You cannot say you have seen the streets of Paris until you have walked them at sunrise; every one has seen them at night, but he must watch them change from night to day before he can claim to have seen them at their best. I walked under the arches of the Rue de Rivoli one morning when it was so dark that they looked like the cloisters of some great monastery, and it was impossible to believe that the empty length of the Rue Cambon had but an hour before been blocked by the blazing front of the Olympia, and before that with rows of carriages in front of the two Columbins. There were a few belated cabs hugging the sidewalk, with their drivers asleep on the boxes, and a couple of gendarmes slouching together across the Place de la Concorde made the only sound of life in the whole city. The Seine lay as motionless as water in a bath-tub, and the towers of Notre Dame rising out of the mist at one end, and the round bulk of the Trocadéro bounding it at the other, seemed to limit the river to what one could see of its silent surface from the Bridge of the Deputies. The Eiffel Tower, the great skeleton of the departed exposition, disappeared and reformed itself again as drifting clouds of mist swept through it and cut its great ugly length into fragments hung in mid-air. As the light grew in strength the façades of the government buildings grew in outline, as though one were focussing them through an opera-glass, and the pillars of the Madeleine took form and substance; then the whole great square showed itself, empty and deserted. The darkness had hidden nothing more terrible than the clean asphalt and the motionless statues of the cities of France.