The conversation is compared with some aptitude to a Spanish town devastated by an earthquake, which confounds in one ruin palaces and huts, churches and houses of ill-fame. So in their talk the ideal and the grotesque, poetry and cynical jesting are confounded pell-mell. Silence is made while a passage from Victor Hugo is declaimed, after which four discourses are pronounced. Three are by Borel, Clopet, and Bouchardy respectively, concealed in the names of Reblo, Noel, and Don José, and the second discourse is delivered by the swarthy O'Neddy himself, who, _Faisant osciller son regard de maudit_ _Sur le conventicule,_ pours out a passionate complaint that poets have too long been under the yoke of governments and codes of law. The evening closes with a violent tumult. The punch has done its work, and the _cénacle_ is a-screaming with the ecstasy of energumens. _Ce fut un long chaos de jurons, de boutades,_ _De hurrahs, de tollés et de rhodomontades._ They danced and sang like the demon crew in the master's "Ronde du Sabbat," _Et jusques au matin les damnés Jeune-Frances_ _Nagèrent dans un flux d'indicibles démences._ It is to be hoped that the worthy fruiterer was sleeping quietly in another part of Paris, and only the potatoes were kept awake and sleep banished from the pears. If at this point our reader feels inclined to throw up his hands and exclaim "How disgusting!" he will be well advised to put down the book. One cannot approach Bohemia without a certain sympathy for youthful excesses, howsoever opposed they may be to one's personal predilections. If the _cénacle_ indulged in occasional orgies--which, even allowing a good deal for "local colour" in O'Neddy's "Pandæmonium," they certainly did--they had a great many compensating virtues, such as complete disinterestedness and a consuming love of art, which were not conspicuous in Paris at the time. Maxime du Camp in his memoir on Gautier sets the extreme limit to which reasonable criticism of them can go when, after remarking on the promise given by a violent youth for a fruitful middle age, he says: