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 cafés and