III

FEBRUARY




FEBRUARY dusk on the Seine. The boats are plying again, but they
stop at nightfall, and the river is inky-smooth, with the same long
weed-like reflections as in August. Only the reflections are fewer
and paler; bright lights are muffled everywhere. The line of the
quays is scarcely discernible, and the heights of the Trocadero are
lost in the blur of night, which presently effaces even the firm
tower-tops of Notre-Dame. Down the damp pavements only a few street
lamps throw their watery zigzags. The shops are shut, and the
windows above them thickly curtained. The faces of the houses are
all blind.

In the narrow streets of the Rive Gauche the darkness is even
deeper, and the few scattered lights in courts or "cites" create
effects of Piranesi-like mystery. The gleam of the
chestnut-roaster's brazier at a street corner deepens the sense of
an old adventurous Italy, and the darkness beyond seems full of
cloaks and conspiracies. I turn, on my way home, into an empty
street between high garden walls, with a single light showing far
off at its farther end. Not a soul is in sight between me and that
light: my steps echo endlessly in the silence. Presently a dim
figure comes around the corner ahead of me. Man or woman? Impossible
to tell till I overtake it. The February fog deepens the darkness,