crossway of the Rue Drouot. Perhaps his increase of fever was due to
those glowing Boulevards. The private rooms of the restaurants were still
ablaze, the cafes threw bright radiance across the road, the pavement was
blocked by their tables and chairs and customers. All Paris seemed to
have come down thither to enjoy that delightful evening. There was
endless elbowing, endless mingling of breath as the swelling crowd
sauntered along. Couples lingered before the sparkling displays of
jewellers' shops. Middle-class families swept under dazzling arches of
electric lamps into cafes concerts, whose huge posters promised the
grossest amusements. Hundreds and hundreds of women went by with trailing
skirts, and whispered and jested and laughed; while men darted in
pursuit, now of a fair chignon, now of a dark one. In the open cabs men
and women sat side by side, now husbands and wives long since married,
now chance couples who had met but an hour ago. But Mathieu went on
again, yielding to the force of the current, carried along like all the
others, a prey to the same fever which sprang from the surroundings, from
the excitement of the day, from the customs of the age. And he no longer
took the Beauchenes, the Moranges, the Seguins as isolated types; it was
all Paris that symbolized vice, all Paris that yielded to debauchery and
sank into degradation. There were the folks of high culture, the folks
suffering from literary neurosis; there were the merchant princes; there
were the men of liberal professions, the lawyers, the doctors, the
engineers; there were the people of the lower middle-class, the petty
tradesmen, the petty clerks; there were even the manual workers, poisoned
by the example of the upper spheres--all practising the doctrines of
egotism as vanity and the passion for money grew more and more intense. .
. . No more children! Paris was bent on dying. And Mathieu recalled how
Napoleon I., one evening after battle, on beholding a plain strewn with
the corpses of his soldiers, had put his trust in Paris to repair the
carnage of that day. But times had changed. Paris would no longer supply