In the Days of My Youth: A Novel

by Amelia B. Edwards

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.