They were very keen about
business, and would not give credit for a centime--not even to English
boys. They were said to be immensely rich and quite alone in the world.
How very dead they must be now! I thought. And I gazed at them and
wondered at their liveliness and the pleasure they took in living. They
sold many things: nougat, _pain d'epices_, mirlitons, hoops, drums,
noisy battledoors and shuttlecocks; and little ten-sou hand-mirrors,
neatly bound in zinc, that could open and shut.
I looked at myself in one of these that was hanging outside; I was old
and worn and gray-my face badly shaven--my hair almost white. I had
never been old in a dream before.
I walked through the gate in the fortifications on to the outer Talus
(which was quite bare in those days), in the direction of the Mare
d'Auteuil. The place seemed very deserted and dull for a Thursday. It
was a sad and sober walk; my melancholy was not to be borne--my heart
was utterly broken, and my body so tired I could scarcely drag myself
along. Never before had I known in a dream what it was to be tired.
I gazed at the famous fortifications in all their brand-new pinkness,
the scaffoldings barely removed--some of them still lying in the dry
ditch between--and smiled to think how these little brick and granite
walls would avail to keep the Germans out of Paris thirty years later
(twenty years ago).
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