Close at hand is the Place and College of the Sorbonne—­silent in the midst of noisy life, solitary in the heart of the most crowded quarter of Paris.  A sombre mediaeval gloom pervades that ancient quadrangle; scant tufts of sickly grass grow here and there in the interstices of the pavement; the dust of centuries crust those long rows of windows never opened.  A little further on is the Rue des Gres, narrow, crowded, picturesque, one uninterrupted perspective of bookstalls and bookshops from end to end.  Here the bookseller occasionally pursues a two-fold calling, and retails not only literature but a cellar of_ petit vin bleu_; and here, overnight, the thirsty student exchanges for a bottle of Macon the “Code Civile” that he must perforce buy back again at second-hand in the morning.

A little farther on, and we come to the College Saint Louis, once the old College Narbonne; and yet a few yards more, and we are at the doors of the Theatre du Pantheon, once upon a time the Church of St. Benoit, where the stage occupies the site of the altar, and an orchestra stall in what was once the nave, may be had for seventy-five centimes.  Here, too, might be seen the shop of the immortal Lesage, renowned throughout the Quartier for the manufacture of a certain kind of transcendental ham-patty, peculiarly beloved by student and grisette; and here, clustering within a stone’s throw of each other, were to be found those famous restaurants, Pompon, Viot, Flicoteaux, and the “Boeuf Enrage,” where, on gala days, many an Alphonse and Fifine, many a Theophile and Cerisette, were wont to hold high feast and festival—­terms sevenpence half-penny each, bread at discretion, water gratis, wine and toothpicks extra.

But it was in the side streets, courts, and impasses that branched off to the left and right of the main arteries, that one came upon the very heart of the old Pays Latin; for the Rue St. Jacques, the Rue de la Harpe, the Rue des Gres, narrow, steep, dilapidated though they might be, were in truth the leading thoroughfares—­the Boulevards, so to speak—­of the Student Quartier.  In most of the side alleys, however, some of which dated back as far, and farther, than the fifteenth century, there was no footway for passengers, and barely space for one wheeled vehicle at a time.  A filthy gutter invariably flowed down the middle of the street.  The pavement, as it peeped out here and there through a moraine of superimposed mud and offal, was seen to consist of small oblong stones, like petrified kidney potatoes.  The houses, some leaning this way, some that, with projecting upper stories and overhanging gable-roofs, nodded together overhead, leaving but a narrow strip of sky down which the sunlight strove in vain to struggle.  Long poles upon which were suspended old clothes hung out to air, and ragged linen to dry, stood out like tattered banners from the attic windows.  Here, too, every ground-floor was a shop, open, unglazed, cavernous, where the dealer lay perdu in the gloom of midday, like a spider in the midst of his web, surrounded by piles of old bottles, old iron, old clothes, old furniture, or whatever else his stock in trade might consist of.