In the immediate vicinity are to be found the quaint jumbled buildings of old Paris, but they are fast disappearing. And the Quartier abounds in the world's greatest schools and colleges of the arts and sciences.
It was often our wont on Saturday evenings to saunter along the Boul', and sometimes to visit the cafés. To Bishop particularly it was always a revelation and a delight, and he was forever studying and sketching the types that he found there. He was intimately acquainted in all the cafés along the line, and with the mysterious rendezvous in the dark and narrow side streets.
American beverages are to be had at many of the cafés on the Boul',—a recent and very successful experiment. The idea has captured the fancy of the Parisians, so that "Bars Américains," which furnish cocktails and sours, are numerous in the cafés. Imagine a Parisian serenely sucking a manhattan through a straw, and standing up at that!
The Boul' Mich' is at its glory on Saturday nights, for the students have done their week's work, and the morrow is Sunday. Nearly everybody goes to the Bal Bullier. This is separated from the crowded Boul' Mich' by several squares of respectable dwelling-houses and shops, and a dearth of cafés prevails thereabout. At the upper end of the Luxembourg is a long stone wall brilliantly bedecked with lamps set in clusters,—the same wall against which Maréchal Ney was shot (a striking monument across the way recalls the incident). At one end of this yellow wall is an arched entrée, resplendent with the glow of many rows of electric lights and lamps, which reveal the colored bas-reliefs of dancing students and gri-settes that adorn the portal. Near by stands a row of voitures, and others are continually dashing up and depositing Latin-Quarter swells with hair parted behind and combed forward toward the ears, and dazzling visions of the demi-monde in lace, silks, and gauze. And there is a constantly arriving stream of students and gaudily dressed women on foot. Big gardes municipaux stand at the door like stone images as the crowd surges past.
To-night is one-franc night. An accommodating lady at the box-office hands us each a broad card, and another, au vestiaire, takes our coats and hats and charges us fifty centimes for the honor. Descending the broad flight of softly carpeted red stairs, a brilliant, tumultuous, roaring vision bursts upon us, for it is between the dances, and the visitors are laughing and talking and drinking. The ball-room opens into a generous garden filled with trees and shrubbery ingeniously devised to assure many a secluded nook, and steaming garçons are flying hither and thither serving foaming bocks and colored syrups to nymphs in bicycle bloomers, longhaired students under tam o'shanters, and the swells peculiar to le Quartier Latin.