“Today, as in all previous times, any man who takes up the arts without other means of existence except the art itself will be forced to start off in the ways of Bohemia … and for the anxious reader or the timorous bourgeois we must repeat the truth in the form of an axiom: Bohemia is a necessary stage of the artistic life, it is the prologue to the Academy, to the State Hospital, or to the public morgue.”
— Henry Murger, Preface to “Scenes de la vie de Boheme”
