Well, he reached Paris in due time, and took a small bedroom on a third floor in the Rue du Faubourg Poissonnière—over a cheap hatter's—opposite the Conservatoire de Musique.
On the first night he was awoke by a terrible invasion—such malodorous swarms of all sizes, from a tiny brown speck to a full‑grown lentil, that they darkened his bed; and he slept on the tiled floor after making an island of himself by pouring cold water all round him as a kind of moat; and so he slept for a week of nights, until he had managed to poison off most of these invaders with poudre insecticide ... "mort aux punaises!"
In the daytime he first of all went for a swim at the Passy baths—an immense joy, full of the ghosts of by‑gone times; then he would spend the rest of his day revisiting old haunts—often sitting on the edge of the stone fountain in the rond‑point of the Avenue du Prince Impérial, or de l'Impératrice, or whatever it was—to gaze comfortably at the outside of the old school, which was now a pensionnat de demoiselles: soon to be pulled down and make room for a new house altogether. He did not attempt to invade these precincts of maiden innocence; but gazed and gazed, and remembered and realized and dreamt: it all gave him unspeakable excitement, and a strange tender wistful melancholy delight for which there is no name. Je connais ça! I also, ghostlike, have paced round the haunts of my childhood.
When the joy of this faded, as it always must when indulged in too freely, he amused himself by sitting in his bedroom and painting Leah's portrait, enlarged and in oils; partly from the very vivid image he had preserved of her in his mind, partly from the stolen photograph. At first he got it very like; then he lost all the likeness and could not recover it; and he worked and worked till he got stupid over it, and his mental image faded quite away.
But for a time this minute examination of the photograph (through a powerful lens he bought on purpose), and this delving search into his own deep consciousness of her, into his keen remembrance of every detail of feature and color and shade of expression, made him realize and idealize and foresee what the face might be some day—and what its owner might become.
And a horror of his life in London came over him like a revelation—a blast—a horrible surprise! Mere sin is ugly when it's no more; and so beastly to remember, unless the sinner be thoroughly acclimatized; and Barty was only twenty‑two, and hated deceit and cruelty in any form. Oh, poor, weak, frail fellow‑sinner—whether Vivien or Guinevere! How sadly unjust that loathing and satiety and harsh male contempt should kill man's ruth and pity for thee, that wast so kind to man! what a hellish after‑math!
Poor Barty hadn't the ghost of a notion how to set to work about becoming a painter, and didn't know a soul in Paris he cared to go and consult, although there were many people he might have discovered whom he had known: old school‑fellows, and friends of the Archibald Rohans—who would have been only too glad.
So he took to wandering listlessly about, lunching and dining at cheap suburban restaurants, taking long walks, sitting on benches, leaning over parapets, and longing to tell people who he was, his age, how little money he'd got, what lots of friends he had in England, what a nice little English girl he knew, whose portrait he didn't know how to paint—any idiotic nonsense that came into his head, so at least he might talk about something or somebody that interested him.
There is no city like Paris, no crowd like a Parisian crowd, to make you feel your solitude if you are alone in its midst!