The Workmen’s Club of Sainte-Geneviève is not the only one of the kind in Paris; there are at least ten formed on the same plan and which reach directly and surely, without any attempt at noisy propagandism, their essential aim: that of depriving the dram shop and the tavern of their prey. The lower part of the Rue des Carmes leads to the market of the same name and to the Place Maubert, which occupies the site of the ancient convent. The cloister of the Couvent des Carmes was remarkable as a masterpiece of architecture. The Place Maubert was in the middle ages the true forum of the University Quarter, the meeting place of the students, the boatmen of the Seine, and market people from all parts of the country, as well as the central academy of the language spoken by the populace. Thus it was said of a man who was coarse in his talk that he had “learned his compliments in the Place Maubert.” The “Compliments of the Place Maubert” was indeed the title of a dictionary of plebeianisms. The name of the place or square is corrupted from that of Jean Aubert, second Abbé of Sainte-Geneviève. Receiving from all sides the outpourings of six popular streets, the Place Maubert has witnessed many tumultuous scenes. Here in 1418 assembled the partisans of Bourgogne who set out to massacre the partisans of Armagnac in their prisons. Here were burnt as heretics Alexandre d’Evreux and Jean Pointer in 1533; the mason Poille in 1535, the goldsmith Claude Lepeintre in 1540, and finally, in 1546, the printer Étienne Dolet, who, by his religious and political opinions as well as by the bitterness of his polemical writings, had made for himself implacable enemies. Across the Place Maubert was dragged the body of Ramus, assassinated in 1572 at the College of Presles in the Rue des Carmes. On one side of it were raised in 1588 the first barracks of the partisans of the House of Guise against King Henri III., and sixty years later the barricades of the Fronde. [Illustration: THE CHAPEL OF THE ANCIENT COLLEGE OF THE LOMBARDS.] At a few steps from the Place Maubert stood, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, in the Rue de Bièvre and the Rue des Grands Degrés, two attorneys’ offices, where were engaged two young clerks destined one day to dazzle the world of letters and of the stage. One was Crébillon; the other Voltaire.