So far as Bohemia was concerned, the generation of 1830 had entirely passed away by 1846, when Murger's sketches actually appeared, and the young men of whom Bohemia was composed were formed under less violent influences. The last flashes of Napoleon's glory had not illuminated their early days, they knew little of the stifling reign of Charles X, and the Revolution of 1830 took place when they had only a little while outgrown the nursery. By the time they grew up the complexion of affairs in Paris wore a more even tone. Assisted by Guizot, Louis Philippe had found the _juste-milieu_ to his people's satisfaction, revolutionary tendencies had been checked or diverted into harmless channels of humanitarian reform, the _bourgeois_ had firmly grasped his power and built up an already solid bulwark of commercial interest. In the artistic world, too, things were quieter. "Hernani," once a scandal, had become a classic, and there was no further need of red waistcoats and furious _claques_. Romanticism, indeed, had become so workaday that a successful little excitement was aroused by a reaction against it in what was called "l'école de bon sens," whose chief poet, Ponsard, gained quite a celebrity for a short time with his classic drama "Lucrèce." Beyond the gadfly of artistic impulse and the natural fermentation of the adolescent mind, there was little to rouse a young man's passions or send his blood coursing faster through his veins; there was no particular idol to worship, no hobby-horse to ride, as a Gautier or a Borel had worshipped Hugo and mounted the gallant steed called Middle Ages. The creed of Romanticism was so thoroughly established that there was nothing left to make any fuss about, with the natural consequence that its early extravagances had fallen out of fashion and there was no further need to be satanic or profess excessive sensibility. Literature was feeling its way to the austerer Romanticism of Flaubert and the Goncourts, as painting towards the "realism" of Courbet, but the growth was still below ground and the surface as yet seemed undisturbed. The generation of Rodolphe and Schaunard found, therefore, in Paris no eager band to whom they could ally themselves and to whose educative influence they could submit. Driven by their impulses towards the arts, with souls naturally romantic, as most young men's souls are, they found no cause which they could immediately embrace in the manner of the second _cénacle_. They missed that valuable education which is the idolization of a great man, and were confined instead to fighting their own battle, a very much less distinguished affair, which allowed many little dishonourable compromises with indolence and in which victory meant no more than individual success. This explains, to some extent, the absence of intellectual fecundity in Murger's heroes, which even their most devoted admirers cannot deny. Rodolphe's poems are indeed only pale