_“The rôle of a pretty woman is more serious than we think.”_
_“I was twenty, age when the heart all illumined with poesy guards religiously the subtile vibrations of the beautiful and the just; the sweet human season in which one yearns to have a thousand mouths to bite to bleeding—during an eternity—the bare pink bosoms of the beautiful chimeras that go singing by.”_—CLOVIS HUGUES.
“_I shall eternally hide my deepest emotions under the mask of_ insouciance _and the perruque of irony._”
JULES VALLÈS, in Jacques Vingtras—Le Bachelier.
[Illustration: A CAVEAU OF THE LATIN QUARTER]
A great deal has been said of late years about the change which has taken place in the _Pays Latin_ and in the student character. The “old boys” tell us, with sneering superiority or quavering regret, that the _Quartier Latin_ is no longer what it was. Some evoke the revels and the _grisettes_ depicted in Louis Huart’s _Physiologie de l’Etudiant_, Musset’s _Mimi Pinson_, and Mürger’s _La Vie de Bohème_, and others the rebellious souls of the student martyrs of 1789, 1830, 1848, and 1871.
According to the former, the contemporary student is a morose, prudent, selfish, woman-hating, digging prig, with no higher dreams than pettifogging politics and bourgeois comfort, and the _étudiante_ a scheming, avaricious adventuress. According to the latter, he is snobbish, extravagant, and dissipated, a brainless spendthrift, gambler, debauchee, and drunkard, and his amorette, aside from differences of sex, his perfect counterpart.
There is truth in these somewhat conflicting charges, since both these types of student do exist. The curious thing is that similar complaints have been made by the alumni out in the world for almost as long as there have been alumni. It is not easy to go back far enough into the history of the _Quartier Latin_ to escape caustic aspersions on its ignoble present and fond reversions to its fine and proper past.
If there is one period that is vaunted to-day above another as the golden age of the Latin Quarter, it is the period portrayed in the writings of Mürger, De Musset, and Nestor Roqueplan,—period when “_le vin était spirituel et la folie philosophique_”; period of innumerable drolleries and of two revolutions; and yet each of these three writers, even the happy-hearted Mürger, had recourse to that necessary, if puerile, vanishing point of the perspective of thought,—an anterior golden age.