10 The Rice Institute Pamphlet
exceeded only by their fervent disregard for convention. Dur-
ing the Romantic movement these colorful and somewhat
lunatic habitués of the cabarets and bistros of the Left Bank
called themselves Jeune France—“Young France”—and during
the symbolist and impressionist movements, Decadents1When
SurreaUsm and cubism were in vogue they were Dadaists, and
now that existentialism has become, as we say, all the rage,
it is not surprising that these joyful antagonists of middle-
class platitude should have adopted the existentialist banner
for their very own. To be sure, they are Bohemians of a
very modern sort, these so-called Existentialists, and possibly
they harbor some vague notion that an addiction to dis-
arrayed clothing and some of the more cacophonous forms
of Dixieland Jazz is an expression of Sartre’s idea of human
liberty. The truth of the matter is that they are no more
representative of existentialism, which is in reality the stern-
est of philosophies, than they were of romanticism or sur-
realism. They do provide a good deal of amusing and often
profitable publicity, and surround the doctrines themselves
with an aura of charming insanity which tends to give to
their contemporaries the illusion that it is they, and not
Victor Hugo, Auguste Renoir, or Pablo Picasso, who are
making artistic and literary history, an illusion which history
itself quickly rectifies.
I must confess, however, that tire recollection I most fre-
quently associate with existentialism has nothing to do with
the intellectual cliques of the Latin Quarter or Saint-Germain-
des-Prés. At about this time I was living in a Paris apartment
not far from the Parc Monceau, and one of my neighbors was
a small French boy named Claude. One day I gave Claude
an old copy of Life magazine I happened to have, and not
long afterwards he knocked at my door, explaining that he