He wanted her very much to share in the delight of those days. It was all so new and beautiful to him, so different from London. He went about the city, sometimes alone, sometimes with Dagneau for a companion, to the Louvre, where the Venus de Milo filled him with awe and wonder, or to the Luxembourg, with its statuary set among the green trees. In the afternoons, when he had any spare time, he would take a book and read in the Tuileries, or on one of the seats in the Champs Elysées, where the fat Norman and Breton nurses, with their broad coloured ribbons floating from their coifs, wheeled perambulators up and down, or took the children to the Punch and Judy shows. And on Sundays in the season, there were the races at Longchamps, with a drive homewards in the cool of the evening, through the Bois, where his cab was one of a long line of vehicles making a moving pageant of the human comedy, with laughing bourgeois families riding five and six in a cab, and aristocracy and opulent beauty, artificial and real, rolling by in victorias and electric broughams.

Those rides down the Avenue du Bois to the Arc de Triomphe made him feel very poor: the women, lolling back in silken comfort, seemed lifted above the everyday world, away from all thought of squalor and sordidness. They were the rare hot-house flowers of society; the cold wind of life's reality would wither them in a day. So they passed before him, exquisitely beautiful and remote, looking with languid interest at the rest of the people in the incomparable vanity of their silk and lace and diamonds....

Yet again, his work took him behind the scenes of Parisian life, into places that are not familiar to the[298] casual visitor to Paris. He would sit in the Chamber of Deputies to make notes of an important debate............