Then the grey skirt and the little round-toed shoes beneath it passed from my sight, quickly hidden from me by the increasing crowd; yet I heard the voice a moment more, but fragmentarily:  “Don’t you see how ashamed he is, how he must have been starving before he did that, or that someone dependent on him needed—­”

I caught no more, but the sweetness that this beautiful lady understood and felt for the poor absurd wretch was so great that I could have wept.  I had not seen her face; I had not looked up —­even when she went.

“Who is she?” cried a scoundrel voyous, just as she turned.  “Madame of the parasol?  A friend of monsieur of the ornamented head?”

“No.  It is the first lady in waiting to his wife, Madame la Duchesse,” answered a second.  “She has been sent with an equerry to demand of monseigneur if he does not wish a little sculpture upon his dome as well as the colour decorations!”

“’Tis true, my ancient?” another asked of me.

I made no repartee, continuing to sit with my chin dependent upon my cravat, but with things not the same in my heart as formerly to the arrival of that grey pongee, the grey glove, and the beautiful voice.

Since King Charles the Mad, in Paris no one has been completely free from lunacy while the spring-time is happening.  There is something in the sun and the banks of the Seine.  The Parisians drink sweet and fruity champagne because the good wines are already in their veins.  These Parisians are born intoxicated and remain so; it is not fair play to require them to be like other human people.  Their deepest feeling is for the arts; and, as everyone had declared, they are farceurs in their tragedies, tragic in their comedies.  They prepare the last epigram in the tumbril; they drown themselves with enthusiasm about the alliance with Russia.  In death they are witty; in war they have poetic spasms; in love they are mad.

The strangest of all this is that it is not only the Parisians who are the insane ones in Paris; the visitors are none of them in behaviour as elsewhere.  You have only to go there to become as lunatic as the rest.  Many travellers, when they have departed, remember the events they have caused there as a person remembers in the morning what he has said and thought in the moonlight of the night.

In Paris it is moonlight even in the morning; and in Paris one falls in love even more strangely than by moonlight.

It is a place of glimpses:  a veil fluttering from a motor-car, a little lace handkerchief fallen from a victoria, a figure crossing a lighted window, a black hat vanishing in the distance of the avenues of the Tuileries.  A young man writes a ballade and dreams over a bit of lace.  Was I not, then, one of the least extravagant of this mad people?  Men have fallen in love with photographs, those greatest of liars; was I so wild, then, to adore this grey skirt, this small shoe, this divine glove, the golden-honey voice—­of all in Paris the only one to pity and to understand?  Even to love the mystery of that lady and to build my dreams upon it?—­to love all the more because of the mystery?  Mystery is the last word and the completing charm to a young man’s passion.  Few sonnets have been written to wives whose matrimony is more than five years of age—­is it not so?