CHAPTER XXIII.
THE QUARTIER LATIN.
The dear old Quartier Latin of my time--the Quartier Latin of Balzac, of Beranger, of Henry Murger---the Quartier Latin where Franz Mueller had his studio; where Messieurs Gustave; Jules, and Adrien gave their unparalleled _soirees dansantes_; where I first met my ex-flame Josephine--exists no longer.

It has been improved off the face of the earth, and with it such a gay bizarre, improvident world of youth and folly as shall never again be met together on the banks of the Seine.
Ah me! how well I remember that dingy, delightful Arcadia--the Rue de la Vieille Boucherie, narrow, noisy, crowded, with projecting upper stories 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.