Of such streets—­less like streets, indeed, than narrow, overhanging gorges and ravines of damp and mouldering stone—­of such streets, I say, intricate, winding, ill-lighted, unventilated, pervaded by an atmosphere compounded of the fumes of fried fish, tobacco, old leather, mildew and dirt, there were hundreds in the Quartier Latin of my time:—­streets to the last degree unattractive as places of human habitation, but rich, nevertheless, in historic associations, in picturesque detail, and in archaeological interest.  Such a street, for instance, was the Rue du Fouarre (scarcely a feature of which has been modernized to this day), where Dante, when a student of theology in Paris, attended the lectures of one Sigebert, a learned monk of Gemblours, who discoursed to his scholars in the open air, they sitting round him the while upon fresh straw strewn upon the pavement.  Such a street was the Rue des Cordiers, close adjoining the Rue des Gres, where Rousseau lived and wrote; and the Rue du Dragon, where might then be seen the house of Bernard Palissy; and the Rue des Macons, where Racine lived; and the Rue des Marais, where Adrienne Lecouvreur—­poor, beautiful, generous, ill-fated Adrienne Lecouvreur!—­died.  Here, too, in a blind alley opening off the Rue St. Jacques, yet stands part of that Carmelite Convent in which, for thirty years, Madame de la Valliere expiated the solitary frailty of her life.  And so at every turn!  Not a gloomy by-street, not a dilapidated fountain, not a grim old college facade but had its history, or its legend.  Here the voice of Abelard thundered new truths, and Rabelais jested, and Petrarch discoursed with the doctors.  Here, in the Rue de l’Ancienne Comedie, walked the shades of Racine, of Moliere, of Corneille, of Voltaire.  Dear, venerable, immortal old Quartier Latin!  Thy streets were narrow, but they were the arteries through which, century after century, circulated all the wisdom and poetry, all the art, and science, and learning of France!  Their gloom, their squalor, their very dirt was sacred.  Could I have had my will, not a stone of the old place should have been touched, not a pavement widened, not a landmark effaced.

Then beside, yet not apart from, all that was mediaeval and historic in the Pays Latin, ran the gay, effervescent, laughing current of the life of the jeunessed’ aujour d’hui. Here beat the very heart of that rare, that immortal, that unparalleled vie de Boheme, the vagabond poetry of which possesses such an inexhaustible charm for even the soberest imagination.  What brick and mortar idylls, what romances au cinquieme, what joyous epithalamiums, what gay improvident menages, what kisses, what laughter, what tears, what lightly-spoken and lightly-broken vows those old walls could have told of!