They had been pure Bohemians, most of them, in their earlier youth, with higher ideals and more restricted enjoyments; but their gorge, too, had risen at the squalor of their Maison Vauquer, and they had parleyed with the devil. Discovering in themselves some talent for making money, they had exploited it to the exclusion of all others. They traded either in their own art or in that of others. On the boulevard they held their own by their engaging sallies of malicious gossip, by their prodigal extravagance, and, above all, by the fear which their power as journalists, critics, caricaturists, or newspaper proprietors inspired. They were Bohemians at heart, carrying the more pardonable disorders of Bohemia into less exacting circumstances, spending their gifts and their money without a thought, luxurious, venal, insatiable. Their type is to be found to-day in the rich mercantile, especially Jewish, society of all large cities; but in Paris of the thirties and forties they were more powerful and more conspicuous. Though they could never hope to enter the Jockey Club, they were hail-fellow-well-met with the _viveurs_ of blue blood; they served the Rastignacs when it was worth their while, and they were so near to the true Bohemia that their example was at once its temptation and its despair. Balzac himself sums up the four friends, Bixiou, Finot, Blondet, and Couture, in a passage which, having myself said so much, I quote in the original: "C'était quatre des plus hardis cormorans éclos dans l'écume qui couronne les flots incessamment renouvelés de la génération présente; aimables garçons dont l'existence est problématique, à qui l'on connaît ni rentes ni domaines, et qui vivent bien. Ces spirituels _condottieri_ de l'industrie moderne, devenue la plus cruelle des guerres, laissent les inquiétudes à leurs créanciers, gardent les plaisirs pour eux, et n'ont de souci que de leur costume. D'ailleurs, braves à fumer, comme Jean Bart, leur agare sur un baril de poudre, peut-être pour ne pas faillir à leur rôle; plus moqueurs que les petits journaux, moqueurs à se moquer d'eux-mêmes, perspicaces et incrédules, fureteurs d'affaires, avides et prodigues, envieux d'autrui, mais contents d'eux-mêmes; profonds politiques par saillies, analysant tout, devinant tout, ils n'avaient pas encore pu se faire jour dans le monde où ils voudraient se produire."