of the _jeunessed' aujour d'hui._ Here beat the very heart of that rare,
that immortal, that unparalleled _vie de Bohème_, the vagabond poetry of
which possesses such an inexhaustible charm for even the soberest
imagination. What brick and mortar idylls, what romances _au cinquième_,
what joyous epithalamiums, what gay improvident _ménages_, what kisses,
what laughter, what tears, what lightly-spoken and lightly-broken vows
those old walls could have told of!

Here, apparelled in all sorts of unimaginable tailoring, in jaunty
colored cap or flapped sombrero, his pipe dangling from his button-hole,
his hair and beard displaying every eccentricity under heaven, the Paris
student, the _Pays Latiniste pur sang_, lived and had his being. Poring
over the bookstalls in the Place du Panthéon or the Rue des
Grès--hurrying along towards this or that college with a huge volume
under each arm, about nine o'clock in the morning--haunting the cafés at
midday and the restaurants at six--swinging his legs out of
upper windows and smoking in his shirt-sleeves in the summer
evenings--crowding the pit of the Odéon and every part of the Theatre du
Panthéon--playing wind instruments at dead of night to the torment of
his neighbors, or, in vocal mood, traversing the Quartier with a society
of musical friends about the small hours of the morning--getting into
scuffles with the gendarmes--flirting, dancing, playing billiards and
the deuce; falling in love and in debt; dividing his time between
Aristotle and Mademoiselle Mimi Pinson ... here, and here only, in all
his phases, at every hour of the day and night, he swarmed, ubiquitous.

And here, too (a necessary sequence), flourished the fair and frail
grisette. Her race, alas! is now all but extinct--the race of Frétillon,
of Francine, of Lisette, Musette, Rosette, and all the rest of that too
fascinating terminology--the race immortalized again and again by