FROM the Place St. Michel, this ever gay and crowded boulevard ascends a long incline, up which the tired horses tug at the traces of the fiacres, and the big double-decked steam trams crawl, until they reach the Luxembourg Gardens,—and so on a level road as far as the Place de l’Observatoire. Within this length lies the life of the “Boul’ Miche.”

Nearly every highway has its popular side, and on the “Boul’ Miche” it is the left one, coming up from the Seine. Here are the cafÉs, and from 5 P.M. until long past midnight, the life of the Quartier pours by them—students, soldiers, families, poets, artists, sculptors, wives, and sweethearts; bicycle girls, the modern grisette, the shop girl, and the model; fakirs, beggars, and vagrants. Yet the word vagrant is a misnomer in this city, where economy has reached a finesse that is marvelous. That fellow, in filth and rags, shuffling along, his eyes scrutinizing, like a hungry rat, every nook and corner under the cafÉ tables on the terrace, carries a stick spiked with a pin. The next instant, he has raked the butt of your discarded cigarette from beneath your feet with the dexterity of a croupier. The butt he adds to the collection in his filthy pocket, and shuffles on to the next cafÉ. It will go so far at least toward paying for his absinthe. He is hungry, but it is the absinthe for which he is working. He is a “marchand de mÉgots”; it is his profession.

One finds every type of restaurant, tavern, and cafÉ along the “Boul’ Miche.” There are small restaurants whose plat du jour might be traced to some faithful steed finding a final oblivion in a brown sauce and onions—an important item in a course dinner, to be had with wine included for one franc fifty. There are brasseries too, gloomy by day and brilliant by night (dispensing good Munich beer in two shades, and German and French food), whose rich interiors in carved black oak, imitation gobelin, and stained glass are never half illumined until the lights are lit.

All day, when the sun blazes, and the awnings are down, sheltering those chatting on the terrace, the interiors of these brasseries appear dark and cavernous.

The clientÈle is somber too, and in keeping with the place; silent poets, long haired, pale, and always writing; serious-minded lawyers, lunching alone, and fat merchants who eat and drink methodically.

Then there are bizarre cafÉs, like the d’Harcourt, crowded at night with noisy women tawdry in ostrich plumes, cheap feather boas, and much rouge. The d’Harcourt at midnight is ablaze with light, but the crowd is common and you move on up the boulevard under the trees, past the shops full of Quartier fashions—velvet coats, with standing collars buttoning close under the chin; flamboyant black silk scarfs tied in a huge bow; queer broad-brimmed, black hats without which no “types” wardrobe is complete.

On the corner facing the square, and opposite the Luxembourg gate, is the Taverne du PanthÉon. This is the most brilliant cafÉ and restaurant of the Quarter, forming a V with its long terrace, at the corner of the boulevard and the rue Soufflot, at the head of which towers the superb dome of the PanthÉon.

It is 6 P.M. and the terrace, four rows deep with little round tables, is rapidly filling. The white-aproned garÇons are hurrying about or squeezing past your table, as they take the various orders.

“Un demi! un!” shouts the garÇon.

“Deux pernod nature, deux!” cries another, and presently the “Omnibus” in his black apron hurries to your table, holding between his knuckles, by their necks, half a dozen bottles of different apÉritifs, for it is he who fills your glass.

It is the custom to do most of one’s correspondence in these cafÉs. The garÇon brings you a portfolio containing note-paper, a bottle of violet ink, an impossible pen that spatters, and a sheet of pink blotting-paper that does not absorb. With these and your apÉritif, the place is yours as long as you choose to remain. No one will ask you to “move on” or pay the slightest attention to you.

Should you happen to be a cannibal chief from the South Seas, and dine in a green silk high hat and a necklace of your latest captive’s teeth, you would occasion a passing glance perhaps, but you would not be a sensation.

CÉleste would say to Henriette:

“Regarde Ça, Henriette! est-il drÔle, ce sauvage?”

And Henriette would reply quite assuringly:

“Eh bien quoi! c’est pas si extraordinaire, il est peut-Être de Madagascar; il y en a beaucoup À Paris maintenant.”

There is no phase of character, or eccentricity of dress, that Paris has not seen.

Nor will your waiter polish off the marble top of your table, with the hope that your ordinary sensibility will suggest another drink. It would be beneath his professional dignity as a good garÇon de cafÉ. The two sous you have given him as a pourboire, he is well satisfied with, and expresses his contentment in a “merci, monsieur, merci,” the final syllable ending in a little hiss, prolonged in proportion to his satisfaction. After this just formality, you will find him ready to see the point of a joke or discuss the current topics of the day. He is intelligent, independent, very polite, but never servile.

It is difficult now to find a vacant chair on the long terrace. A group of students are having a “Pernod,” after a long day’s work at the atelier. They finish their absinthe and then, arm in arm, start off to Madame Poivret’s for dinner. It is cheap there; besides, the little “boÎte,” with its dingy room and sawdust floor, is a favorite haunt of theirs, and the good old lady, with her credit slate, a friendly refuge in time of need.

At your left sits a girl in bicycle bloomers, yellow-tanned shoes, and short black socks pulled up snug to her sunburned calves. She has just ridden in from the Bois de Boulogne, and has scorched half the way back to meet her “officier” in pale blue. The two are deep in conversation. Farther on are four older men, accompanied by a pale, sweet-faced woman of thirty, her blue-black hair brought in a bandeau over her dainty ears. She is the model of the gray-haired man on the left, a man of perhaps fifty, with kindly intelligent eyes and strong, nervous, expressive hands—hands that know how to model a colossal Greek war-horse, plunging in battle, or create a nymph scarcely a foot high out of a lump of clay, so charmingly that the French Government has not only bought the nymph, but given him a little red ribbon for his pains.

He is telling the others of a spot he knows in Normandy, where one can paint—full of quaint farm-houses, with thatched roofs; picturesque roadsides, rich in foliage; bright waving fields, and cool green woods, and purling streams; quaint gardens, choked with lavender and roses and hollyhocks—and all this fair land running to the white sand of the beach, with the blue sea beyond. He will write to old PÈre Jaqueline that they are all coming—it is just the place in which to pose a model “en plein air,”—and Suzanne, his model, being a Normande herself, grows enthusiastic at the thought of going down again to the sea. Long before she became a Parisienne, and when her beautiful hair was a tangled shock of curls, she used to go out in the big boats, with the fisherwomen—barefooted, brown, and happy. She tells them of those good days, and then they all go into the Taverne to dine, filled with the idea of the new trip, and dreaming of dinners under the trees, of “Tripes À la mode de Caen,” Normandy cider, and a lot of new sketches besides.

Already the tables within are well filled. The long room, with its newer annex, is as brilliant as a jewel box—the walls rich in tiled panels suggesting the life of the Quarter, the woodwork in gold and light oak, the big panels of the rich gold ceiling exquisitely painted.

At one of the tables two very chic young women are dining with a young Frenchman, his hair and dress in close imitation of the Duc d’Orleans. These poses in dress are not uncommon.

A strikingly pretty woman, in a scarlet-spangled gown as red as her lips, is dining with a well-built, soldierly-looking man in black; they sit side by side as is the custom here.

The woman reminds one of a red lizard—a salamander—her “svelte” body seemingly boneless in its gown of clinging scales. Her hair is purple-black and freshly ondulÉd; her skin as white as ivory. She has the habit of throwing back her small, well-posed head, while under their delicately penciled lids her gray eyes take in the room at a glance.

She is not of the Quarter, but the Taverne du PanthÉon is a refuge for her at times, when she grows tired of Paillard’s and Maxim’s and her quarreling retinue.

“Let them howl on the other bank of the Seine,” says this empress of the half-world to herself, “I dine with Raoul where I please.”

And now one glittering, red arm with its small, heavily-jeweled hand glides toward Raoul’s open cigarette case, and in withdrawing a cigarette she presses for a moment his big, strong hand as he holds near her polished nails the flaming match.

Her companion watches her as she smokes and talks—now and then he leans closer to her, squaring his broad shoulders and bending lower his strong, determined face, as he listens to her,—half-amused, replying to her questions leisurely, in short, crisp sentences. Suddenly she stamps one little foot savagely under the table, and, clenching her jeweled hands, breathes heavily. She is trembling with rage; the man at her side hunches his great shoulders, flicks the ashes from his cigarette, looks at her keenly for a moment, and then smiles. In a moment she is herself again, almost penitent; this little savage, half Roumanian, half Russian, has never known what it was to be ruled! She has seen men grow white when she has stamped her little foot, but this big Raoul, whom she loves—who once held a garrison with a handful of men—he does not tremble! she loves him for his devil-me-care indifference—and he enjoys her temper.

But the salamander remembers there are some whom she dominated, until they groveled like slaves at her feet; even the great Russian nobleman turned pale when she dictated to him archly and with the voice of an angel the price of his freedom.

“Poor fool! he shot himself the next day,” mused the salamander.

Yes, and even the adamant old banker in Paris, crabbed, stern, unrelenting to his debtors—shivered in his boots and ended in signing away half his fortune to her, and moved his family into a permanent chateau in the country, where he keeps himself busy with his shooting and his books.

As it grows late, the taverne becomes more and more animated.

Every one is talking and having a good time. The room is bewildering in gay color, the hum of conversation is everywhere, and as there is a corresponding row of tables across the low, narrow room, friendly greetings and often conversations are kept up from one side to the other. The dinner, as it progresses, assumes the air of a big family party of good bohemians. The French do not bring their misery with them to the table. To dine is to enjoy oneself to the utmost; in fact the French people cover their disappointment, sadness, annoyances, great or petty troubles, under a masque of “blague,” and have such an innate dislike of sympathy or ridicule that they avoid it by turning everything into “blague.”

This veneer is misleading, for at heart the French are sad. Not to speak of their inmost feelings does not, on the other hand, prevent them at times from being most confidential. Often, the merest exchange of courtesies between those sharing the same compartment in a train, or a seat on a “bus,” seems to be a sufficient introduction for your neighbor to tell you where he comes from, where he is going, whether he is married or single, whom his daughter married, and what regiment his son is in. These little confidences often end in his offering you half his bottle of wine and extending to you his cigarettes.

If you have finished dinner, you go out on the terrace for your coffee. The fakirs are passing up and down in front, selling their wares—little rabbits, wonderfully lifelike, that can jump along your table and sit on their hind legs, and wag their ears; toy snakes; small leaden pigs for good luck; and novelties of every description. Here one sees women with baskets of Écrivisse boiled scarlet; an acrobat tumbles on the pavement, and two men and a girl, as a marine, a soldier, and a vivandiÈre, in silvered faces and suits, pose in melodramatic attitudes. The vivandiÈre is rescued alternately from a speedy death by the marine and the soldier.

Presently a little old woman approaches, shriveled and smiling, in her faded furbelows now in rags. She sings in a piping voice and executes between the verses a tottering pas seul, her eyes ever smiling, as if she still saw over the glare of the footlights, in the haze beyond, the vast audience of by-gone days; smiling as if she still heard the big orchestra and saw the leader with his vibrant baton, watching her every movement. She is over seventy now, and was once a premier danseuse at the opera.

But you have not seen all of the Taverne du PanthÉon yet. There is an “American Bar” downstairs; at least, so the sign reads at the top of a narrow stairway leading to a small, tavern-like room, with a sawdust floor, heavy deal tables, and wooden stools. In front of the bar are high stools that one climbs up on and has a lukewarm whisky soda, next to Yvonne and Marcelle, who are both singing the latest catch of the day at the top of their lungs, until they are howled at to keep still or are lifted bodily off their high stools by the big fellow in the “type” hat, who has just come in.

Before a long table at one end of the room is the crowd of American students singing in a chorus. The table is full now, for many have come from dinners at other cafÉs to join them. At one end, and acting as interlocutor for this impromptu minstrel show, presides one of the best fellows in the world. He rises solemnly, his genial round face wreathed in a subtle smile, and announces that he will sing, by earnest request, that popular ballad, “’Twas Summer and the Little Birds were Singing in the Trees.”

There are some especially fine “barber chords” in this popular ditty, and the words are so touching that it is repeated over and over again. Then it is sung softly like the farmhand quartettes do in the rural melodrama outside the old homestead in harvest time. Oh! I tell you it’s a truly rural octette. Listen to that exhibition bass voice of Jimmy Sands and that wandering tenor of Tommy Whiteing, and as the last chord dies away (over the fields presumably) a shout goes up:

“How’s that?”

“Out of sight,” comes the general verdict from the crowd, and bang go a dozen beer glasses in unison on the heavy table.

“Oh, que c’est beau!” cries Mimi, leading the successful chorus in a new vocal number with Edmond’s walking-stick; but this time it is a French song and the whole room is singing it, including our old friend, Monsieur Frank, the barkeeper, who is mixing one of his famous concoctions which are never twice quite alike, but are better than if they were.

The harmonic beauties of “’Twas Summer and the Little Birds were Singing in the Trees” are still inexhausted, but it sadly needs a piano accompaniment—with this it would be perfect; and so the whole crowd, including Yvonne, and CÉleste, and Marcelle, and the two Frenchmen, and the girl in the bicycle clothes, start for Jack Thompson’s studio in the rue des Fourneaux, where there is a piano that, even if the candles in the little Louis XVI brackets do burn low and spill down the keys, and the punch rusts the strings, it will still retain that beautiful, rich tone that every French upright, at seven francs a month, possesses.