Balzac, we all know, was a little too ready to believe in the depravity of human nature, particularly when men of letters were in question. Moreover, he was profoundly antagonistic to the creed of the _Bousingots_. His portrait of Nathan is distinctly ill-natured, but it bears out the profound remark of Baudelaire, that if the Restoration had developed in glory Romanticism would never have separated from it. In another extravagant tirade (in "Béatrix") Balzac complains that the Revolution of 1830 opened the flood-gates of petty ambition, and the result of modern "equality" was that everybody did his utmost to become conspicuous. This complaint was very largely true, but as far as the _Bousingots_ are concerned Baudelaire puts the facts in a truer light. The policy of _juste-milieu_ inevitably caused revolt among the over-excited young men of the day. The _Bousingots_ were part of this revolt, but the best of them had no thought of self-advancement. On the contrary, the testimony of contemporaries goes to show that the saving virtue of the Romantic Bohemia, _Bousingot_ and _Jeune-France_ alike, was disinterestedness. Baudelaire says in extenuation of Pétrus Borel himself: "He loved letters ferociously, and to-day we are encumbered with pretty, supple writers ready to sell the muse for the potter's field." Asselineau avers that if there was much of the ridiculous in their excesses, there was nothing sordid. "They never talked of money, or business, or position." The artist Jean Gigoux,[8] in regretting the past, says that the _rapin_ of his later years, if better dressed, knew less than those of his young days, and was greedy of honours and money, things which the _rapins_ of old sincerely despised. Indeed, it is impossible to read much about the Romantics of 1830, high or low, aristocratic or Bohemian, without coming to the conclusion that they were neither jealous nor mercenary. So the _Bousingots_--though some rolled their eyes and knitted their brows "as if they would bully the whole universe," others "fixed their dark glances on the ground in fearful meditation," others, "gloomily leaning against a statue or tree," threw "such terrific meaning into their looks as might be naturally interpreted into the language of the witches in 'Macbeth'"[9]--did these things in all sincerity, with an ambition, not to "get on," but to "do something."