Vie Boheme

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 352, 22 March 1946, Page 13

Vie Boheme

"So this is Bohemia, old boy? Is it nervous anaemia, or joy? Who are the ladies who cook haddock and eggs in a nook? What are they called, and why are they bald, and are they as odd as they look?" Thus sang Sir Alan Herbert, many years before knighthood, and the engaging rhyme serves as well as any other, to introduce the most common connotations of the word "Bohemia," now forming the subject of a series of presentations from 3YA and 3YL by the Henri Penn Trio. Bohemia entered the English language in its sense of a land

of artistic and romantic unconventionality from the French, when Murger wrote his "La Vie Bohéme," that collection of stories of Latin Quarter student life which so famously ingpired Signor Puccini.:It was not a native English habit to use that particular European country in that sense: Alsatia, as nearer home, used to serve that purpose. But Murger and Puccini made a hit and displaced London’s thieves’ quarter from the popular imagination, As for the French, they used "Bohemian" in the above sense because of the Romany people, who moved. in from CeMtral Europe and points east. Their native

individualism, in matters of game laws and so forth, was regularly blamed on more respectable Eastern peoples; the French knew them as Bohemians and the name "gipsy" is a hearty English abbreviation of "Egyptian."