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Updated: May 18, 2025
The new rulers of the country were mostly very young men, who were conspicuous for their enthusiasm and their daring but not for their judgment and experience. They had picked upon the boulevards and in the Quartier Latin of Paris and in Geneva the sonorous phrases of Western democracy and demagogy, and with these they impressed, not only their fellow citizens, but also the onlookers in Europe.
The son of a provincial bailiff, Jean Marin had come, as do so many others, to study law in the Quartier Latin. In the various beer-houses that he had frequented he had made friends with several talkative students who spouted politics as they drank their beer. He had a great admiration for them and followed them persistently from cafe to cafe, even paying for their drinks when he had the money.
This malevolent old portent, whose gray and crafty face was often seen in the Rue M. le Prince during the life of Mlle. de Tartas had, it seems, fully expected to enjoy her small wealth after her death; and when it appeared that she had left him only the contents of the gloomy old house in the Quartier Latin, giving the house itself and all else of which she died possessed to her nephew in America, the Sar proceeded to remove everything from the place, and then to curse it elaborately and comprehensively, together with all those who should ever dwell therein.
Under the pressure of hunger and thirst, the prisoner at length made a confession, and mentioned a bookseller of the Quartier Latin, who, under the Fronde, had made his shop a meeting-place for rebels. The bookseller, having been put in the Bastille, and upon the same diet as his salesman, stated the name of the Dutch printer who had published the pamphlet.
But that be two-three days yet biffo' we can be sure ab-oud that. Maybe ad the laz' we'll 'ave to join the asylum, but tha'z our hope, to move up town into the quartier nouveau and that beautiful 'garden diztric'. But we'll always con-tinue to love the old 'ouse here. 'Tis a very genuine ancient relique, that 'ouse. You see those wall'? Solid plank of two inch' and from Kentucky!"
The old street and all belonging to it especially and peculiarly the Café Procope -was of the choicest Quartier Latin flavor in the time of which I write; in the pleasant, careless, impecunious days of my youth. A cheap and highly popular restaurateur named Pinson rented the old theatre. A costumier hung out wigs, and masks, and débardeur garments next door to the restaurateur.
He became a lawyer and pleaded causes, which he lost. However, one morning he read in the papers that one of his former comrades of the Quartier had just been appointed deputy. He again became his faithful hound, the friend who does the drudgery, the unpleasant tasks, for whom one sends when one has need of him and with whom one does not stand on ceremony.
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.
But M. Étienne laid a restraining hand on his shoulder. "Not you. I. They will kill you in the Halles just as cheerfully as in the Quartier Marais. This is my affair." He looked at Monsieur with kindling eyes, seeing his chance to prove his devotion. The duke yielded to his eagerness. "But," M. Étienne added generously, "you may have the honour of paying the piper."
Besides, he began to find himself incommoded by the vigilance of the French police, on account of his intimacy with the Russian students of the Quartier Latin young men with cold eyes and limp and dishevelled hair who were endeavouring to implant in Paris the vengeances of Nihilism.
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