traveling!"




Chapter 2

An Unknown Paris in the Night and Rain



It was Sunday morning, the bells were ringing to church, and I was
strolling in the gardens of the Tuileries. A bright morning sun was
drying the dewy lawns and the wet marble bodies of the gods and
athletes, the leaves on the trees were falling, and the French autumn,
so slow, so golden, and so melancholy, had begun. At the end of the
mighty vista of the Champs Élysées, the Arc de Triomphe rose, brown and
vaporous in the exhalations of the quiet city, and an aeroplane was
maneuvering over the Place de la Concorde, a moving speck of white and
silver in the soft, September blue. From a near-by Punch and Judy show
the laughter of little children floated down the garden in outbursts of
treble shrillness. "Villain, monster, scoundrel," squeaked a voice.
Flopped across the base of the stage, the arms hanging downwards, was a
prostrate doll which a fine manikin in a Zouave's uniform belabored with
a stick; suddenly it stirred, and, with a comic effect, lifted its
puzzled, wooden head to the laughing children. Beneath a little Prussian
helmet was the head of William of Germany, caricatured with Parisian
skill into a scowling, green fellow with a monster black mustache turned
up to his eyes. "Lie down!" cried the Zouave doll imperiously. "Here is
a love pat for thee from a French Zouave, my big Boche." And he struck