ts 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. 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 th