occurred. Having paid a visit to a neighbouring coiffeur, in order that a becoming toilet might be made, they jumped into an omnibus, and proceeded to breakfast at one of the trois plats restaurateurs in the Palais Royal.

'Well, Leddy,' said Jack, as soon as they were seated in the salon, 'you 've begun well. It is not everybody has the good luck to see so much of French life as you have done during your first twenty-four hours in Paris.'

I think I have seen quite enough for this once,' replied Mr. Ledbury.

Oh I fiddle-de-dee-take some more wine. I knew a man who s opped a fortnight at Paris without recollecting a sight he had visited, although he kept a journal all the time-after a fashion.'

'How was that?'

Why, like many other of the brute classes of humanity, the animal "gents" who visit Paris,-he thought the chief attraction was buying Cognac at fourteen pence a bottle. He used to get regularly intoxicated at breakfast every morning, and then start out sight-seeing with his companions. At night they told him where he had been, and he put it down; but beyond this he had no idea. Do you like your breakfast?'

'I think my appetite is returning,' answered Mr. Ledbury, who was making a tolerable attack upon some rognons sautés, and had already finished his demi-bouteille of Chablis. What are you eating

there?'

'Sole au gratin,' replied Jack Johnson; 'scalloped sole, if I may term it so,-only it isn't.'

'Well, but it is a sole, is it not?' observed Mr. Ledbury. No more than you are a grasshopper,' returned Jack. How could they afford soles for a twenty-five sous breakfast, and so far away from the sea? The soles here are all flounders cut into shape, kept to acquire a game-flavour, and then served up with sauce and mushrooms.'

'What a deception French cookery is!' remarked Ledbury.

'So is English too, occasionally,' said Jack, especially schoolpies, and hashed mutton at home on Saturdays-all culinary equivo

cations.'

'I suppose you will tell me next that these are not kidneys which I am eating.'

No more they are,' replied Jack; they cut them out of foie de rveau. It's the same with everything else. Stewed fowl is made out of boiled veal, peach fritters from Normandy apples. We have learnt that cats and rabbits are synonymous; and biftek aux pommes is made from-no, I won't tell you. You shall go some day to Montfaucon and judge for yourself. I told Aimée this morning that I thought I should make you open your eyes before you went home.'

*

Oh! you have seen the young lady, then, already?' said Mr. Ledbury. She must be about very early.'

This speech is not altogether an imposition upon the credulity of Mr. Ledbury. Our readers may recollect, that a year or two ago several hundred kilogrammes of horse-flesh were seized at one of the barriers by the octroi guard, and we know that this event was followed by the immediate failure of some of the cheap restaurants of the Quartier Latin.

'She is very,' answered Jack, shooting a bit of crust from off the table with his finger, and hitting an old gentleman on the nose, who sat near them, with a red riband in his button-hole; whereat the old gentleman looked remarkably fierce at a little child whom he imagined to be the culprit; and the little child, after wriggling about in various uncomfortable attitudes beneath his savage glance, finally began to cry, and was immediately knocked on the knuckles with a spoon by its mother for being fractious.

Having concluded their meal, Jack Johnson informed Mr. Ledbury that he had hunted up some lodgings for them that morning in the Rue St. Jacques, and that they would therefore leave the Hôtel de l'Etoile that day. He added, as their stay in Paris would pos sibly be for some little time, this would be much cheaper than the hotel, at which he merely intended to rest the first night, that they might look about them for a suitable apartment. Mr. Ledbury could not help smiling, now the danger was all over, at the little advantage he had received from the bed he was about to pay for, which certainly had not been of much service to him, a circumstance of which Jack Johnson, on his part, did not complain.

CHAPTER IV.

Of the Quartier Latin and Mr. Ledbury's lodgings therein.

SITUATED on the unfashionable side of the Seine, in the same relation to Paris as the Borough is to London, is a dense congeries of narrow, dirty, tortuous streets, that cling and twist round the Sorbonne and Pantheon like mud-worms round a pebble at low-water, and form in their ensemble the venerable Quartier Latin. It is a part of the city little known to the mere 'weekly visitor' from England, and yet withal a most interesting locality. The flaunting Chaussée d'Antin and aristocractic Rue de Rivoli swarm with too many of our own countrymen; and the announcement of Pickled Tongues' and Cheshire Cheese' in the Faubourg St. Honoré inspires purchasers with a suspicion that the English spoken here' places a treble price upon every article vended. The frigid respectability and dilapidated grandeur of the Faubourg St. Germain reminds us only of a French translation of Fitzroy Square; the Quartier St. Antoine is a mass of rags and revolution; and the Champs Elysées a conglomeration of conjurors, girls' schools, Punch's shows, cafés, and boarding-houses.

But the Quartier Latin has claims upon our attention and respect of another description; for there is no division of Paris more rich in historical associations. Independently of the interest attached to the Sorbonne and the gloomy crypts of St. Généviève, nearly every street is connected with some romance of the moyen age of French history. In the monastery of the Cordeliers, which formerly stood on the site of the fountain near the spot where the Rue de l'Ecole de Médecine debouches into the Rue de l'Ancienne Comédie, we are told that in 1522 a lovely girl was discovered in the garb of a page, who had long waited upon the holy fathers in that capacity,they being, of course, perfectly unconscious of her sex; and that the authorities were ungallant enough to whip her from the convent, of which a portion of the walls is still visible in the Rue

l'Observance. Here the club of the Cordeliers received the Marseillois auxiliaries previously to the slaughter in the Tuileries on the terrific 10th of August; and here also the following summer Marat lived, aad was assassinated by the heroic Charlotte Corday. Within a radius of two hundred yards from this spot we arrive at the Place St. Michel, where a statue was raised in the reign of the 'mad king,' Charles the Sixth, to the memory of Perinet Leclerc, the son of the gate keeper of the Porte St. Germain, who stole the keys from beneath his father's pillow to admit the troops of the Duke of Burgundy, which led to the downfall of the partisans of Armagnac.

In the Rue St. Jacques,-where Mr. Ledbury's new lodging was situated, the privacy of which we shall anon invade,-on the dreadful eve of St. Bartholomew, Bethune, the younger brother of Sully, narrowly escaped assassination by showing a breviary to the soldier, which he had fortunately caught up in the confusion of the massacre. In the adjacent Rue de la Harpe and Cloistres de St. Benoist this book again saved him; and, after lying concealed for three days in the College de Bourgogne, which stood on the site of the present medical school, he was liberated and pardoned upon consenting to go to mass. The valiant Philip de Mornay at the same period escaped from his house in the Rue St. Jacques, whilst it was actually in possession of the mob, who were pillaging it, although the landlord was a Catholic. Nor should we omit to mention that, at a later date, in the Carmelite convent which stood formerly in the Rue d'Enfer, the beautiful and penitent Louise de la Vallière retired in 1680, where also, after thirty years of pious seclusion and regret, she died.

But there is little now left to recall these bygone events; for the buildings have been razed, and streets of tall, diity houses erected on the spots they occupied, if we except the time-hallowed walls of the Hôtel de Cluny in the Rue des Mathurins, which alone inclose tangible memorials of the Quartier Latin in the olden time. And although the majority of the sight-seekers at Paris know as little about that venerable edifice as a west-end exquisite does of Ratcliffe Highway, yet it is well worthy of inspection; with its fine Gothic architecture, its fluted and embossed armour, its curiously-fashioned . windows, breaking the sunbeams into a hundred fantastic forms upon the polished oaken boards, for daring to intrude where all should be dim and mysterious; and its domestic relics of other days, which call up with mute and affecting eloquence indistinct imaginings of those who made a home of that old mansion, whose very names have now passed away even from the ancient chronicles.

But we will not farther root up the mouldering archives of bloodshed and crime,-our business lies not so much with them as with present records of gallantry and merriment; for the Quartier Latin derives its interest from other sources, doubtless more congenial to the taste of our readers. One half of the promoters of the real fun and gaiety of Paris reside within its limits. In a word, it is the abode--we think the hive would be a better term, were it not for the ideas of industry connected with that straw tenement-of nearly all the students of law and medicine in Paris; and very fortunate indeed is it that they have a quartier to themselves, or the walls of the city would not contain them, to say nothing of the iron gates at the barriers. They are all joyousness and hilarity; and their hearts

are as light as the summer breeze that sweeps over the pleasant foliage of the Luxembourg gardens, endeared to their memory by so many flirtations on their stone benches. And the French students are not exclusive in their love-making, for they pay their court alike to all. The rosy Cauchoise in her high lace cap,-the sprightly Lyonnaise, the belle petite Belge,' (and what pretty creatures the Belgian girls are!)-with the laughing, pouting, constant, coquetting grisette-THE grisette, pur sang, of Paul de Kock, Jules Janin, and Beranger,-each in turn receives their protestations of an eternal love for the winter course of lectures, and equally each in turn jilts them. But they feel no very bitter pang when their professions are laughed at. Their love is as light as their hearts; and, when they lose the affectionate glance of one pair of eyes, they endeavour, without loss of time, to rekindle the flame, which is soft and transient as the ignition of a hydro-pneumatic lamp or a German tinder allumette, in another.

The students are not, however, the only characteristics of the Quartier Latin. It is a great resort of marchands d'habits, or old clothes men, as we unpolitely term them in England; and one would think they must be in the habit of transacting a considerable share of business with the inhabitants, as they possess an astonishing predilection for the streets about the Ecole de Médecine and Panthéon. Then there are perambulating sellers of almost everything at a certain price; and their barrows present a strange collection of articles, all of which may be purchased for five sous each-plates, knives, whips, decanters, whistles, pins, brushes, lucifers, brooches, looking-glasses, almanacks, pencils,-in fact, an endless variety of wares. It is needless to add, that all are of inferior manufacture, and more or less damaged; but they do for the housekeepers of the Quartier Latin.

The suite of three rooms-or rather the apartment, with two closets to sleep in, which the enterprise of Jack Johnson discovered for Mr. Ledbury and himself was a very fair specimen of the lodgings of this part of the world. It was on the fifth floor, for the sake of air and economy, the price diminishing from forty to fifteen francs a month as you ascended the staircase; or, to speak properly, as they talk about the radiation of caloric at the Adelaide Gallery, in an inverse proportion to the square of the distance' from the street door. The furniture was simple and scanty, but there was enough. They had a fine looking-glass, however, with a marble slab before it, the use of the bellows, a vase of artificial flowers from the Boulevards, and an alabaster clock which did not go; there was also a secretary, which let down to form a species of table, and a stove in the corner,-a curious compound of iron and crockery, with a tin chimney.

Well, Leddy,' said Jack Johnson, as he pulled his panting companion up five flights of stairs, and into the room, what do you think of the crib?'

Why, to tell you the truth, I-’

What Mr. Ledbury intended for a reply was never ascertained; for, as he entered the apartment to inspect it, his feet slid away from beneath him along the glazed tile floor, which had been polished by the frotteur until he could see his face in it, and he measured his length upon the ground.

'Bravo!' cried Jack, quite enraptured at the event.

Here's your artificial ice without a patent, and nothing to pay for trying it. Get up, old fellow !-that's it. Are you hurt?'

Oh! no-not at all,' cheerfully replied Mr. Ledbury, with the air of a person who has tumbled down in the street on a frosty day, but goes away smiling and looking pleasant, inwardly smarting with pain and confusion-Oh! no-not at all. The room is rather high up, though; isn't it?'

That's the beauty of it,' replied Jack. Look at the view! If we were lower down, we could not see one of those chimney-pots, nor the towers of St. Sulpice. Besides, the higher we get, the more noise we can make. And then the furniture !'

'I don't think that clock goes,' said Mr. Ledbury, peering at the face of it.

That's no matter they never do: the look of it 's the thing. Did you never win one of them at a travelling bazaar or fancyfair?'

'I never had that good fortune.'

That is because you didn't try soon enough,' said Jack Johnson. The clocks are always won the first night the establishment opens. People who come afterwards never get anything but backgammonboards, boxes of soldiers, and mother-of-pearl salt spoons. How deficient the diffusion of Useful Knowledge is still, in spite of all the society's books!'

This is a fact certainly worth knowing,' said Mr. Ledbury.

To be sure,' replied Jack. You may depend upon it, if Government was to start an educational course of "Dodges for the Million," it would be of infinite service.'

'You would make an excellent professor.' 'Rather,' said Johnson;

and from what I can make out of the newspaper reports of Hullah's plan with his thumb and four fingers, I should do it in the same style-somehow so.'

And here candour compels us to state that Jack Johnson forgot himself, and was vulgar enough to take a sight,'-—a coarse habit peculiar to the lower classes when they wish to express the word 'gammon!' pantomimically.

As soon as their effects arrived, and were stowed away in their proper places, Jack Johnson informed Mr. Ledbury that, as they had come to live among the French medical students, they had better attire themselves accordingly, lest they should look too particular in the streets, which he thought they did at present. And, indeed, any one else, with far less powers of observation, would have made the same remark, had they witnessed the crowd of odd beings who were loitering after lecture in the open space between the Café Dupuytren and the Ecole de Médecine when our friends turned out to make some purchases. Some wore their hair flowing down their backs almost as long as a woman's; others had it cropped quite close, and covered by a flat cap of bright scarlet, without a poke. These cultivated their mustachios until they grew like penthouses over their lips; those allowed their beards to reign on their chins in unshaven luxuriance. The majority wore trowsers of a dingy grey, brought down very low over the insteps, and coats with half-inch collars, similar in style to the costume of the seedy foreigners who loiter about the Quartier du Lester Square at this