This piece of etymology, nugatory as it may appear, is, in fact, very important. It is the first real delimitation of our inquiry. _La vie de Bohème_ is essentially a French term, and it is therefore fitting that we should examine its implications in that language. Murger in his preface is contradictory, but his very contradiction is pregnant and valuable. At the outset he applies the term _bohémien_ to the literary and artistic vagabonds of all ages. "La Bohème dont il s'agit dans ce livre n'est point une race née aujourd'hui, elle a existé de tous temps et partout, et peut revendiquer d'illustres origines." Homer, he says, was the first Bohemian of Greek antiquity, and his tradition was carried on by the medieval minstrels and troubadours; Pierre Gringoire and François Villon, Clément Marot and Mathurin Regnier, Molière and Shakespeare, Rousseau and D'Alembert were the leading citizens of their contemporary Bohemias. This brings Murger to his own day, of which he says: "Aujourd'hui comme autrefois, tout homme qui entre dans les arts, sans autre moyen d'existence que l'art lui-même, sera forcé de passer par les sentiers de la Bohème." If Chelsea were here to make a triumphant interruption, it would have spoken too soon, for he proceeds to give the definition which serves as an epigraph to this chapter, and, without a word of warning, contradicts what he has said before in the sentence: "Nous ajouterons que la Bohème n'existe et n'est possible qu'à Paris." This is a highly serious matter. It leaves old Homer nothing but a Greek poet, and Chelsea--well--little more than Chelsea. However, I cannot imagine Homer objecting, and Chelsea must forgive me, if I accept Murger's statement in the strictest possible way. Further, the Paris implied is the Paris of Murger's own day. That this was so may appear more clearly in the sequel, but for the present it must suffice to say that the Paris of the Romantic period, which gave birth to Bohemia, was unlike the Paris of earlier days in many respects, and no Romantic had any conception of the cosmopolitan Paris of to-day. _La vie de Bohème_, far from being a vague label, was a phrase packed with intimate meaning, meaning which at the time was not at all so fully manifest as under criticism and comparison it may now appear. It depended for its peculiar qualities upon the social and material conditions of Louis Philippe's Paris, which have long since passed away.