F. Berkeley Smith

“ It is Love that moves Paris—it is the motive power of this big, beautiful, polished city—the love of- 204 - adventure, the love of intrigue, the love of being a bohemian if you will—but it is Love all the same!
“I work for love,” hums the little couturière.
“I work for love,” cries the miller of Marcel Legay.
“I live for love,” sings the poet.
“For the love of art I am a painter,” sighs Edmond, in his atelier—“and for her!”
“For the love of it I mold and model and create,” chants the sculptor—“and for her!”
It is the Woman who dominates Paris—“Les petites femmes!” ”

“ The more I know this modest [Pg 22] great man the more I like him, and I have known him in all kinds of wind and weather, for Tanrade is an indefatigable hunter. He and I have spent nights together in his duck-blind—a submerged hut, a murderous deceit sunk far out on the marsh—cold nights; soft moonlight nights—the marsh a mystic fairy-land; black nights—-mean nights of thrashing rain. Nights that paled to dawn with no luck to bring back to Suzette's larder. Sunny mornings after lucky nights, when Tanrade and I would thaw out over our coffee in the garden among the roses. ”

“ Moreover, Alice was in her best humour and in her best clothes; the doctor genial; Thayor beaming; Margaret merry as a lark; Holcomb's ease and personality a delight (Mrs. Thayor had at the last moment sent a special invitation by Margaret, and he had come) —and Jack a never-ending joy. That rare something which made every man who knew him love him, bubbled out of him as ceaselessly as the ascending commotion in the golden vintage. Moreover, this good fellow was overjoyed at the change in his host; he felt that Thayor's splendid health was largely due to his advice. ”

“ The door opens and the singer, Gabriel Montoya, enters, hastily shaking hands with those about him and rushing to the back room, where his arrival is greeted with thunderous applause.
Monsieur Montoya’s poetic locks that crown his noble brow are mussed as if he had just escaped from a panic. He is invariably introduced as “Monsieur le Docteur” to his audience, his early life having been devoted to the study of medicine. He is a man of wide experience, having at one time made a tour around most of the world as a ship’s surgeon. ”

“ The Parisian goes into the latest sport because it affords him a new sensation. Being blasé of all else in life, he plunges into automobiling, buys a white and red racer—a ponderous flying juggernaut that growls and snorts and smells of the lower regions whenever it stands still, trembling in its anger and impatience to be off, while its owner, with some automobiling Marie, sits chatting on the café terrace over a cooling drink. The two are covered with dust and very thirsty; Marie wears a long dust-colored ulster, and he a wind-proof coat and high boots. ”

“ One evening I had shot late on the marshes and started for home by way of La Poche. It was bright moonlight when I reached a trail new to me and approached the deserted village by way of a tangled, overgrown road.
The wind had gone down with the rising of the moon, and the intense stillness of the place was such that I could hear about me in the tangle the lifting of a trampled weed and the moving of the insects as my boots disturbed them. The silence was uncanny. Under the brilliancy of the moon all things gleamed clear in a mystic light, their shadows as black as the sunken pits of a cave. ”

“ Would the man who had entrusted all to him be satisfied? he wondered. The thought made him strangely silent. The trapper was the first to mention it as he and the Clown sat smoking with Billy in the dusk outside the latter's cabin the evening before Thayor's arrival. Holcomb, squatting on the ground, had been whittling a twig to a fine point—now he leaned forward and drove it out of sight in the cool earth with his heel. Then, closing his jack-knife, he gazed across the tidy clearing at the big camp, and the line of low-roofed cabins showing dimly in the twilight against the trees. ”

“ Here and there among them you will see the glitter of smart turnouts. In the cool Bois nearby, the deer from their noon-day hiding-places hear the trot of equestrians passing in the feathery alleys. Upon some grassy corner of the wood a family party have spread themselves and laid out their bread, cheese and wine for a day’s outing. Like a yellow pearl shimmering far up in the azure, a balloon sails briskly toward Vincennes.
All these things happen when the sun shines. When it rains, Paris is in mourning. Cozy corners of café interiors are sought. ”

“ It is not all fisher girls, Bohemian neighbours, romance, and that good friend the curé who shoots one day and confesses sinners the next. Things from the outside world come to us—happenings with sometimes a note of terror in them to make one remember their details for days.
Only the other day I had run up from the sea to Paris to replenish the larder of my house abandoned by the marsh at Pont du Sable, and was sitting behind a glass of vermouth on the terrace of the Café de la Paix when the curtain rose. ”

“ He sat perched on the top of a giant hemlock chattering over his good luck. The chipmunk, at the first sinister glare, had skittered away to safety. He had not had a wink of sleep and his little nose was as black as his hide from running over charred timber. Often it was a close squeak with him to keep from burning his feet.
Nothing can tear through a forest like a fire. Its speed is unbelievable; it strikes with the quickness of a cat—slipping out myriads of snake-like tongues right and left into the dryest places. It reasons—it decides—rarely it pardons. ”

“ At the private view her residence is crowded with the curious of the grand monde. These women of the most exclusive society cross her threshold and block her stairway and pry into every open corner of her domicile—women who would have been shocked to find themselves in front of her doorstep at any other time. So much for the moral hypocrisy of the virtuous.
And while the stairways at this private view are thronged with the fashionable world, Mimi and her most intimate friends are laughing over champagne and biscuits in the kitchen, the only room that has not been turned over to the public. ”

“ Pont du Sable was awake for the day.
It is the most unimportant of little villages, yet it is four centuries old, and of stone. It seems to have shrivelled by its great age, like its oldest inhabitants. One-half of its two score of fishermen's houses lie crouched to the rambling edge of its single street; the other half might have been dropped at random, like stones from the pocket of some hurrying giant. Some of these, including the house of the ruddy little mayor and the polite, florid grocer, lie spilled along the edge of the marsh. ”

“ Alice Thayor thought of these things as she gazed out upon the strange, silent pond. It was the first time in her later life she had taken time to think. Mental anguish has its sudden changes. When we have suffered enough we seek the pleasant; to suffer requires effort. When at last we shirk the work of being unhappy we forget our sorrow. Alice, little by little, was forgetting hers—even in the midst of these trying circumstances.
Soon she noticed that Margaret's blanket had slipped from her shoulders. ”

“ A year ago the veteran chef of a celebrated Parisian restaurant resigned his position. Prices had been affixed to the menu. With this deplorable change the famous maison had sunk below the dignity of this august personage. To attach to so noble a creation as a “filet d’ours à la François-Joseph” a fixed price as one would to a pound of butter, made his further connection with the house an impossibility. “Parbleu!” he cried, “Had Paris become a gargotte for the grand monde that he should have lived to see this?” ”

“ A heavy peasant's cart goes by, groaning in agony under the brake. When the wind is from the sea, it is like a bevy of witches shrilling my doom down the chimney. "Aye, aye, 'tis he," they seem to scream, "the stranger—the s-t-r-a-n-g-e-r." One's mind is alert at this hour—one must be brave in a foreign land.
And so I sat up late, smoking a black pipe that gurgled in unison with the purring on my chest while I thought seriously of Marianne.
I had seen her go laughing to jail two months ago, handcuffed to a gendarme on the back seat of the last car of the toy train. ”

“ Once abandoned in the wilderness, wholly dependent upon what can be wrested from its clutch to prolong existence, all the ordinary standards and ambitions of life become as naught: for neither love, hatred, revenge, honour, money, jewels, or social success will bring a cup of water, a handful of corn or a coal of fire. Under this torture Nature once more becomes king and man again an atom; his judgment clarified, his heart stripped naked, his soul turned inside out. The untamed, mighty, irresistible primitive is now to be reckoned with, and a lie will no longer serve. ”

“ Should the small boy grow up to be a connoisseur in much that glitters in life besides golden chariots, and yet manage to keep young enough to preserve a kindly feeling toward the lady of perennial youth upon the white horse, should boyish love of the picturesque still abide in him, he will find within the gates of Paris a city after his own heart, a place where gaiety never ceases, where the finesse of amusement has been brought almost to a state of perfection. ”

“ It was dark when she let down the bars of the orchard, leading into the farm-yard. Here the air was moist and heavy with the pungent odour of manure; a turkey gobbler and four timid hens roosting in a low apple tree, stirred uneasily as the cows passed beneath them to their stable next to the kitchen—a stable with a long stone manger and walls two feet thick. Above the stable was a loft covered by a thatched roof; it was in a corner of this loft, in a large box filled with straw and provided with a patchwork-quilt, that Yvonne slept. ”