I had five hundred francs in my pocket, I possessed rooms in the Place Vendôme, a princely fortune lay at my back, I had a guardian, everything that a guardian ought to be from a young man's point of view, I had just shaken hands with the Emperor, I had the entrée of the very best of society in France, yet I doubt if you could have found a more forlorn creature than myself if you had searched the whole of Paris.
I did not know where to go or what to do, so I went back to the Place Vendôme, superintended the unpacking of my things, looked at my new clothes, and at seven o'clock, called by the lovely evening, I went out again, proposing to myself to dine somewhere and see life.
Over the western sky, brilliant and liquid as a topaz, hung the evening star. Paris was preparing for the festival of the night, wrapping herself in the dark gauze of shadows and spangling herself with lights. I hung on the Pont des Arts, looking at the dark lilac of the Seine, looking at the drifting barges, listening to the sounds of the city.
Then I walked on.
Oh, there is no doubt that we are led in this world when we seem to lead, and that when we take a direction that brings us to fate it is not by our own volition. This I was soon to prove.
I walked on—walked in the blindness of reverie—and opened my eyes to find myself in a new world.
A broad boulevard, a blaze of lights, cafés thronged to the pavement, the music of barrel-organs, laughter, and a crowd.
Such a crowd! Men with long hair, gentlemen in pegtop trousers, wearing smoking-caps with tassels, smoking long pipes; men in rags, hawkers yelling their wares, blind men tapping their way with their sticks, deaf men blowing penny whistles, grisettes, gamins, poets, painters, gnomes from the Rue du Truand, goblins from Montmartre, Thénard and Claquesons, Fleur de Marie and Mimi Pinson, Bouchardy and Bruyon; skull-like faces, ghost-like faces, faces like roses, paint, satin, squalor, beauty; and all drifting as if blown by the wind of the summer night, drifting under the stars, here in shadow, here in the blaze of the roaring cafés, drifting, drifting, in a double current from and towards the voiceless and gas-spangled Seine.
Not in the bazaars of Bagdad, or on the Bardo of Tunis, could you see so fantastic a sight as the Boulevard St. Michel in the year 1869.
It fascinated me, and, mixing with the crowd, I drifted half the length of the boulevard, till suddenly I was brought up as if by the blast of a trumpet in my face. By the pavement a man had placed a little carpet, six inches square; on this carpet, lit by the light of a bullseye lantern, two tiny dolls, manipulated by an invisible thread, were wrestling and tumbling, to the edification of a small crowd of interested onlookers. One of these—a man with a violin under his arm, a man with a round, fresh-coloured childish face—I knew at sight. He had not altered in nine years. He was the good angel, the violinist of that troupe of wandering musicians, whose music had held me in the gallery of the Schloss Lichtenberg.