About Paris . rehearsal is finished you can crossthe Place de la Concorde and hang over thestone parapet, and watch the Deputies comingover the bridge, or the men washing the dogs inthe Seine, and shaving and trimming their tuftsof curly hair, and twisting their mustaches intomilitary jauntiness; or you can turn your backto this and watch the thousands of carriages andcabs and omnibuses crossing the great squarebefore you from the eight streets opening into it,with the water of the fountains in the middleblown into spray by the wind, and turned intothe colors of the rainbow by the sun. This gr
About Paris . rehearsal is finished you can crossthe Place de la Concorde and hang over thestone parapet, and watch the Deputies comingover the bridge, or the men washing the dogs inthe Seine, and shaving and trimming their tuftsof curly hair, and twisting their mustaches intomilitary jauntiness; or you can turn your backto this and watch the thousands of carriages andcabs and omnibuses crossing the great squarebefore you from the eight streets opening into it,with the water of the fountains in the middleblown into spray by the wind, and turned intothe colors of the rainbow by the sun. This great,beautiful open place, even to one accustomedto city streets and their monuments, seems tochange more rapidly and to form with greaterlife than any other spot in the world, and itsgreat stupid obelisk in the centre appears to riselike a monster exclamation-point of wonder atwhat it sees about it, and with the surprise overall of finding itself in the centre of it. You cannot say you have seen the streets of. THE STREETS OF PARIS 43 Paris until you have walked them at sunrise;every one has seen them at night, but he mustwatch them change from night to day before hecan claim to have seen them at their best. Iwalked under the arches of the Rue dc Rivolione morning when it was so dark that they lookedlike the cloisters of some great monastery, and itwas impossible to believe that the empty lengthof the Rue Cambon had but an hour before beenblocked by the blazing front of the Olympia,and before that with rows of carriages in front ofthe two Columbins. There were a few belatedcabs hugging the sidewalk, with their driversasleep on the boxes, and a couple of gendarmesslouching together across the IMace de la Con-corde made the only sound of life in the wholecity. The Seine lay as motionless as water in abath-tub, and the towers of Notre Dame risingout of the mist at one end, and the round bulkof the Trocad^ro bounding it at the other, seemedto limit the river to what one could see o
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