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 picturesque detail, and in archaeological interest.

Such a street, for instance, was the Rue du Fouarre (scarcely a feature of which has been modernized to this day), where Dante, when a student of theology in Paris, attended the lectures of one Sigebert, a learned monk of Gemblours, who discoursed to his scholars in the open air, they sitting round him the while upon fresh straw strewn upon the pavement.

Such a street was the Rue des Cordiers, close adjoining the Rue des Gres, where Rousseau lived and wrote; and the Rue du Dragon, where might then be seen the house of Bernard Palissy; and the Rue des Macons, where Racine lived; and the Rue des Marais, where Adrienne Lecouvreur--poor, beautiful, generous, ill-fated Adrienne Lecouvreur!--died.