The street throbbed with light and life. He was in a broad avenue with windows that blazed with splendid colour in the night. The faces of the clocks in the middle of the avenue were lit up; the lamps of the flower and newspaper kiosks made pools of shining yellow on the pavement; and above him the red and golden and green of the illuminated advertisements came and went, sending their iridescence into the night. It was not one unbearable glare that startled the eyes, but a blend of many delicate and fine luminous tints: one café was lit with electric lights that gave out a soft pale rose colour, another was of the faintest blue, and a third a delicate yellow, and all these different notes of light rushed together in a lucent harmony.
Music floated to him as he passed slowly in the stream of bleating and jingling and hooting traffic. He saw the people sitting outside the cafés near braziers of glowing coal, calmly drinking coloured liquids, as though there were no such thing as work in the world.
And that was the thought that gave Humphrey his first impression of Paris. These people, it seemed, only played with life. There was something artificial and unreal about all these cafés: they played at being angry (that business at the Customs office was part of the game), an agent held up a little white baton to stop the traffic—playing at being a London policeman, thought Humphrey. He wondered whether this sort of thing went on always, with an absurd thought of the Paris he had seen at a London exhibition.
The cab veered out of the traffic down a side-street between two cafés larger than the rest, and, at the last glimpse of people sitting in overcoats and furs by the braziers, he laughed in the delight of it. "Why, they're playing at it being summer," he said to himself.
Six months had passed since that day, and he had seen Paris in many aspects, yet nothing could alter his first impression. The whole city was built as a temple of pleasure, a feminine city, with all the shops in the Rue Royale or the Avenue de l'Opera decked with fine jewels and sables. Huge emporiums everywhere, crowded with silks and ribbons and lace; wonderful restaurants, with soft rose-shaded lights and mauve and grey tapestries, as dainty as a lady's boudoir. Somewhere, very discreetly kept in the background, men and women toiled behind the scenes of luxury and pleasure ... those markets in the bleak morning, and the factories on the outskirts of the city, and along the outer Boulevards one saw great-chested men and narrow-chested girls walking homewards from their day's work. But there was pleasure, even for these people: the material pleasure of life, and the spiritual pleasure of art and beauty. The first they could satisfy with a jolly meal in the little bright restaurants of their quarter with red wine and cognac; and of the second they could take their fill for nothing, if they were so minded, for it surrounded them in a scattered profusion everywhere.
Humphrey, in the Paris office of The Day, on the fourth floor of an apartment building in the Rue le Peletier, sat dreaming of all that had happened in the past six months. Wonderful months had they been to him! They had altered his whole perception of things. Here, in a new world and a new city, he was beginning to see things in a truer proportion. Fleet Street receded into the far perspective as something quite small and unimportant; the men themselves, even, seemed narrow-minded and petty, incapable of thinking more deeply than the news of the day demanded.
Humphrey, from the heights of his room in Paris, began to see how broad the world was, that it was finer to deal with nations than individuals, and from his view Fleet Street appeared to him in the same relation as Easterham had appeared to him in London.
The clock struck five. Rivers and Neckinger and Selsey would be going into the conference now in Ferrol's room to discuss the contents of the paper.