A solitary fiacre passed me slowly with no one on the box, but with the coachman sitting back in his cab. He was returning to the stables, evidently, and had on his way given a seat to a girl from the street, whom he was now entertaining with genial courtesy. He had one leg thrown over the other, and one arm passed back along the top of the seat, and with the other he waved to the great buildings as they sprang up into life as the day grew. The girl beside him was smiling at his pleasantries, while the rising sun showed how tired and pale she was, and mocked at the paint around her sleepy eyes. The horse stumbled at every sixth step, and then woke again, while the whip rocked and rolled fantastically in its socket like a drunken man. From up the avenue of the Champs Élysées came the first of the heavy market-wagons, with the driver asleep on the bench, and his lantern burning dully in the early light. Back of him lay the deserted stretch of the avenue, strange and unfamiliar in its emptiness--save for the great arch that rose against the dawn, and seemed, from its elevation on the very top of the horizon, to serve as a gateway into the skies beyond. The air in the Champs Élysées was heavy with a perfume of flowers and of green plants, and the leaves dripped damp and cool with the dew. Hundreds of birds sang and chattered as though they knew the solitude was theirs but for only one more brief hour, and that they then must give way to the little children, and later to crowds of idle men and women. It seemed impossible that but a few hours before Duclerc had filled these silent, cool woods with her voice--Duclerc, with her shoulder-straps slipping to her elbows and her white powdered arms tossing in the colored lights of the serpentine dance. The long, gaudy lithographs on the bill-boards and the arches of colored lamps stood out of the silence and fresh beauty of the hour like the relics of some feast which should have been cleared away before the dawn, and the theatres themselves looked like temples to a heathen idol in some primeval wood. And as I passed out from under the cool trees to the silent avenues I felt as though I had caught Paris napping, and when she was off her guard, and good and fresh and sweet, and had discovered a hidden trait in her many-sided character, a moment of which she would be ashamed an hour or two later, as cynics are ashamed of their secret acts of charity. II THE SHOW-PLACES OF PARIS NIGHT