Los Bohemios

While the Marquis de Sade was penning his infamous The 120 Days of Sodom in the Bastille, another marquis in a nearby cell, no less libertine, was composing a similarly scandalous novel, equally replete with lust and excesses but with much more to say about the profession of writing. The bohemians alluded to in the title are a troupe of writers who traverse the Champagne countryside accompanied by their concubines and a donkey laden with unpublished manuscripts. They live off of the land, engage in interminable philosophical discussions, quarrel and bawl like infants, and engage in indiscriminate promiscuity, stopping only to wolf down whatever food they can steal along the way. Filled with humor, satire, double entendres, social observations, and profanity, this book can be read as a picaresque novel, a roman à clef, a collection of essays, an anticlerical pamphlet, an autobiography, or a libertine tract. No matter the genre, Los bohemos is undeniably entertaining.