Thence home--to quite, innocent, suburban Passy--by the quays, walking
on the top of the stone parapet all the way, so as to miss nothing (till
a gendarme was in sight), or else by the Boulevards, the Rue de Rivoli,
the Champs Elysees, the Avenue de St. Cloud, and the Chaussee de la
Muette. What a beautiful walk! Is there another like it anywhere as it
was then, in the sweet early forties of this worn-out old century, and
before this poor scribe had reached his teens?
Ah! it is something to have known that Paris, which lay at one's feet as
one gazed from the heights of Passy, with all its pinnacles and spires
and gorgeously-gilded domes, its Arch of Triumph, its Elysian Fields,
its Field of Mars, its Towers of our Lady, its far-off Column of July,
its Invalids, and Vale of Grace, and Magdalen, and Place of the Concord,
where the obelisk reared its exotic peak by the beautiful unforgettable
fountains.
There flowed the many-bridged winding river, always the same way, unlike
our tidal Thames, and always full; just beyond it was spread that
stately, exclusive suburb, the despair of the newly rich and recently
ennobled, where almost every other house bore a name which read like a
page of French history; and farther still the merry, wicked Latin
quarter and the grave Sorbonne, the Pantheon, the Garden of Plants; on
the hither side, in the middle distance, the Louvre, where the kings of
France had dwelt for centuries; the Tuileries, where "the King of the
French" dwelt then, and just for a little while yet.
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