The Student Vagabond

Paris had been an untidy, shouting, excited city all that day, but towards nightfall there dropped down over the great stone buildings a profound silence. There is something calm in a busy city that is uneasy and restive, for it is the calm of men skulking in dark alleys and of vague shadows on brick walls. The strange lack of sound sent a stir through the King's Guard and they swaggered a trifie obviously as they strode about the streets that night.

Next day in a grey dawn the odd lull still hung over the city as though the good citizens had refused to awaken. No windows were flung wide to groet the morning, no one went whistling to work, the breakfast bacon seemed to lie quiet in its own grease. As the day wore on a strange murmur like far off breakers on a distant beach began in the St. Antoine to break the sullen quietude. Travelling slowly along the crooked streets it gathered volume always nearer, always louder. At last with a great roar it burst out around the high walls of the Bastille and the Revolution had begun. The Paris mob broke up running, shouting, shrieking, calling, hurling, swearing, beating, advancing, swarming; but always moving, always attacking, always increasing. They stormed the deep ditch, the double draw bridge, the eight great towers amid cannon, musket fire and smoke. And in the crowd stood Defarge of the wine shop grown hot with the work of four fierce hours. He called to his men, he shouted at his wife, he bellowed at the sky until at last in a great surge the crowd rose higher and higher until it struggled over the ditch, through the double drawbridge and in past the eight great towers surrendered.

There is more than a touch of Dickens about this passage and perhaps it would have been fairer to put it in quotation marks, but the Vagabond's memory is too faulty for such precision and it is too good to allow him to write something of his very own. Today occurs in Emerson 211 what the Vagabond feels is one of the finest lectures in College. He has heard it twice but he will go again today to hear Mr. Hersey speak on the "Paris of the Great Writers." There is the Revolution of Dickens, the Notre Dame of Victor Hugo, and the Montmartre of Du Maurier and the Vagabond must fight with DeFarge, pour lead with Quasimodo, and swagger along the boulevards with Taffy.

TODAY

10 o'clock

"Stolypin: the Constitutional Experiment," Mr. Vernadsky, Boylston 21.

"Robin and Marion, and Pathelin," Professor Webster, Sever 18.

"Emily Dickinson," Professor Mathiessen, Harvard 6.

"Le Drame Romantique," Professor Morize, Emerson 211.

11 o'clock

"Granville-Barker and St. John Hankin," Professor Murray, Harvard 3.

"Music of the Renaissance and Reformation," Professor Davison, Music Building.

"German Drama of the Nineteenth Century. Franz Grillparzer," Professor Burkhard, Germanic Lecture Room.

12 o'clock

"Lessing, Goethe, and A. W. Schlegel," Professor Babbitt, Harvard 5.

2 o'clock

"Paris and the Great Novelists," Mr. Hersey, Emerson 211. Illustrated with slides.

TOMORROW

9 o'clock

"Provinces of the Second Century," Mr. Hammond, Sever 18.

"Juvenal's Satires," Professor Peterkin, Sever 14.

"Industrial Revolution," Professor Gay, New Lecture Hall.

"'Pearl' Poet': 'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,'" Mr. Whiting, Sever 11.

10 o'clock

"Bismarck and the Roman Catholics," Professor Fay, Harvard 1.

11 o'clock

"French and English Renaissance Architecture," Professor Edgell, Fogg Large Room.

12 o'clock

"Pintoricchio," Professor Post, Fogg Large Room.

2 o'clock

"Selections from Butler, Dorset, and Sedley," Professor Greenough, Sever 11.