In order to catch at a glance the result of a lapse of years I lingered in the last chapter over Rodolphe, Mimi, and their friends, figures drawn from the moving scene of contemporary life, yet snatched from the changes of time as permanently as those on Keats's Grecian urn. The "Scènes de la Vie de Bohème" show, as it seems to me, more clearly than any other kind of record, the decadence of Bohemia, regarding the degree of its approach to an ideal of complete artistic existence, since the great days that followed 1830. This might, indeed, be a warrant for not returning to more documentary facts at all, but there are always those to be considered who view Fiction as a sprite so far divorced from actuality that they are unable to place any trust in her indications. The teller of stories, in their apprehension, is always on the look-out for a good effect, to which end he will minimize the essential and magnify the unessential, distorting sober fact at the call of his individual imagination. They are the people who read novels, as they say, for relaxation, while finding wisdom alone in biographies and memoirs bristling with dates and packed with quotations. The question, "What, after all, is sober fact?" is sufficient to put them into confusion, but to propound that ancient problem would be here beside the mark, for in a book that honestly professes to be as sober in fact as any it would be unbecoming unduly to press the point on behalf of fiction. The warrant, therefore, will be allowed to pass, and we return to those tales which men have told about themselves and their friends under the names which they bore at baptism, duly signed and dated. Such information as they give concerning the later years of Bohemia is, at best, fragmentary, but the fragments have some appearance of falling together in the light of Murger's picture. A more diligent research might have produced a more detailed record, but it may be questioned whether the total effect would have been any clearer. There were scores of obscure persons in Bohemia, but their daily uprising and lying-down were not so very widely different. At least this may be asserted, that after a certain number of facts it is safer to use the imagination for the rest.