Nevertheless, aside from the impropriety inherent in the very nature of waltzing, there was not a word, look, or gesture of immorality or impropriety. The dresses were all decent; and if there was vice, it was vice masked under the guise of polite propriety.
How different, I could not but reflect, is all this from the gin palaces of London! There, there is indeed a dazzling splendor of gas light. But there is nothing artistic, nothing refined, nothing appealing to the imagination. There are only hogsheads, and barrels, and the appliances for serving out strong drink. And there, for one sole end, the swallowing of fiery stimulant, come the nightly thousands—from the gay and well dressed, to the haggard and tattered, in the last stage of debasement. The end is the same—by how different paths! Here, they dance along the path to ruin, with flowers and music; there, they cast themselves bodily, as it were, into the lake of fire.
Wednesday, June 15. Went in the forenoon to M. Belloc's studio, and read while H. was sitting.
Then we drove to Madame Roger's, who is one of the leaders of Paris taste and legislation in dress, and who is said to have refused to work for a duchess who neglected to return her husband's bow. I sat in the outer courts while some mysterious affairs were being transacted in the inner rooms of state.
Then we drove to the Louvre, and visited the remains from Nineveh. They are fewer in number than those in the British Museum, which I have not yet seen. But the pair of human-headed, winged bulls are said to be equal in size to any.
I was very much impressed, not only by the solemn grandeur of the thought that thirty centuries were looking down upon me out of those stony eyes, but by what I have never seen noticed, the magnificent phrenological development of the heads. The brow is absolutely prodigious—broad, high, projecting, massive. It is the brow of a divinity indeed, or of a cherub, which I am persuaded is the true designation of these creatures. They are to me but the earliest known attempts to preserve the cherubim that formed the fiery portals of the Eden temple until quenched in the Purges of the deluge.
Out of those eyes of serene, benign, profound reflection, therefore, not thirty, but sixty centuries look down upon me. I seem to be standing at those mysterious Eden gates, where Adam and Eve first guided the worship of a world, amid the sad, yet sublime symbols of a previous existence in heavenly realms.
After leaving the Louvre H. and I took a calèche, or open two-seat carriage, and drove from thence to the Madeleine, and thence the whole length of the Boulevards, circling round, crossing the Pont d'Austerlitz, and coming back by the Avenue de l'Observatoire and the Luxembourg.
Then we saw theatres, the Port St. Denis, Port St. Martin, the site of the Bastille, and the most gay, beautiful, and bustling boulevards of the metropolis.
As we were proceeding along the Boulevard des Italiens, I saw the street beginning to line with people, the cabs and carriages drawing to either side and stopping; police officers commanding, directing, people running, pushing, looking this way and that. "Qu' y a-t-il?" said I, standing up by the driver—"What's the matter?"