The grisette is fast dying out.

Of the Rue de la Harpe not a recognisable feature is left.

The old Place St.Michel, the fountain, the Theatre du Pantheon, are gone as if they had never been.

Whole streets, I might say whole parishes, have been swept away--whole chapters of mediaeval history erased for ever.
Well, I love to close my eyes from time to time, and evoke the dear old haunts from their ruins; to descend once more the perilous steeps of the Rue St.Jacques, and to thread the labyrinthine by-streets that surround the Ecole de Medecine.

I see them all so plainly! I look in at the familiar print-shops--I meet many a long-forgotten face--I hear many a long-forgotten voice--I am twenty years of age and a student again! Ah me! what a pleasant time, and what a land of enchantment! Dingy, dilapidated, decrepit as it was, that graceless old Quartier Latin, believe me, was paved with roses and lighted with laughing gas..