“Ah, you lucky beggar!” he cried. “Just to think that in seven hours’ time you will be in the heart of the universe, while I am wasting away in this old, aimless penitentiary of a spot. You don’t know what’s before you, my boy! The cafés, the good little drinks, the fine little dinners, the dear little women! I am sick for the sound of the streets and the lights down the Champs-Elysées in the evening! What a world, and what a place this country, where you go about knee-deep in mud to each other’s funerals, with only the cows to look at! But you’ll be strange at first, mon cher! Look here, I know what I’ll do,” and he took out a card with an address on it and pushed it into Jean’s hand. “Go and call there,” he said, as the train started. “If I can’t run up and put you through your paces, you’ll see someone there who’s worth seeing; at least she is usually considered to be so!” Maurice gave a significant twist to his moustache as he spoke. He was really more proud of the lady who lived at the address than of that extremely handsome feature, in fact he considered them both his features, and he thought he was very generous to let Jean have the unexampled opportunity of observing them. As for Jean, he put the address carefully in his pocket; it seemed to him that after all he should not be so very friendless in Paris.
The train took its short, uneven way through the flat lands of France.
Poplars and a pale sky, with peasants working in the fields, stretched through an eternity of daylight.
Here and there towers of grey stone and groups of tall, narrow houses broke through the long monotony of the fields, and Jean’s heart beat faster with the hope that this time it was really Paris.
The rain came on again, and the short day was closing before Jean realized that the sudden stream of grey houses was after all not going to break again into empty fields, but was Paris herself, the great insignificant fringe of the world’s enigma, the city where there is most pleasure and least happiness—the cleverest thought and the vainest action—where more ideas are born and more perish in their tarnished bloom than any other place on earth. None of these things did Jean dream of, as out of the grey evening the lights of Paris broke, wave after wave of them, through the curtain of rain, like handfuls of splendid jewels prodigally flung into colourless mud. And with the lights came the sound—the sound of Paris, which is so different from the soft, dull roar of London or the sharp, hysterical scream of New York, the sound that is pitilessly light and infinitely gay—the voice of Paris, which is like the laughter of a heartless woman mocking at a life she has wrecked. And when Jean heard it he drew his breath in for a moment and felt afraid.
Jean had never seen so many people in his life as he saw at the terminus of the Gare St. Lazare, nor had he ever seen people move so freely and so quickly; there was neither stiffness nor bustle in the swiftly circulating crowd. He dragged his valise on to the platform, feeling strange and isolated in this new, bewildering world.
“I beg your pardon, sir,” said a voice behind him, “but I think you must be Monsieur le Baron. I come from the Comte D’Ucelles, sir.”
Henri would have liked extremely to have come to Jean’s assistance, but beyond seeing after his scanty luggage and placing the oldest rug over him in the motor as comfortably as possible, there was nothing he could do. Still, Jean saw the friendliness in his eyes and liked it. It was the only friendliness he was to see for some time.
As he was dressing as quickly as he could for eight o’clock dinner (his train had been late and Henri had warned him to hurry) the Comte D’Ucelles tapped at his door and entered. Romain was a man who wore fifty years easily, he had a most charming manner and a perpetual smile; what he looked like when he wasn’t smiling no one ever knew, for no one had ever seen his face in repose. He smiled when he was pleased, when he was bored, and when he was angry. He did not smile when he was amused, because he had not been amused for some time; he had long ago worn out his capacity for amusement. He met Jean with a generous outburst of reproach.
Upon his honour—was this really Jean? And why on earth hadn’t he seen him all these preposterous years? Jean had really behaved abominably to them; and how immensely he had grown, and what a charming time he would have in Paris! He asked after Miss Prenderghast, he rallied Jean on the broken hearts he was certain to have left behind him in the country; he made the most lavish excuses for having put Jean into such a wretched room, though it was the handsomest Jean had ever seen.