Those rides down the Avenue du Bois to the Arc de Triomphe made him feel very poor: the women, lolling back in silken comfort, seemed lifted above the everyday world, away from all thought of squalor and sordidness. They were the rare hot-house flowers of society; the cold wind of life's reality would wither them in a day. So they passed before him, exquisitely beautiful and remote, looking with languid interest at the rest of the people in the incomparable vanity of their silk and lace and diamonds....
Yet again, his work took him behind the scenes of Parisian life, into places that are not familiar to the casual visitor to Paris. He would sit in the Chamber of Deputies to make notes of an important debate, or to watch the rigid semicircle of French legislators break up into riotous factions, with the tintinnabulation of the President's bell adding to the din. This would appear in The Day with the head-line, "Pandemonium in the French Chamber." Perhaps it was necessary to interview a juge d'instruction in his private room at the Palais de Justice, or to pass through the corridors of the Surété—France's Scotland Yard—to inquire into a sensational murder mystery.
And he found, too, that in Paris he had a certain standing as a journalist that was denied him in London. He was registered in books, and the seal of approval was given to him in the shape of a coupe-fil, which was a card of identity, with his portrait and the name of The Day on it—a magic card that enabled him to do miraculous things with policemen and officials; it was a passport to the front row in the drama of life. There was no need in Paris to haggle with policemen, to wink at them, and win a passage through the crowd by subterfuge as in London: this card divided a way for him through the multitude.
So that now, when he felt that he had established himself in his career, when his salary was more than adequate for the needs of two, the strong need of Elizabeth came to him. The brilliant gaiety of Paris swirled about him, and tried to entice him into its joyous whirlpool. He knew the dangers that beset him: he knew the stories of men who had been dragged into the whirlpool, down into the waters that closed over their heads, bringing oblivion.
And he looked towards the ideal of Elizabeth, as he had always looked towards the ideal of the love which she personified, to save him from the evil things that are bred by loneliness and despair.
III
One Saturday night, when there was nothing else to do, he went up to Montmartre, and walked along the Boulevard de Clichy, past the grotesque absurdities of the cabarets that are set there for the delectation of foreign and provincial strangers: cabarets that mock at death and heaven and hell with all the vulgarity and coarseness that exists side by side with the love of beauty, art and culture in Paris.
For a franc you could watch the old illusion of a shrouded man turning to a grisly skeleton in his narrow coffin; or you could see a diverting burlesque of the celestial realms, and observe how sinners were burnt in a canvas hell with artificial flames. Humphrey had seen all these during his first week in Paris: he had laughed, but afterwards he had been ashamed of his laughter. They were a little degrading....