“But my dreams weren’t at all of knights, cavaliers, heroes! You bet no! My dreams were just of Paris, this lovely merciless Paris!”
The music and the dance lay in the halls behind them. They were alone on the formal terrace high above the marvellous sweep of the Champs Élysées. Far down on the left the fountains of the Place de la Concorde hung in the blue air like slim curved reeds of crystal. In the courtyard below them a cypress-tree stood dark and still, and in its shadow the concierge’s wife talked in whispers to her lover. From the wide pavement men looked up at the lighted windows with pale astonished faces. Far up on the right, served by long processions of lights from all the corners of the world, the Arc de Triomphe stood high against the pale spring night. Most massive of monuments, built high to the god of war upon the blood of a hundred battlefields, upon the bones of uncountable men and horses, upon the anguish of ravished countries—the miraculous art of men to worship their own misery has raised the monument to the Corsican murderer to be as a dark proud jewel on the brow of the most beautiful of cities. And Ava cried: “Look, the stars are framed in the arch! Oh, Duke, look! And so the arch is like a gate into the kingdom of the stars!”
The Duke whispered: “Don’t talk of the stars, Ava Lamb! The stars make me think of all that is impossible.”
Up and down the broad avenue between the trees prowled the beasts of the cosmopolitan night, these with two great yellow eyes, those with one small red eye closely searching the ground. In the middle distance the Seine shone like a black sword, and the horrible gilt creatures that adorn the Bridge of Alexander III were uplifted by the mercy of the night to the dignity of fallen archangels driving chariots to the conquest of the Heavens. And a three-cornered moon lifted up an eyelash from the beau quartier about the Place Victor Hugo.
“There’s beauty, isn’t there,” sighed Miss Lamb, “in the very name of Paris! even when it’s said in an American accent——”
“But, sister-in-law, I love your accent!”
“My, how you laugh at me! But ... Paris, Paris! Oh, isn’t that a lovely name for a town built by men to have!”
And as, over his coffee the next morning, the young Duke reflected on yesternight, he found himself enchanted by a gay memory. Oh, to be enchanted again, to be thrilled, to be exalted—and all, honest to God, by companionship! What fun there was in life when women didn’t grow so confoundedly familiar with one’s habits. To be with Ava Lamb was to renew all the joy he’d once had of loving his wife, to renew it and to increase it, for wasn’t he now older and wiser, wasn’t he now wise enough to appreciate enchantment? Why, oh, why, wasn’t his wife like this girl, why, since they were both alike in so much, hadn’t Leonora a little of Ava’s warm attention and quick understanding? And again the Duke, in solace for self-pity, cast back to yesternight, how he had warmed to the beautiful stranger’s love of Paris and had told her the tale of how Paris had come to be called Paris, and the way of that was this:
“In the old days, Ava, if I may call you Ava, when the world was small and the animals enormous, they tell how a young conqueror came out of the dark lands, and with fire and sword he came into the smiling land of France. Of course it was not called France then, but you know what I mean. Now that was a great and noble prince, and it was his custom to rest himself after the tumult of battle with the worship of art and beauty, which is not at all the fashion among princes nowadays, because of course we have progressed so far since then. And so our prince, when he had killed as many natives of the conquered country as the honour of war demands, chained the rest with iron chains and put them to the building of a mighty city by the river Seine. And when at last the city was builded it was far and away the fairest city in the world, as all who saw it instantly admitted under torture, for the young prince hated argument.
“All went well until they came to the christening of the city, when it transpired that no one had the faintest idea what name to call it. Here was a to-do! Nameless they could not leave so great a city, yet what name would embrace all these marvels of architecture, how could they call so fair a city by any such commonplace kind of label as Rome, Jerusalem or Wapping? Therefore the young prince fell weeping with mortification for that his city must remain nameless just because it was the fairest city in the world, when an ancient man rose up in the assembly and said: ‘This here is not the fairest city in the world. But the magic city of Is in the land of Brittany has got it so beat that this looks like a slum beside it. I have spoken.’ Not that he ever had a chance to again, even though it presently was proved that not the fairest city in the world could be fairer than Is in Brittany, and so the prince made the best of a bad job and called his city the Equal to Is, which is Par-Is, which is Paris. Shall we dance?”