sides, to permeate his houseless soul like a palpable and viscous substance of numb terror and despair, were now impregnated with all the vital energies of living, with the intoxication of an unspeakable, nameless, infinitely strange and various joy. As they walked across the vast court of the Louvre towards the great arched gateway and all the brilliant traffic of the streets, the enormous dynamic murmur of the mysterious city came to him and stirred his entrails with the sensual premonitions of unknown, glamorous and seductive pleasure. Even the little taxis, boring past with wasp-like speed across the great space of the Louvre and through the sounding arches, now contributed to this sense of excitement, luxury and joy. The shrill and irritating horns sounded constantly through the humid air, and filled his heart with thoughts of New Year: already the whole city seemed astir, alive now with the great carnival of New Year’s Eve.
At the Régence they found a table on the terrace of the old café where Napoleon had played dominoes, and among the gay clatter of the crowd of waning afternoon they drank brandy, talked passionately and with almost delirious happiness, drank brandy again, and watched the swarming and beautiful life upon the pavements and at the crowded tables all around them.
The streams of traffic up and down the whole Avenue de l’Opéra and the Place de la Comédie Française, the delicate, plain, and beautiful façade of the Comédie across the Square from them, the statue of frail De Musset, half-fainting backwards in the arms of his restoring muse—all this seemed not only part of him, but now that Starwick was here, to gain an enormous enhancement and enchantment, to be the total perfume of an incredibly good and lovely and seductive life, the whole of which, in all its infinite ramifications, seemed to be distilled into his blood like a rare liquor and to belong to him. And so they drank and talked and drank until full dark had come, and tears stood in their eyes, and the brandy saucers were racked up eight deep upon their table.
Then, gloriously sad and happy and exultantly triumphant, and full of nameless joys and evil, they stepped into one of the shrill, exciting little taxis and were charioted swiftly up that thronging noble street, until the great soaring masses of the Opéra stood before them and the Café de la Paix was at one side.
And they were young, all-conquering and exultant, and all the magic life of strange million-footed Paris belonged to them, and all its strange and evil fragrance burned fierce and secret in their veins, and they knew that
