Intimist

"By its subject, the work is inscribed at the intersection of the romantic and realist traditions: on the one hand, Musset's La Confession d'un enfant du siecle and Vigny's Chatterton, but also the so-called intimist novel that, as Jean Bruneau notes, 'recounts events of daily life and asks the essential questions about them' and which, 'down-to-earth and often moralizing', prefigures the realist novel and the thesis novel; and on the other hand, the second bohemia, whose intimate journal in the romantic manner (as with Courbet's intimist painting of the world familiar to the painter) is converted into the realist novel when, with Les Scènes de la vie de bohème by Murger and especially Les Aventures de Mariette and Chien-Caillou by Champfleury, it registers in a faithful manner the often sordid reality of rawboned daubers' lives, their garrets, watering-holes and love affairs ('It is in reality the saddest live,' writes Champfleury in a letter of 1847, 'consisting of not dining, not having boots, and making about all that a quantity of paradoxes.')"

"However, he had not yet at that time fully displayed the principle of expression through intonation, the amazing ability to construct a line of verse in accordance with the most ready-to-hand, most colloquial speech - a characteristic which makes some critics group him with the intimist poets who write of the most complicated inner experiences, ostensibly inaccessible to the ordinary reader of today, and which makes others see him, no less mistakenly, as far too closely continuing the Futurists' methods of fashioning language."