At the same table, if it was one of those rare nights when all three might think of going to the Brasserie, there might be the melancholic Charles Baudelaire, lean and smart in his severe black suit, head shaved as if ready for the guillotine, brooding silently over his debts or the prosecution of Les Fleurs du Mal. 

Together Murger, Courbet and Baudelaire, who had met in the 1840s in cafes like the Momus, represented three styles of Bohemian life. But since most other cafe habitues were more interested in ices than revolution they were three styles of Bohemia doomed to futility.
 
Of the regular or occasional clients Theophile Gautier had been among the first to try to rescue Art from the shipwreck of his times. Along with friends like Gerard de Nerval he had formed an artistic colony which met in the 1830s in their studios in the Impasse du Doyenne. Romantic writers had been forming similar private coteries for several years but Gautier and his friends liked to think of themselves as Bohemians: a term already used by Balzac in 1830 to describe the background of his novel Un Grand Homme de Province a Paris. 

The word 'Bohemian' conjured up a vision of the artist as gipsy; but there were two important differences. He did not have to be a wanderer - Bohemia could be a definite place like the Latin Quarter - and while he could be starving, he could also have a private income like Gautier and his friends. By the last half of the century the world of the boulevardiers would be in decline and Bohemia would become the dominant myth of literary cafe society in Paris.

Although 'le bon Theo' probably looked in at the Brasserie from time to time - he once lived briefly a few doors away in the rue Navarin - he may not have found its Realist ambience too sympathetic. The manifesto of his cenacle was the ideal of l'Art pour l'Art, Art for Art's Sake, by which they hoped to isolate their work from the society they despised. Drinking with his many literary friends in the 1850s, Gautier would often be tempted to reminisce about those days in the 1830s when he would sit in his red waistcoat drinking wine from a skull, or inventing paradoxes with his friends, frantically trying to convince himself he was no longer bourgeois.

The bourgeoisie had been less than horrified. After all, the idea that Art could be appreciated only by people of sensitivity and talent was attractive to nouveaux riches looking for signs of social distinction. And there were other ways in which l'Art pour l'Art reflected rather than challenged the power of the bourgeoisie. The supremacy of a metaphysical Art had its mirror image in the triumph of finance capital. Often it seemed the more bankers there were in France, the more Bohemian were its artists. If Art could be produced only by a few inspired Romantics, this was in harmony with the trend towards the division of labour. The denial that Art had any social purpose was also useful to a ruling class that had seen the danger in Hugo's alliance of liberals and Romantics. If one member of Gautier's cenacle dreamt of killing Louis-Philippe with a needle dipped in prussic acid, most of the young artists who worshipped Goethe's Werther and Vigny's Chatterton were far more likely to kill themselves. This secret attraction of the bourgeoisie towards l'Art pour l'Art was so powerful that their young heirs, who had their money without their obligations, spent their time living up to the standards of Gautier in the elegant boulevard cafes.

After the July Revolution of 1850 the landscape of Paris had begun to express its young bourgeois prosperity. The streets were widened and many more were paved with wood. There were sidewalks lined with macadam instead of hard earth along the streets. At last it was possible to sit outside without being splashed by mud. The introduction of gas lighting caused a sensation: la ville lumiere. The cafes looked splendid with their bright lights and their large plate-glass windows. On the terraces of the boulevard cafes the haut monde sat watching itself pass by. The crowds had begun to drift away from the by now slightly disreputable Palais Royal after the duc d'Orleans tried to clean it up in 1829. At Tortoni's or the Cafe Riche a few doors away in the Boulevard des Italiens, the aristocrats, diplomats, rich tourists were joined by artists like Oftenbach, the Goncourt brothers, Balzac, Alexandre Dumas or the heavily financed dandy Roger de Beauvoir, with whom the hapless Charles Baudelaire felt bound to compete. 'In the Cafe Riche,' wrote one contemporary, 'the most pleasant novels are sketched out, the intrigues of the boulevards are carried on, and the anxieties of politics and the boredom of everyday life are altogether forgotten.'

All this was a fascinating new world for Baudelaire. As a teenager he had run around the less elegant cafes of the Latin Quarter, still the maze of sordid and dimly lit streets that Villon had known, though slightly more respectable for writers since Hugo had lived there. Only when he had been given three thousand pounds for his majority in 1842 did Baudelaire progress to the elegant society of the Right Bank, where he liked to create an exotic effect in his apartment with oriental perfumes, shelves of books in gold and leather, tall bottles of Rhenish wine, soft oriental rugs... a mood he was determined to maintain in the literary cafes too. He enjoyed walking into a cafe with his 'Black Venus', Jeanne Duval, on his arm. His beautiful clothes, wavy hair, pointed beard made him look like an Old Master portrait. Amid the literary crowds of the elegant Divan le Peletier, opened in 1837 at no. 3 rue le Peletier, by the side of the Cafe Riche ('a stupid little place,' wrote the Goncourts), he would distract the attention of strangers who had been looking at Balzac or the Romantics like Musset, de Beauvoir, Gautier, de Nerval, Berlioz. If he walked into the Tabourey, a silent cafe by the entrance to the Jardin du Luxembourg, where the waiters moved around like solemn ghosts in their black vests, he would soon have as many people round his table as some hesitant author warming up his friends before the first night of his latest play. He would break off the lyrical flow of his talk on politics or aesthetics and turn to the lady who had been watching him from the next table. 'Mademoiselle,' he would ask politely, 'do you know what I should like to do? I long to bite into your white flesh. And, if you will permit me, I will tell you how I would like to make love to you. I should like to bind your hands together and tie you by the wrists from the ceiling of my room .... ' Or he would flick his wrists languidly at the cheese. 'Don't you think it tastes faintly of child's brain?' Or in cafes like the young Brasserie des Martyrs he would recite strange and often sadistic verses that were probably among those published over a decade later under the title suggested by a friend at the Cafe Lemblin, Les Fleurs du Mal.

His perversity would have looked merely sordid if it had not been properly subsidized. Once Baudelaire's capital had been taken from his reach in 1844 by his horrified family, who left him burdened with debt for the rest of his life, he shied away from cafes where he might find some wit like de Beauvoir making scurrilous remarks on his virility. Instead he enrolled as an unofficial member of the Bohemian cafe society of the Left Bank. Baudelaire was too refined to be mistaken for one of the Bohemian artists who lived virtually like tramps. But he shared their fate of poverty and anonymity. His Bohemia was solitary and morbid, the Bohemia of a man who would sit with his friends in a cafe and still feel alone.

La Boheme was the underworld of artists who lacked recognition, capital, or income. Most Bohemians had not taken any conscious decision to opt out of bourgeois society. They simply did not have enough money. Some still hoped they would be able to eat at Tortoni's and wear their own clothes. Others helped to plot the Revolution of 1848. Or they might escape into the artificial paradise of opium, hashish or alcohol. Although some were merely incompetent or sick, others were victims of this boulevard society - orthodoxy of taste and the treatment of their work as a commodity made life tough for experimental artists, while many had been lured into hopeless ambitious by the haze of Romanticism. Specialization of labour also made it harder for artists to make a living if they could not sell their work. By the 1840s this constituency of unemployed artists was large enough to merit the nickname of la Boheme.

At first the capital of this mythical country was the Cafe Momus. The term la Boheme had been used by writers like Balzac, but it was Henry Murger, habitue of the Momus and starving author, who made it famous. Murger was a painter's son whose life was dominated by his literary ambitions, penniless friends, and his obsession with caffeine. He liked to write alone at night, surrounded by candles, hocking back innumerable cups of coffee to stimulate his nerves. Although this habit had its romantic appeal it was more probably due to having to share his lodgings. 'You should get up at five,' his mystified flatmate Jules Husson would tell him, 'with a big carafe of cold water.' But to no avail. Although Murger felt his health was being ruined by coffee, he knew he was hooked. 'Madame,' he wrote in Scenes de la Boheme, the fictional memoirs of the Momus, 'the coffee plant is a native of Arabia, where it was discovered by a goat. Its use was extended to Europe. Voltaire used to drink seventy cups a day. I like mine without sugar, but very hot.'

And so by the time the Brasserie became a resort for ladies of dubious reputation in the early 1860s there had been three kinds of Bohemian artists who saw themselves reflected in its garish mirrors. Murger made his fortune by romanticizing la Boheme and found he had written himself into an impasse. He died of a mysterious purpura in 1861 believing, possibly with reason, that he had killed himself. 'Too much coffee... or he was said to have gasped at the end. 'No Bohemia .... ' Although the Goncourts agreed he had a fatal addiction they believed it was to poverty and absinthe. They said his body had begun to decompose before he died and they found this a satisfying tribute to the Bohemian life. As for Courbet, he died in 1872 after five yeats of lonely and bitter exile in Switzerland. His fantasy of an Art that would help his Bohemian friends achieve the socialist paradise in his lifetime failed to survive the Commune. At the end of his life in 1867 Baudelaire had been unable to convince himself of either illusion. Often he would go to a cafe simply to brood alone. 'I'm watching an endless procession of death's heads!' he explained once to a friend. By 1867 he was paralysed by syphilis and had lost all contact with the world. Only a single blasphemy would pass his lips: 'Sacre Nom!' Of the artists who later became famous as Bohemians the most popular fate was suicide, exile, or insanity.