a large, low sheaf of towers, the
Petit-Chatelet, whose yawning gate devoured the end of the Petit-Pont.
Then, if your view ran along the bank, from east to west, from the
Tournelle to the Tour de Nesle, there was a long cordon of houses, with
carved beams, stained-glass windows, each story projecting over that
beneath it, an interminable zigzag of bourgeois gables, frequently
interrupted by the mouth of a street, and from time to time also by the
front or angle of a huge stone mansion, planted at its ease, with courts
and gardens, wings and detached buildings, amid this populace of crowded
and narrow houses, like a grand gentleman among a throng of rustics.
There were five or six of these mansions on the quay, from the house of
Lorraine, which shared with the Bernardins the grand enclosure adjoining
the Tournelle, to the Hotel de Nesle, whose principal tower ended Paris,
and whose pointed roofs were in a position, during three months of the
year, to encroach, with their black triangles, upon the scarlet disk of
the setting sun.

This side of the Seine was, however, the least mercantile of the two.
Students furnished more of a crowd and more noise there than artisans,
and there was not, properly speaking, any quay, except from the Pont
Saint-Michel to the Tour de Nesle. The rest of the bank of the Seine was
now a naked strand, the same as beyond the Bernardins; again, a throng
of houses, standing with their feet in the water, as between the two
bridges.

There was a great uproar of laundresses; they screamed, and talked, and
sang from morning till night along the beach, and beat a great deal of
linen there, just as in our day. This is not the least of the gayeties
of Paris.

The University presented a dense mass to the eye. From one end to
the other, it was homogeneous and compact. The thousand roofs, dense,
angular, clinging to each other, composed, nearly all, of the same
geometrical element, offered, when viewed from above, the aspect of a
crystallization of the same substance.

The capricious ravine of streets did not cut this block of houses into
too disproportionate slices. The forty-two colleges were scattered about
in a fairly equal manner, and there were some everywhere. The amusingly
varied crests of these beautiful edifices were the product of the same
art as the simple roofs which they overshot, and were, actually, only a
multiplication of the square or the cube of the same geometrical
figure. Hence th