He stopped short and drew a long breath, seeking to drive away his growing intoxication.  He had passed the Grand Opera and was reaching the crossway of the Rue Drouot.  Perhaps his increase of fever was due to those glowing Boulevards.  The private rooms of the restaurants were still ablaze, the cafes threw bright radiance across the road, the pavement was blocked by their tables and chairs and customers.  All Paris seemed to have come down thither to enjoy that delightful evening.  There was endless elbowing, endless mingling of breath as the swelling crowd sauntered along.  Couples lingered before the sparkling displays of jewellers’ shops.  Middle-class families swept under dazzling arches of electric lamps into cafes concerts, whose huge posters promised the grossest amusements.  Hundreds and hundreds of women went by with trailing skirts, and whispered and jested and laughed; while men darted in pursuit, now of a fair chignon, now of a dark one.  In the open cabs men and women sat side by side, now husbands and wives long since married, now chance couples who had met but an hour ago.  But Mathieu went on again, yielding to the force of the current, carried along like all the others, a prey to the same fever which sprang from the surroundings, from the excitement of the day, from the customs of the age.  And he no longer took the Beauchenes, the Moranges, the Seguins as isolated types; it was all Paris that symbolized vice, all Paris that yielded to debauchery and sank into degradation.  There were the folks of high culture, the folks suffering from literary neurosis; there were the merchant princes; there were the men of liberal professions, the lawyers, the doctors, the engineers; there were the people of the lower middle-class, the petty tradesmen, the petty clerks; there were even the manual workers, poisoned by the example of the upper spheres—­all practising the doctrines of egotism as vanity and the passion for money grew more and more intense. . . .  No more children!  Paris was bent on dying.  And Mathieu recalled how Napoleon I., one evening after battle, on beholding a plain strewn with the corpses of his soldiers, had put his trust in Paris to repair the carnage of that day.  But times had changed.  Paris would no longer supply life, whether it were for slaughter or for toil.

And as Mathieu thought of it all a sudden weakness came upon him.  Again he asked himself whether the Beauchenes, the Moranges, the Seguins, and all those thousands and thousands around him were not right, and whether he were not the fool, the dupe, the criminal, with his belief in life ever renascent, ever growing and spreading throughout the world.  And before him arose, too, the image of Seraphine, the temptress, opening her perfumed arms to him and carrying him off to the same existence of pleasure and baseness which the others led.