that every guest who wrote in after years of Nodier's _salon_, its merry conversation followed inevitably by dancing, did so with most grateful praise, for Nodier died in 1846, leaving his Romantic friends to write regretful reminiscences. The _salon_ of Sophie Gay and her daughter was equally infected by high spirits, but it was less purely literary. Liszt, Thalberg, and Berlioz made music here; Roger de Beauvoir met Lamartine, and the Marquis de Custine sat by Balzac or Alphonse Karr. The de Vignys also had a _salon_, and Théodore de Banville speaks most warmly of their kindly hospitality; but there was a certain aloofness about the creator of "Eloa," and another of his guests found that in his house colouring seemed absent, so that "the regular guests seemed to come and go in the moonlight."[12] To speak at greater length about the _salons_ of the Romantic period would here be beside the mark. Bohemians, no doubt, were often to be found at Victor Hugo's or Nodier's, but on those occasions they were consciously straying outside their own boundaries. Neither the stately house in the Place Royale nor the librarian's dwelling at the Arsenal was within the domains of Bohemia, and no Bohemian of the time would have dreamed of claiming them, as the later "Parnassiens" might have claimed the _salons_ of Nina de Kallias and Madame Ricard, for parts of their ordinary existence. The case, however, is different with the relations between _le tout Paris_ and Bohemia. _Le tout Paris_ was, as I have said, a nucleus, but a nucleus of disparate and constantly shifting particles. This perfectly undefined body had, of course, no definite place of assembly, but so far as it could be identified with any particular locality it may be said to have congregated on the boulevard. The Boulevard des Italiens--_the_ boulevard--was the chosen spot for the saunterings of the chosen few, a fact which by itself is a proof of the smallness and privacy of Paris compared with the present day, when this same boulevard is flooded from morning till night by a hurrying stream of indistinguishable humanity. In the days of Louis Philippe nobody, except an ignorant foreigner, ventured to appear on this sacred preserve in the afternoon without some semblance of a title. The title may have been so small as a peculiarly elegant waistcoat, a capacity for drinking, or a happy invention for practical jokes, or it may have been the reputation for a ready wit and a trenchant pen; but whosoever dared to show himself in this select society was sure to have some particular justification for making himself conspicuous, otherwise he was certain to be quizzed out of existence. The newcomer, if he survived a short but swift scrutiny, entered an informal though exclusive club of which every member was known to the others--he was known, that is, to "all Paris." All Paris, in a sense, it truly was, not because the greatest poets and