less obnoxious, tyrannies it maintains for the clipping of its own wings, and which form a kind of stable throne for its prestige. For what would France be in the eyes of the world without its five Academies, without its École des Beaux Arts, its Théâtre Français, the house of Molière, without its high literary tradition, the distinction and elegance of all that emanates from its genius? The liberty of the gypsy is undoubtedly the greatest blessing of life, freedom to paint, to write, to act, to speak, to breathe, by spontaneous and untrammelled effort, freedom to ride upon the crests of inspiration unmindful of the approval of the fogies of tradition, to tilt against the windmills of discord in one’s own manner without a thought for “conservatoire” or national opera-house, to go a-sailing on the lake of dreams, without calculating the benefit it may be to your pocket, and dive for pearls of fancy without reckoning their market value. But civilisation sets too just a value upon the benefits of tradition and discipline to tolerate this nomad contempt of their advantages; and in no country are these advantages more highly prized than in France, the land of revolution and unrest. Even the follies of the Latin Quarter, as long as they lasted, were rigidly based upon the traditions of that wild spot. _La Vie de Bohème_, for all its apparent recklessness of rowdy students and Mimi Pinsons and Lisettes, had its traditions in vice and virtue, deviation from which was regarded an infraction as intolerable as ever could be deviation from those of the five Academies or the Comédie Française. The student in the process of going to the dogs was bound to go thither in the way of the Quarter. He inherited from a long line of genius his hat and his garments, the cut of his hair and beard, his sins and attitudes. The road of pleasure and pain, of wickedness and repentance, of distraction and despair, was cut out for him upon tradition as unswervable as that of the most respectable institution, and to act the proper part assigned him in the triumph of disreputableness he should take Villon for his model, or wring out the sombre folds of the poet’s mantle in the gaiety and genial ruffianism of the modern ideal of the Latin Quarter. But here, happily, we alight upon an institution in process of doom. The Quarter is in the pangs of transformation, and soon the cheap and unsympathetic heroes of Mürger will be but a memory, and not a decent one at that. Along the “Boul. Mich.” youths are beginning to pay their way, for all the world like the common “beastly burgess” across the river.