And then, execrating Mueller, and Molino, and Molino’s bath, and Molino’s customers, and all Molino’s ancestors from the period of the deluge downwards, I reluctantly complied.

The air was brisk, the sky cloudless, the sun coldly bright; and the city wore that strange, breathless, magical look so peculiar to Paris at early morning.  The shops were closed; the pavements deserted; the busy thoroughfares silent as the avenues of Pere la Chaise.  Yet how different from the early stillness of London!  London, before the world is up and stirring, looks dead, and sullen, and melancholy; but Paris lies all beautiful, and bright, and mysterious, with a look as of dawning smiles upon her face; and we know that she will wake presently, like the Sleeping Beauty, to sudden joyousness and activity.

Our road lay for a little way along the Boulevards, then down the Rue Vivienne, and through the Palais Royal to the quays; but long ere we came within sight of the river this magical calm had begun to break up.  The shop-boys in the Palais Royal were already taking down the shutters—­the great book-stall at the end of the Galerie Vitree showed signs of wakefulness; and in the Place du Louvre there was already a detachment of brisk little foot-soldiers at drill.  By the time we had reached the open line of the quays, the first omnibuses were on the road; the water-carriers were driving their carts and blowing their shrill little bugles; the washer-women, hard at work in their gay, oriental-looking floating kiosques, were hammering away, mallet in hand, and chattering like millions of magpies; and the early matin-bell was ringing to prayers as we passed the doors of St. Germain L’Auxerrois.

And now we were skirting the Quai de l’Ecole, looking down upon the bath known in those days as Molino’s—­a hugh, floating quadrangular structure, surrounded by trellised arcades and rows of dressing-rooms, with a divan, a cafe restaurant, and a permanent corps of cooks and hair-dressers on the establishment.  For your true Parisian has ever been wedded to his Seine, as the Venetian to his Adriatic; and the Ecole de Natation was then, as now, a lounge, a reading-room, an adjunct of the clubs, and one of the great institutions of the capital.

Some bathers, earlier than ourselves, were already sauntering about the galleries in every variety of undress, from the simple calecon to the gaudiest version of Turkish robe and Algerian kepi.  Some were smoking; some reading the morning papers; some chatting in little knots; but as yet, with the exception of two or three school-boys (called, in the argot of the bath, moutards), there were no swimmers in the water.

With some of these loungers Mueller exchanged a nod or a few words as we passed along the platform; but shook hands cordially with a bronzed, stalwart man, dressed like a Venetian gondolier in the frontispiece to a popular ballad, with white trousers, blue jacket, anchor buttons, red sash, gold ear-rings, and great silver buckles in his shoes.  Mueller introduced this romantic-looking person to me as “Monsieur Barbet.”