OF course the proper name for the great thoroughfare of the Quartier Latin is the Boulevard Saint-Michel, but the boulevardiers call it the Boul' Mich', just as the students call the Quatre Arts the Quat'z' Arts, because it is easier to say.
The Boul' Mich' is the student's highway to relaxation. Mention of it at once recalls whirling visions of brilliant cafés, with their clattering of saucers and glasses, the shouting of their white-aproned garçons, their hordes of gay and wicked damsels dressed in the costliest and most fashionable gowns, and a multitude of riotous students howling class songs and dancing and parading to the different cafés as only students can. This is the head-quarters of the Bohemians of real Bohemia, whose poets haunt the dim and quaint cabarets and read their compositions to admiring friends; of flower-girls who offer you un petit bouquet, seulement dix centimes, and pin it into your button-hole before you can refuse; of Turks in picturesque native costume selling sweetmeats; of the cane man loaded down with immense sticks; of the stems a yard long; of beggars, gutter-snipes, hot-chestnut venders, ped- lers, singers, actors, students, and all manner of queer characters.
The life of the Boul' Mich' begins at the Panthéon, where repose the remains of France's great men, and ends at the Seine, where the gray Gothic towers and the gargoyles of Notre-Dame look down disdainfully upon the giddy traffic below. The eastern side of the Boul' is lined with cafés, cabarets, and brasseries.
This is historic ground, for where now is the old Hôtel Cluny are still to be seen the ruins of Roman baths, and not a great distance hence are the partly uncovered ruins of a Roman arena, with its tiers of stone seats and its dens. The tomb of Cardinal Richelieu is in the beautiful old chapel of the Sorbonne, within sound of the wickedest café in Paris, the Café d'Harcourt.