CHAPTER XXIII.

THE QUARTIER LATIN.

The dear old Quartier Latin of my time—­the Quartier Latin of Balzac, of Beranger, of Henry Murger—–­the Quartier Latin where Franz Mueller had his studio; where Messieurs Gustave; Jules, and Adrien gave their unparalleled soirees dansantes; where I first met my ex-flame Josephine—­exists no longer.  It has been improved off the face of the earth, and with it such a gay bizarre, improvident world of youth and folly as shall never again be met together on the banks of the Seine.

Ah me! how well I remember that dingy, delightful Arcadia—­the Rue de la Vieille Boucherie, narrow, noisy, crowded, with projecting upper stories and Gothic pent-house roofs—­the Rue de la Parcheminerie, unchanged since the Middle Ages—­the Rue St. Jacques, steep, interminable, dilapidated; with its dingy cabarets, its brasseries, its cheap restaurants, its grimy shop windows filled with colored prints, with cooked meats, with tobacco, old books, and old clothes; its ancient colleges and hospitals, time-worn and weather-beaten, frowning down upon the busy thoroughfare and breaking the squalid line of shops; its grim old hotels swarming with lodgers, floor above floor, from the cobblers in the cellars to the grisettes in the attics!  Then again, the gloomy old Place St. Michel, its abundant fountain ever flowing, ever surrounded by water-carts and water-carriers, by women with pails, and bare-footed street urchins, and thirsty drovers drinking out of iron cups chained to the wall.  And then, too, the Rue de la Harpe....

I close my eyes, and the strange, precipitous, picturesque, decrepit old street, with its busy, surging crowd, its street-cries, its street-music, and its indescribable union of gloom and gayety, rises from its ashes.  Here, grand old dilapidated mansions with shattered stone-carvings, delicate wrought-iron balconies all rust-eaten and broken, and windows in which every other pane is cracked or patched, alternate with more modern but still more ruinous houses, some leaning this way, some that, some with bulging upper stories, some with doorways sunk below the level of the pavement.  Yonder, gloomy and grim, stands the College of Saint Louis.  Dark alleys open off here and there from the main thoroughfare, and narrow side streets, steep as flights of steps.  Low sheds and open stalls cling, limpet-like, to every available nook and corner.  An endless procession of trucks, wagons, water-carts, and fiacres rumbles perpetually by.  Here people live at their windows and in the doorways—­the women talking from balcony to balcony, the men smoking, reading, playing at dominoes.  Here too are more cafes and cabarets, open-air stalls for the sale of fried fish, and cheap restaurants for workmen and students, where, for a sum equivalent to sevenpence half-penny English, the Quartier Latin regales itself upon meats and drinks of dark and enigmatical origin.