Phil looked; they were just above one of the halls of the Egyptian Museum, and they saw strange objects beneath them—statues of gods, mummies of kings, a pell-mell of fallen grandeur. A squatting Sphinx lifted its head and stared at them. Through the dusty glass they might have thought they were looking into an entire past, engulfed in the depths of the sea. A broken column spoke of the crumbling of temples, a mutilated god of the overthrow of altars, a dun-colored sarcophagus of the heaping up of the sand beneath desert winds. Phil explained these dead things to Helia and gave them life.
“Ah,” Helia said, “what happiness it is to know!”
They were alone, half kneeling on the roof, their heads bent toward the skylight; around them Paris murmured like an ocean. They could have imagined themselves the survivors of a world destroyed—the only woman and the only man escaped from the cataclysm, while the mysterious Sphinx raised its head as if to say: “Love! for life passes as a dream!”
Phil and Helia arose in silence and came back to their oasis, while above them, in the blue sky, the doves pursued one another.
On the Roofs of the Louvre
“Look at the birds,” said Helia. “Come quick and give them their grain.”
The doves, as free as those of St. Mark’s or of the Guildhall, had quickly accustomed themselves to her, and the presence of Helia did not trouble them.