St.-Louis, where his comrade was the painter Boissard, a good artist who, as Gautier said, exhausted himself in enthusiasms, and in whose wonderful Louis XIV salon the society of _hachischiens_ met. Had Baudelaire been a true Bohemian at heart he might have instituted a second _Bohème galante_, but he was wanting in that simplicity and goodfellowship which are signal qualities in the Bohemian character. He wished to make his life, like his art, a study in exquisite intensity, so that in the days of his splendour his mode of living was rather that of a "dandy" than anything else. He dressed with immense care, but in a bygone fashion; he pursued every kind of sensation, frequented every kind of society, and became the leader of a set who carefully cultivated eccentricity for its own sake, an eccentricity too _posé_ to serve as a type of Bohemian manners. To make himself a subject of astonishment was his chief amusement, to which end his devices--such as entering a restaurant with a friend and feigning to begin a story with the loud exordium: "After I had murdered my poor father----"--were innumerable. So much may be said with a certain pity or amusement, but it must also be admitted that a certain refinement, both social and intellectual, kept him from associating himself entirely with the not over-discriminating Bohemia of his generation. It is all the more fair to say this because after 1844, when his stepfather got a guardian appointed to take charge of his remaining capital and he was reduced to eking out a reduced income by journalism, with all its attendant disappointments and hardships, he chose with some discrimination the extent to which he would throw in his lot with the Bohemian life for which he had by that time every qualification. He became a friend of Murger and many other complete Bohemians, and there is a story of his asking the original of Schaunard to dine and giving him a piece of Brie cheese and two bottles of claret, asking him to imagine that he was enjoying the dessert after a good dinner. Yet his real intimates were a band of young men, Théodore de Banville, Charles Monselet, Villiers de l'Isle Adam, and Leconte de l'Isle, who chose to maintain a certain amount of order in the midst of eccentricity and found boisterous joviality less to their taste than the more delicate affectations of wit. Here again I hold no brief for the complete Bohemians. They had their compensating virtues, but it is hardly doubtful that Baudelaire and his friends were the better educated and the more truly artistic set of the two. This, perhaps, was the greatest tragedy of Bohemia's decline, that its spiritual distinction faded with its material well-being. At any rate, for a combination of reasons, laudable and the reverse, Baudelaire's set was not Bohemia, and if, as I leave them, I may insist particularly on one of the less laudable reasons, it is that pose, which is another form of convention, must by the very conception