Page:French life in town and country (1917).djvu/67

 *ities, their dress, their precarious triumphs, their fugitive passions and idle loves, the consuming cares of social ostentation and rivalry, to understand Paris, to seize the thousand-and-one delights of its streets and squares and river-bends, to realise how much enjoyment may be got out of an hour in the Luxembourg or Tuileries Gardens, of a penny run down the river to Auteuil, and from Auteuil to Suresnes. When I read a fashionable Parisian novel, where the titled heroine, doubly veiled, is invariably driving in a fiacre to a perfumed and luxurious bachelor's entresol, in a house with two exits; and the hero, when he is not in an elegant "smoking" costume, is making most fatiguing love to his neighbour's wife in evening dress, I am always very sorry for these misguided creatures, and think how much better employed they would be, how much happier and high-spirited they might be, if they only went down the river in a penny boat, or watched the children play, and fed the sparrows in some dear nook of the enchanting public grounds of Paris.

Another source of pleasure are the markets of Paris. The great Halles Centrales one generally visits once, and no more, as a truly wonderful sight; but the flower-markets of the quays, of the Madeleine, and St. Sulpice are scenes of perpetual delight. There are many markets in the different quarters of Paris, where