they were young and that they would never die, that it was New Year’s Eve in Paris, and that that magic city had been created for them. By this time they had between them about 400 francs.
Then followed the huge kaleidoscope of night: at one o’clock, leaving a café, they got into a taxi, and vociferously demanded of the ruddy driver, in French made eloquently confident by alcohol and joy, that they be taken to the resorts most frequented by “nos frères—vous comprenez?—les honnêtes hommes—les ouvriers.”
He smilingly assented, and from that time on until dawn they made a madman’s round of little vile cafés, so mazed, so numerous, so inextricably confused in the vast web-like slum and jungle of nocturnal Paris, that later they could never thread their way back through that labyrinth of crooked alley-ways, and drunkenness and confusion. Their driver took them to a region which they later thought was somewhere in that ancient, foul and tangled quarter between the Boulevard de Sébastopol and Les Halles. And all that night, from one o’clock to dawn, they threaded noxious alleys, beside the shuttered façades of ancient, evil, crone-like houses, and stopped at every blaze of garish light to enter dirty little dives, where sullen evil-visaged men surveyed them sullenly over bistro bars, and gave them with a slimy hand cheap vile cognac in greasy little glasses. In these places there was always the evil, swelling, fatly unctuous and seductive music of accordions, the hoarse bravos of applause. Here one bought metal slugs, a dozen for five francs, and gave them to sluttish sirens with no upper teeth for the favour of a dance; and here also there were many soldiers: Colonial negroes, black as ebony, were most in favour; and here were men with caps and scarves and evil, furtive eyes, who watched them steadily.
From place to place, from dive to dive, all through that huge and noxious labyrinth of night, their wild debauch wore on. And presently they noticed that, wherever they went, two gendarmes followed them, stood quietly at the bar, and courteously and genially took the drinks they always bought for them, and were always there when they entered the next place. And the ruddy and good-natured taxi-man was always there as well, and he too always drank with them, and always said, with robust satisfaction: “Mais oui! Parbleu! A votre santé, messieurs!”
The grey haggard light of daybreak showed the cold grey waters of the Seine, ancient, narrowed, flowing on between huge stone walls, the haggard steep façades of the old shuttered houses in the Latin Quarter, the narrow angularity of the silent streets. In Montparnasse they got out at
