this necessitated repeated ineffective visits to chanceries, consulates and police stations, each too densely thronged with flustered applicants to permit the entrance of one more.  Between these vain pilgrimages, the traveller impatient to leave had to toil on foot to distant railway stations, from which he returned baffled by vague answers and disheartened by the declaration that tickets, when achievable, must also be vises by the police.  There was a moment when it seemed that ones inmost thoughts had to have that unobtainable visa—­to obtain which, more fruitless hours must be lived on grimy stairways between perspiring layers of fellow-aliens.  Meanwhile one’s money was probable running short, and one must cable or telegraph for more.  Ah—­but cables and telegrams must be vises too—­and even when they were, one got no guarantee that they would be sent!  Then one could not use code addresses, and the ridiculous number of words contained in a New York address seemed to multiply as the francs in one’s pockets diminished.  And when the cable was finally dispatched it was either lost on the way, or reached its destination only to call forth, after anxious days, the disheartening response:  “Impossible at present.  Making every effort.”  It is fair to add that, tedious and even irritating as many of these transactions were, they were greatly eased by the sudden uniform good-nature of the French functionary, who, for the first time, probably, in the long tradition of his line, broke through its fundamental rule and was kind.

Luckily, too, these incessant comings and goings involved much walking of the beautiful idle summer streets, which grew idler and more beautiful each day.  Never had such blue-grey softness of afternoon brooded over Paris, such sunsets turned the heights of the Trocadero into Dido’s Carthage, never, above all, so rich a moon ripened through such perfect evenings.  The Seine itself had no small share in this mysterious increase of the city’s beauty.  Released from all traffic, its hurried ripples smoothed themselves into long silken reaches in which quays and monuments at last saw their unbroken images.  At night the fire-fly lights of the boats had vanished, and the reflections of the street lamps were lengthened into streamers of red and gold and purple that slept on the calm current like fluted water-weeds.  Then the moon rose and took possession of the city, purifying it of all accidents, calming and enlarging it and giving it back its ideal lines of strength and repose.  There was something strangely moving in this new Paris of the August evenings, so exposed yet so serene, as though her very beauty shielded her.