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
mediæval 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 Grès, 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. Bénoit,
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 Enragé,"
where, on gala days, many an Alphonse and Fifine, many a Théophile and
Cerisette, were wont to hold high feast and festival--terms sevenpence
half-penny each, bread at discretion, water gratis, wine and