The special home of the wildest jokers and most desperate caricatures of the new spirit was a certain tumble-down barrack, No. 9 Rue Childebert, a street on the south side of that beautiful old church Saint-Germain-des-Prés, and now merged in the Boulevard Saint-Germain. This house, familiarly called "La Childebert," was five or six stories high and thoroughly decayed, for its owner, a Madame Legendre, refused to carry out any repairs. She was justified in this attitude to some extent by the fact that few of her tenants paid any rent. Indeed, according to one witness, no man in his senses would have paid any rent for a room upon the top floor from 1837 onwards. One student, however, an ingenious fellow called Lepierre, who both lived on the top floor and paid his rent, succeeded in forcing the stingy lady to repair the roof. Having been drenched one night during a hard storm, he took his revenge by removing a portion of his flooring, and hiring all the peripatetic water-carriers that could be found to pour water down the hole. The _concierge_ remonstrated, but in vain, and Madame Legendre was sent for in hot haste. When she arrived in a cab she was gaily serenaded by the inhabitants, and on proceeding to the flooded room she was horrified to find Lepierre in the costume of Adam before the Fall, who claimed a right, he said, to have a bath at his _own_ convenience. Madame Legendre fled, but the roof was repaired. The gay desperadoes of La Childebert were capable of carrying through any _charge_, howsoever lurid. One of the most successful was known as "le nez de Bouginier." Bouginier was an artist, the size of whose nose inspired his friend Fourreau with the idea of an exaggerated caricature in which this feature was made enormous. A stencil was cut and copied, and for many days Bouginier's nose appeared on all the walls in Paris. It is even alleged that two parties of students, about to travel in the East and wishing to meet on the voyage, hit on the simple plan of following Bouginier's nose. The party starting first took a stencil with them, so that the second party, leaving a fortnight later, were able to track them to Marseilles, Malta, Alexandria, and Suez. In a certain medallion in the Passage du Caire, just south of the Boulevard Bonne Nouvelle, Bouginier's nose is still immortalized. La Childebert was always "up to" something, but a certain fancy-dress _conversazione_ completely convulsed the neighbourhood. The schools of art and poetry dressed according to their views, and by universal consent the Romantics, for all they could do in pourpoints, doublets, and general local colour, were easily beaten by the Classicists. Romulus and Remus with their wolf and Hercules with the Nemean lion created a _furore_; so great was the real consternation of the district at the apparition of these wild beasts that the commissary of police had to intervene. The wolf and the lion suffered themselves to be led with great docility to his office,