Place Maubert, named after the second vicar of Ste-Geneviève, M. Aubert, was the great meeting-place of students, and here Maître Albert, the distinguished Dominican professor, surnamed “le Grand,” his name recorded by a neighbouring street, gave his lectures in the open air. Executions also took place here. In Impasse Maubert dwelt Ste-Croix, the lover and accomplice of the poisoner Mme de Brinvilliers, and in Rue des Grand Degrés Voltaire in his youth worked in a lawyer’s office. The cellars of Rue Maître-Albert are said to have been prison cells; at No. 13 the negro page Zamor, whose denunciation led Mme Dubarry to the scaffold, died in misery in 1820. No. 16 was the meeting-place of the Communards in 1871. Rue de la Bièvre reminds us that the tributary of the Seine, now a turgid drain, closely covered, once joined the mother-river here. Tradition says Dante made his abode here while in Paris. Over the door of No. 12 we see a statue of St-Michel slaying the dragon. This was originally a college founded in his own house in 1348 by Guillaume de Chanac, bishop of Paris, for twelve poor scholars of the diocese of Limoges. In Rue des Bernardins we see the church St-Nicolas-du-Chardonnet, St-Nicolas of the Thistle-field, built in the seventeenth century upon the site of a thirteenth-century structure erected where till then thistles had run riot. It was designed by a parishioner of mark, the painter Lebrun, enriched by his paintings and those of other artists of note. The tomb of his mother is within its walls and a monument to his memory by Coysevox. Rue St-Victor recalls the abbey, once on the site where now we see the Halle-aux-Vins. There Maurice de Sulli, builder of Notre-Dame, died and was buried in 1196. Hither, to its famous school, came Abelard, St. Thomas à Becket, St. Bernard. It was razed to the ground in 1809. At Nos. 24-26 we saw till just recently the ancient seminary of St-Nicolas, closed since 1906, with its long rows of old-world windows, seventy-two panes on one story; the college buildings were at the corner of Rue Pontoise, a street opened in 1772 as a calf-market and named from the town noted for its excellent veal. And here we find at No. 19 vestiges of the ancient convent of the Bernardins. Rue de Poissy has more important remains of the convent and of its college, founded in 1245 by the English Abbé de Clairvaux, Stephen Lexington, aided by a brother of St. Louis. The grand old walls now serve as the Caserne des Pompiers--the Fire Station. Within we find beautiful old-time Gothic work, a fine staircase, arched naves, tall, slender pillars--the refectory of the monks of yore; and beneath it vaulted cellars with some seventy pillars and ancient bays. CHAPTER XVI IN THE REGION OF THE SCHOOLS THE SORBONNE AND ITS SURROUNDINGS