Des Esseintes shivered deliciously to feel himself mingling in this terrible world of merchants, in this insulating mist, in this incessant activity, in this pitiless gearing which ground millions of the disinherited, urged by the comfort-distilling philanthropists to recite Biblical verses and to sing psalms.

Then the vision faded suddenly with a jolt of the fiacre which made him rebound in his seat.  He gazed through the carriage windows.  Night had fallen; gas burners blinked through the fog, amid a yellowish halo; ribbons of fire swam in puddles of water and seemed to revolve around wheels of carriages moving through liquid and dirty flame.  He endeavored to get his bearings, perceived the Carrousel and suddenly, unreasoningly, perhaps through the simple effect of the high fall from fanciful spaces, his thought reverted to a very trivial incident.  He remembered that his domestic had neglected to put a tooth brush in his belongings.  Then, he passed in review the list of objects packed up; everything had been placed in his valise, but the annoyance of having omitted this brush persisted until the driver, pulling up, broke the chain of his reminiscences and regrets.

He was in the rue de Rivoli, in front of Galignani’s Messenger.  Separated by a door whose unpolished glass was covered with inscriptions and with strips of passe-partout framing newspaper clippings and telegrams, were two vast shop windows crammed with albums and books.  He drew near, attracted by the sight of these books bound in parrot-blue and cabbage-green paper, embossed with silver and golden letterings.  All this had an anti-Parisian touch, a mercantile appearance, more brutal and yet less wretched than those worthless bindings of French books; here and there, in the midst of the opened albums, reproducing humorous scenes from Du Maurier and John Leech, or the delirious cavalcades of Caldecott, some French novels appeared, blending placid and satisfied vulgarities to these rich verjuice hues.  He tore himself away from his contemplation, opened the door and entered a large library which was full of people.  Seated strangers unfolded maps and jabbered in strange languages.  A clerk brought him a complete collection of guides.  He, in turns, sat down to examine the books with their flexible covers.  He glanced through them and paused at a page of the Baedeker describing the London museums.  He became interested in the laconic and exact details of the guide books, but his attention wandered away from the old English paintings to the moderns which attracted him much more.  He recalled certain works he had seen at international expositions, and imagined that he might possibly behold them once more at London:  pictures by Millais—­the Eve of Saint Agnes with its lunar clear green; pictures by Watts, strange in color, checquered with gamboge and indigo, pictures sketched by a sick Gustave Moreau, painted by an anaemic Michael Angelo and retouched by a Raphael submerged in blue.  Among other canvasses, he recalled a Denunciation of Cain, an Ida, some Eves where, in the strange and mysterious mixture of these three masters, rose the personality, at once refined and crude, of a learned and dreamy Englishman tormented by the bewitchment of cruel tones.