Three months sufficed. They dragged all that remained of her out of the
Seine, and then the whole of the pitiful disgrace and tragedy came out.



V


If ever I indite a volume to be entitled Adventures in Paris it will
contain not a line to feed any prurient fancy, but will embrace the record
of many little journeys between the Coiffeur and the Marche des Fleurs,
with maybe an excursion among the cemeteries and the restaurants.

Each city is as one makes it for himself. Paris has contributed greatly to
my appreciation, and perhaps my knowledge, of history and literature and
art and life. I have seen it in all its aspects; under the empire, when the
Due de Morny was king of the Bourse and Mexico was to make every Frenchman
rich; after the commune and the siege, when the Hotel de Ville was in
ruins, the palace of the Tuileries still aflame, the column gone from the
Place Vendome, and everything a blight and waste; and I have marked it rise
from its ashes, grandly, proudly, and like a queen come to her own again,
resume its primacy as the only complete metropolis in all the universe.

There is no denying it. No city can approach Paris in structural unity and
regality, in things brilliant and beautiful, in buoyancy, variety, charm
and creature comfort. Drunkenness, of the kind familiar to London and New
York, is invisible to Paris. The brandy and absinthe habit has been greatly
exaggerated. In truth, everywhere in Europe the use of intoxicants is on
the decline. They are, for the first time in France, stimulated partly
by the alarming adulteration of French wines, rigorously applying and