After a day of trailing through the mud, the réfractaires came together at night, to plunge up to their necks in wine and talk, flaunting their paradoxes, proving their merit to one another, pouring out their hearts in a cloud of heroic but useless fantasy, imagining things never done and books never written. "People call them roués, but they are dupes; or débauchés, when they are mad." They ended up in a hospital, as suicides, in the provinces. They might make a powerful army if only their country knew how to use them. But the reality of their lives was shipwreck, and [Jules] Vallès's final cry summed it up:

"Man overboard!"

-Jerrold Seigel, "Bohemian Paris" (1986)