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 n***d 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, angula
