The school of the Hydropathes Training on and by the stage

The cabaret of the Hydropathes offered a unique education to young poets in the Latin Quarter. The poems were recited by the poets themselves, who therefore become performers. The stage was a space that could be claimed by this new type of writer. It was not only a matter of perfecting one’s poetry, but also of learning to master one’s image as an artist, and of creating a character. This atypical career made a space for the writer outside of institutionalized places and reinvented the codes of literary life in the nineteenth century.