Could I have had my will, not a stone of the old place should have been touched, not a pavement widened, not a landmark effaced.
Then beside, yet not apart from, all that was mediaeval and historic in the Pays Latin, ran the gay, effervescent, laughing current of the life of the _jeunessed' aujour d'hui._ Here beat the very heart of that rare, that immortal, that unparalleled _vie de Boheme_, the vagabond poetry of which possesses such an inexhaustible charm for even the soberest imagination.

What brick and mortar idylls, what romances _au cinquieme_, what joyous epithalamiums, what gay improvident _menages_, 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 Pantheon or the Rue des Gres--hurrying along towards this or that college with a huge volume under each arm, about nine o'clock in the morning--haunting the cafes 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 Odeon and every part of the Theatre du Pantheon--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 Fretillon, of Francine, of Lisette, Musette, Rosette, and all the rest of that too fascinating terminology--the race immortalized again and again by Beranger, Gavarni, Balzac, De Musset; sketched by a hundred pencils and described by a hundred pens; celebrated in all manner of metres and set to all manner of melodies; now caricatured and now canonized; now painted wholly _en noir_ and now all _couleur de rose_; yet, however often described, however skilfully analyzed, remaining for ever indescribable, and for ever defying analysis! "De tous les produits Parisiens," says Monsieur Jules Janin (himself the quintessence of everything most Parisian), "le produit le plus Parisien, sans contredit, c'est la grisette." True; but our epigrammatist should have gone a step farther.