already in their veins. These Parisians are born intoxicated and
remain so; it is not fair play to require them to be like other
human people. Their deepest feeling is for the arts; and, as
everyone had declared, they are farceurs in their tragedies,
tragic in their comedies. They prepare the last epigram in the
tumbril; they drown themselves with enthusiasm about the
alliance with Russia. In death they are witty; in war they have
poetic spasms; in love they are mad.

The strangest of all this is that it is not only the Parisians
who are the insane ones in Paris; the visitors are none of them
in behaviour as elsewhere. You have only to go there to become
as lunatic as the rest. Many travellers, when they have
departed, remember the events they have caused there as a person
remembers in the morning what he has said and thought in the
moonlight of the night.

In Paris it is moonlight even in the morning; and in Paris one
falls in love even more strangely than by moonlight.

It is a place of glimpses: a veil fluttering from a motor-car, a
little lace handkerchief fallen from a victoria, a figure
crossing a lighted window, a black hat vanishing in the distance
of the avenues of the Tuileries. A young man writes a ballade
and dreams over a bit of lace. Was I not, then, one of the least
extravagant of this mad people? Men have fallen in love with
photographs, those greatest of liars; was I so wild, then, to
adore this grey skirt, this small shoe, this divine glove, the
golden-honey voice--of all in Paris the only one to pity and
to understand? Even to love the mystery of that lady and to