roughout
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.

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 pictures