The Quartier Latin since the War [pp. 326-336]

1884.] TKE QuARH~R LATIAr SJiVCE TIlE WAR. 327
bring down their houses about their ears. The vandalism was
accomplished, but not until its putative inspirer had ceased to
have any interest in the humiliation of the Legitimist nobility.
When the star of the Man of December set at Sedan the serpent
had crept close to their door, but its threshold remained uncrossed. It was reserved for the iconoclasts of a Radical Re.
publican municipality to play skittles with the mansions that
housed the faithful followers of King Henry V. Baron Haussman n's demolitions left the aristocratic district intact, but they
went far enough to initiate a structural revolution in the neigh.
boring "Quarter of the Schools." And the work of the great
Alsacian renovator has been carried on by his Republican suc.
cessors with a vigor which promises soon to leave few landmarks standing that were familiar to the student youth of a
quarter of a century ago.
Light and air have been let into old crooked streets and
courts where neither had penetrated for ages; towering rookeries which had housed generation after generation of light-hearted
but impecunious aspirants to knowledge have crumbled under
the pick and crowbar; hostelries and taverns, without which the
Latin Quarter would have seemed flat, stale, and unprofitable to
its denizens, have vanished from off the face of the earth; the
P6pini~re of the Luxembourg even has been sacrificed to the
rage for innovation, and is now only represented to the pilgrim's
searching eye by a number of parallelograms of sward intersected by canals of asphalt. And be it remarked that here are only
mentioned the outrages on the old Quarter which can be remembered by young men. Of the ruin and desolation wrought by
the great clearance which prepared the way for the Boulevard
St. Michel others have written with tear-laden pens. Were the
genial Mn Ledbury to-day placed in the centre of the Quarter which was the scene of his memorable adventures he would
feel as much at sea as in Chicago; the F~re Goriot would find
himself a homeless wanderer in the street which still bears the
name of Lace'p~de, and you might put a quondam student of the
healing art within a stone's throw of the School of Medicine with
the certainty that he could not find his way to it even with the
aid of a pocket-compass.
Want of light, air, and room is said to exercise a depressing
influence on the health and spirits of the children of the poor.
The absence of these blessings seems in old times to have operated in a precisely opposite way on the student youth of France.
In their old, narrow stre~ts, which only got an occasional gleam of