"The hotel has shut up. Everybody has fled! We are quite alone
here!"
I was glad to have added a little item of history to that old mansion
where the Duc de Noailles lived, where Lafayette was married, and
where Marie Antoinette saw old ghost faces--the dead faces of
laughing girls--when she passed on her way to the scaffold. It was a
queer incident in its story when three English journalists opened it
after the great flight from Paris.
Early that morning, after a snatch of sleep, we three friends walked
up the Avenue des Champs Elysees and back again from the Arc de
Triomphe. The autumn foliage was beginning to fall, and so
wonderfully quiet was the scene that almost one might have heard a
leaf rustle to the ground. Not a child scampered under the trees or
chased a comrade round the Petit Guignol. No women with twinkling
needles sat on the stone seats. No black-haired student fondled the
hand of a pretty couturiere. No honest bourgeois with a fat stomach
walked slowly along the pathway meditating upon the mystery of life
which made some men millionaires. Not a single carriage nor any
kind of vehicle, except one solitary bicycle, came down the road
where on normal days there is a crowd of light-wheeled traffic.
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