To the left of Rue Saint-Jacques, or the east if you prefer, Rue des Écoles separates two different regions. The lower one, modern and active, stretches towards the Jussieu University and the Jardin des Plantes. Its centre is the Place Maubert. In 1862, Delvau could still write that this was
perhaps the only part of Paris that has kept its former physiognomy. Ten steps away, Paris has dressed itself from head to foot in fresh stone and plaster: only the Place Maubert cynically vaunts its old rags! It is not a square, but a vast puddle of mud . . . It is like a living tradition of medieval Paris. If you blink your eyes, you might believe you were still seeing and hearing its population from the time of Isabel of Bavaria and Louis XI! A prolific and tenacious breed, which resisted all efforts to destroy or even civilize it – as M. Joseph Prudhomme said. Nothing did the trick, not guns, or plague, or famine, or starvation, or debauchery – not even mutual education!145
The property speculation of the 1960s succeeded where guns and plague had failed.
The top of the Montagne, a very ancient region that stretches across the Place du Panthéon towards the Mouffetard quarter, has been partly disfigured by the proliferation of restaurants and crêperies. The Place de la Contrescarpe and Rue Mouffetard, ‘a localized swarm, a kind of Villonesque survival’ from the time of Léon Daudet, which the Situationists of the 1950s made into the ‘continent Contrescarpe’, are now no more than shadows of their former selves. And yet, on the irregular territory bordered by Rues Tournefort, Lhomond, de l’Arbalète, Claude-Bernard, d’Ulm and de l’Estrapade, in a modest and almost village-like architectural setting, memories of Diderot and the four sergeants of La Rochelle (in 1970 there was still a café bearing their names on the corner of Rue Descartes and Rue Clovis, and it is right, I believe, that the memory of their republican martyrdom should have been cherished so long on this counter146) merge with memories of Eugène Rastignac, still the naïve boarder at Mme Vauquer’s, as well as those of another student – young Vingtras, alias Vallès.
‘No one knows why certain quarters become degraded and vulgarized, morally as well as materially; why, for instance, the ancient residence of the court and the church, the Luxembourg and the Latin Quarter, have become what they are today . . . why the elegance of life has left that region . . . why such mud and dirty trades and poverty should have fastened on a hilly piece of ground, instead of spreading out upon the flat land beyond the confines of the ancient city.’ Such is Balzac’s musing in The Lesser Bourgeoisie. Twenty years later, Théodore de Banville asked in similar vein:
How could the student of today insist on being what the student of an earlier age was, when the inevitable Duval restaurants, with their mouldings, gilt decoration and exotic wooden ceilings, have established themselves in a palace, on the very spot where modest eateries were formerly sited, and when you can see, right on Rue des Grès, where the Middle Ages left such a strong imprint, an English tavern offering its roast beef, York ham, pickles and sauces of ground-up cockchafer (see Balzac), washed down with pale ale, as in Rue Royale?147
And in 1964, Yvan Christ would not have believed he had hit the nail on the head quite so accurately in predicting that ‘in twenty years, new and tender greybeards will shed melancholy tears over the old Latin Quarter of the 1960s, the best years there ever were’.148
Ever since the time of Villon, the Latin Quarter, as the quarter of youth, was prey more than any other to nostalgia for the good old days. But however much one might distrust such feelings, it is impossible not to regret the profusion, variety and liveliness of the cafés of the quarter between 1850 and 1914 – not their physical setting, which was in no way comparable with the fairyland establishments on the Boulevards, but their atmosphere. Some of them were political first and foremost. Vallès relates that in 1850, in the Café du Vote Universel, ‘there were people said to have been leaders on the barricades of Saint-Merri, prisoners at Dullens, insurgents of June 1848’. Close by, in the Café de la Renaissance, opposite the Saint-Michel fountain, the public ‘had a particular physiognomy at the absinthe hour and in the evenings. Untidy students with their hair in disorder, women students . . . The masters of Paris under the Commune held their sessions there, preparing their sinister plan of campaign that would end up in fire and murder.’149 In Rue Saint-Séverin, where François Maspero’s La Joie de Lire served as a political university for a whole generation, the Brasserie Saint-Séverin was one of the canteens for the leaders of the Commune. According to Lepage, who can hardly be suspected of objectivity, ‘Above them ruled Raoul Rigault . . . arriving on horseback, turning his mount on Boulevard Saint-Michel, and gazing arrogantly at the women from behind a double lorgnette.’
Other places were more prosaic. The immense d’Harcourt, on the corner of the Place de la Sorbonne and Boulevard Saint-Michel (the side opposite the present PUF bookstore150) was a café à femmes. For poor students, the most welcoming restaurants were Flicoteaux and Pension Laveur. ‘In exceptional cases, you have Flicoteaux’, Dumas explains in The Mohicans of Paris. You ate there on long tables, in two rooms at right angles, one of which overlooked the Place de la Sorbonne and the other Rue Neuve-de-Richelieu (now Champollion). When Lucien de Rubempré no longer had a sou, he dined at Flicoteaux, which is where he made the decisive acquaintance of Lousteau:
Few indeed were the students who lived in the Latin Quarter during the last twelve years of the Restoration and did not frequent that temple sacred to hunger and impecuniosity . . . Verily, the heart of more than one great man ought to wax warm with innumerable recollections of inexpressible enjoyment at the sight of the small, square window-panes that look upon the Place de la Sorbonne, and Rue Neuve-de-Richelieu. Flicoteaux II and Flicoteaux III respected the old exterior, maintaining the dingy hue and general air of a respectable, old-established house, showing thereby the depth of their contempt for the charlatanism of the shop-front, the kind of advertisement which feasts the eyes at the expense of the stomach, to which your modern restaurant almost always has recourse.151
As for Pension Laveur, this was, in Léon Daudet’s words, ‘a real historic institution which had seen three generations pass, situated on Rue des Poitevins opposite the École de Médecine, in a dilapidated old hôtel . . . You reached the dining rooms and tables by a stone stairway with worn and polished steps, like the border of a Breton well. Aunt Rose, affectionate and venerable, presided over the cash desk, assisted by the brunette Mathilde and Baptiste, who took orders with a smile and brought the dishes grumbling.’152 And Francis Carco, around the same time: ‘I had credit at the Pension Laveur and ate twice a day. Ah, that pension! Despite the smell of cats in the stairway and its lack of pretensions, Baptiste did us well . . .’153 Thirty years earlier you could sometimes meet Courbet there – not yet the ‘famous demolisher’ as Lepage called him – but his usual establishment was rather Brasserie Andler on Rue Hautefeuille, where he had his studio. Courbet’s arrival at Andler’s did not pass unheeded: ‘He advanced, holding his head high – like Saint-Just – and was surrounded! He sat down – and people made a circle around him! He spoke – and people listened to him! When he left, they were still listening.’154 On the list of regular customers, mostly now forgotten (‘Simbermann, experimental chemist and member of the meteorological society, Dupré, professor of anatomy, Furne, publisher’), there appears, as if in an obscure corner, ‘Charles Baudelaire, author of Les Fleurs du mal, which was still unpublished, and who tried out his Edgar Allan Poe effects on the heads of his companions’.
The literary cafés included some very modest ones, such as Le Soleil d’Or, on the corner of the Place Saint-Michel and the quai, where the symbolists held their La Plume evenings, or the Paradox dairy on Rue Saint-André-des-Arts, where you could meet
Auguste Poulet-Malassis, student at the École de Chartes, today a bookseller; a tall chap, very pale, with a certain resemblance to Henri III . . . a charming conversationalist, very intelligent and learned, whom