"Enter [he says] between three and four o'clock, and take your seat at one of the small tables, the greater number of which are already occupied. To your right there is a pale young man: his long hair, falling loosely over his face, gives an additional wildness to the eye, which has caught a mysterious light from the midnight vigil; his clothes are clean and threadbare; his coat too short at the wrists; his trousers too short at the legs; his cravat of a rusty black, and vaguely confining two immense shirt collars, leaves his thin and angular neck almost entirely exposed. To your left is a native of the South, pale and swarthy: his long black locks, parted from his forehead, descend upon his shoulders; his lip is fringed with a slight moustache, and the semblance of a beard gives to his meditative countenance an antique and apostolic cast. Ranged round the room, with their thin, meagre portions of meat and bread, their pale decanter of water before them, sit the students, whom a youth of poverty and privation is preparing for a life of energy or science." Flicoteaux has long been swept away, and buildings of the Sorbonne now occupy its site. Gone, too, these many years, is the Café Momus, which stood in a back street by the old church of Saint-Germain l'Auxerrois, the hostelry celebrated by so many exploits of Murger's four heroes in "Scènes de la Vie de Bohème." It was here that Schaunard and Colline collected Rodolphe for the Bohemian brotherhood, and it became their home, not so much for meals, though it was the scene of their reckless Christmas Eve supper which introduced the saviour Barbemuche, but rather for the lighter _consommations_ over which, by the French custom, they could spend unlimited hours--a precious privilege when a cold garret was the only alternative. There was nothing fictitious about the Café Momus; it was a real establishment serving some respectable shopkeepers of the quarter, when by some mischance, from the good M. Momus' point of view, it attracted the Bohemian horde of Murger, Champfleury, Nadar, Schann, Wallon, and many of the other "Buveurs d'Eau." Even on Murger's testimony, they must be admitted to have abused their privileges without shedding any very great glory in return, and we may take as fairly true the list of grievances which was drawn up by the proprietor against Rodolphe and his friends, from which it appears that they spent the whole day there from morning to midnight, making a desert round them with their strident voices and extravagant conversation; that Rodolphe carried off all the papers in the morning and complained if their bands were broken, and that by shouting every quarter of an hour for _Le Castor_, a journal of the hat trade edited by Rodolphe, the companions had forced a subscription on the proprietor; that Colline and Rodolphe played _tric-trac_ all day, refusing to give up the table to other