THE QUARTIER LATIN.
The dear old Quartier Latin of my time--the Quartier Latin of Balzac, of
Béranger, of Henry Murger---the Quartier Latin where Franz Müller had
his studio; where Messieurs Gustave; Jules, and Adrien gave their
unparalleled _soirées 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. Dark alleys open off here and there from the
main thoroughfare, and narrow side streets, steep as flights of steps.
Low sheds and open stalls cling, limpet-like, to every available nook
and corner. An endless procession of trucks, wagons, water-carts, and
fiacres rumbles perpetually by. Here people live at their windows and in
the doorways--the women talking from balcony to balcony, the men
smoking, reading, playing at dominoes. Here too are more cafés and
cabarets, open-air stalls for the sale of fried fish, and cheap
restaurants for workmen and students, where, for a sum equivalent to
sevenpence half-penny English, the Quartier Latin regales itself upon
meats and drinks of dark and enigmatical origin. Close at hand is the
Place and College of the Sorbonne--silent in the midst of noisy life,
solitary in the heart of the most crowded quarter of Paris. A sombre
mediæval gloom pervades that ancient quadrangle; scant tufts of sickly
grass grow here and there in the interstices of the pavement; the dust
of centuries crust those long rows of windows never opened. A little
further on is the Rue des Grès, narrow, crowded, picturesque, one
uninterrupted perspective of bookstalls and bookshops from end to end.
Here the bookseller occasionally pursues a two-fold calling, and retails
not only literature but a cellar of_ petit vin bleu_; and here,
overnight, the thirsty student exchanges for a bottle of Macon the "Code
Civile" that he must perforce buy back again at second-hand in
the morning.
A little farther on, and we come to the College Saint Louis, once the
old College Narbonne; and yet a few yards more, and we are at the doors
of the Theatre du Pantheon, once upon a time the Church of St. Bénoit,
where the stage occupies the site of the altar, and an orchestra stall
in what was once the nave, may be had for seventy-five centimes. Here,
too, might be seen the shop of the immortal Lesage, renowned throughout
the Quartier for the manufacture of a certain kind of transcendental
ham-patty, peculiarly beloved by student and grisette; and here,
clustering within a stone's throw of each other, were to be found those
famous restaurants, Pompon, Viot, Flicoteaux, and the "Boeuf Enragé,"
where, on gala days, many an Alphonse and Fifine, many a Théophile and
Cerisette, were wont to hold high feast and festival--terms sevenpence
half-penny each, bread at discretion, water gratis, wine and
toothpicks extra.
But it was in the side streets, courts, and _impasses_ that branched off
to the left and right of the main arteries, that one came upon the very
heart of the old Pays Latin; for the Rue St. Jacques, the Rue de la
Harpe, the Rue des Grès, narrow, steep, dilapidated though they might
be, were in truth the leading thoroughfares--the Boulevards, so to
speak--of the Student Quartier. In most of the side alleys, however,
some of which dated back as far, and farther, than the fifteenth
century, there was no footway for passengers, and barely space for one
wheeled vehicle at a time. A filthy gutter invariably flowed down the
middle of the street. 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 Grès, where Rousseau lived and wrote; and
the Rue du Dragon, where might then be seen the house of Bernard
Palissy; and the Rue des Maçons, where Racine lived; and the Rue des
Marais, where Adrienne Lecouvreur--poor, beautiful, generous, ill-fated
Adrienne Lecouvreur!--died. Here, too, in a blind alley opening off the
Rue St. Jacques, yet stands part of that Carmelite Convent in which, for
thirty years, Madame de la Vallière expiated the solitary frailty of her
life. And so at every turn! Not a gloomy by-street, not a dilapidated
fountain, not a grim old college façade but had its history, or its
legend. Here the voice of Abelard thundered new truths, and Rabelais
jested, and Petrarch discoursed with the doctors. Here, in the Rue de
l'Ancienne Comédie, walked the shades of Racine, of Molière, of
Corneille, of Voltaire. Dear, venerable, immortal old Quartier Latin!
Thy streets were narrow, but they were the arteries through which,
century after century, circulated all the wisdom and poetry, all the
art, and science, and learning of France! Their gloom, their squalor,
their very dirt was sacred. 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 mediæval 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 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
Béranger, 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. He should have added that the grisette _pur
sang_ is to be found nowhere except in Paris; and (still a step farther)
nowhere in Paris save between the Pont Neuf and the Barrière d'Enfer.
There she reigns; there (ah! let me use the delicious present tense--let
me believe that I still live in Arcadia!)--there she lights up the old
streets with her smile; makes the old walls ring with her laughter;
flits over the crossings like a fairy; wears the most coquettish of
little caps and the daintiest of little shoes; rises to her work with
the dawn; keeps a pet canary; trains a nasturtium round her window;
loves as heartily as she laughs, and almost as readily; owes not a sou,
saves not a centime; sews on Adolphe's buttons, like a good neighbor; is
never so happy as when Adolphe in return takes her to Tivoli or the
Jardin Turc; adores _galette, sucre d'orge_, and Frederick Lemaître; and
looks upon a masked ball and a debardeur dress as the summit of
human felicity.
_Vive la grisette_! Shall I not follow many an illustrious example and
sing my modest paean in her praise? Frown not, august Britannia! Look
not so severely askance upon my poor little heroine of the Quartier
Latin! Thinkest thou because thou art so eminently virtuous that she who
has many a serviceable virtue of her own, shall be debarred from her
share in this world's cakes and ale?
_Vive la grisette_! Let us think and speak no evil of her. "Elle ne
tient au vice que par un rayon, et s'en éloigne par les mille autres
points de la circonference sociale." The world sees only her follies,
and sees them at first sight; her good qualities lie hidden in the
shade. Is she not busy as a bee, joyous as a lark, helpful, pitiful,
unselfish, industrious, contented? How often has she not slipped her
last coin into the alms-box at the hospital gate, and gone supperless to
bed? How often sat up all night, after a long day's toil in a crowded
work-room, to nurse Victorine in the fever? How often pawned her Sunday
gown and shawl, to redeem that coat without which Adolphe cannot appear
before the examiners to-morrow morning? Granted, if you will, that she
has an insatiable appetite for sweets, cigarettes, and theatrical
admissions--shall she not be welcome to her tastes? And is it her fault
if her capacity in the way of miscellaneous refreshments partakes of the
nature of the miraculous--somewhat to the inconvenience of Adolphe, who
has overspent his allowance? Supposing even that she may now and then
indulge (among friends) in a very modified can-can at the
Chaumière--what does that prove, except that her heels are as light as
her heart, and that her early education has been somewhat neglected?
But I am writing of a world that has vanished as completely as the lost
Pleiad. The Quartier Latin of my time is no more. The Chaumière is no
more. 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 Panthéon, are gone as if they had never been. Whole
streets, I might say whole parishes, have been swept away--whole
chapters of mediæval 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 École de Médecine. 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.