Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v108.djvu/40

36 Paris—the true Paris—turns, toward mid-afternoon, from the workaday duties of life which she never more than half-heartedly performs, and takes up the task for which, by inheritance and inclination, she is best fitted, that of diverting herself and her guests. But it is only with the lighting of her myriad lamps that she can truthfully be said to assume her imperial robes, her sceptre, and her throne. Mistress as she is of all roles of tragedy, comedy, and farce, she plays her part, even as her own inimitable stage-folk, to perfection only in artificial light. Then even her tinsel turns to gold.

As, in the past, all roads of the Roman Empire led at length to Rome, so now all paths of the Parisian world of gayety ultimately bring the pleasure-seeker to the Bois; and beautiful as is this latter-day fairyland at every season and at every hour, it assumes, as it were, a new dress at sundown. There is a pause, a little breathing-space, after the flood of city-bound carriages and pedestrians dwindles, in the stately driveways and shaded walks, to slender streams, and for a half-hour the Bois is once more the old Forêt de Rouvray as it was before it became the municipality's proudest possession. The twilight quietude of a country forest pervades its avenues and alleys: about their feet the trees gather from contact with the dampened grass the long skirts of shadow spread by the fingers of a sun now set, and the remote calm of nature which has clung so loyally and so alluringly to these much-frequented groves and lawns revives and reigns.

But the change is of the briefest. Already, beyond the line of the fortifications, Paris is winking into the fulness of her starry splendor, and, as darkness falls, the cup of her luminous beauty overflows at the brim and spills its sparkling drops into the highways and byways of the Bois de Boulogne. From the Portes Maillot, Dauphine, de la Muette, and de Passy a new tide takes the place of that just ebbed, and this a new Bois is waiting to receive—a Bois of blue-black shadow where lately was sun-dappled green; a Bois of cool silences where were hoof-beats, the rattle of silver harness, and the shrill clamor of playing children; a Bois of mysterious, dim vistas, and damp, sweet smells of moss and loam.

But these dwell in the eye of Paris only as accessories. The vaulted arches of acacia, holm-oak, and pine furnish, not food for her meditation, but echoes for her music and her laughter, and the density of massed foliage and the silver-shot gray of water-reaches serve only as backgrounds or mirrors for the multiplicity of her colored lights. No mere transition from her café-bordered boulevards to the dusk and stillness of this familiar woodland lays a finger of restraint upon her frolic humor. Like her prodigal Bourbons of other days, Paris travels with her whole court at her heels.

Her most trivial progress is a pageant. She invades the Bois, and it is the Bois, not she, that undergoes a change. She brings her music, her light, her laughter, her gayety, her folly, her multiplex and bewildering beauty, in her train, and camps here for an hour or two, as the brilliant little world of the Tuileries might have camped briefly among the trees on the route to Versailles or Fontainebleau. The lacelike masses of inter- mingling branches are flattened like the foliage of a forest scene at the Comédie Française as the blaze of electric light in which she rejoices falls against them, and in this setting, in which even Nature's self turns artificial, the gay, imperious capital lounges, flirts, and dances, to the clear, keen tinkle of glasses and the ring of golden coins.

Armenonville! The very name is like the magician's cornucopia. Touched with the magic wand of memory, it yields glimpses of little tables brilliant with spotless napery and sheen of crystal and silver, of heavy-headed roses leaning from their tall and slender vases. Solicitous waiters, grotesquely swaddled in their aprons, are turning each tiny wineglass to a ruby or a topaz with the liquid light of Bourgogne or Champagne. Electric bulbs glow pink in the heart of roses of crinkled silk. Europe is talking—the gossip of the day, poured like melted silver into the moulds of many languages, takes the most whimsical or graceful forms of wit and epigram, while the Tzigane orchestra, sliding gradually, with