As for the great Parisian world outside, my experience of it is
bounded by the prospect I obtain of the Champs Elysées from my
bed-room window. Fashionable Paris spins and prances by me every
afternoon, in all its glory; but what interest have healthy princes
and counts and blood-horses, and blooming ladies, plunged in abysses
of circumambient crinoline, for me, in my sick situation? They all fly
by me in one confused phantasmagoria of gay colours and rushing forms,
which I look at with lazy eyes. The sights I watch with interest are
those only which seem to refer in some degree to my own invalid
position. My sick man's involuntary egotism clings as close to me
when I look outward at the great highway, as when I look inward at my
own little room. Thus, the only objects which I now notice attentively
from my window, are, oddly enough, chiefly those which I should have
missed altogether, or looked at with indifference if I had occupied my
bachelor apartment in the enviable character of a healthy man.
For example, out of the various vehicles which pass me by dozens in
the morning, and by hundreds in the afternoon, only two succeed in
making anything like a lasting impression on my mind. I have only
vague ideas of dust, dashing, and magnificence in connection with the
rapid carriages late in the day--and of bells and hollow yelping of
carters' voices in connection with the deliberate waggons early in the
morning. But I have, on the other hand, a very distinct remembrance of
one sober brown omnibus, belonging to a Sanitary Asylum, and of a
queer little truck which carries baths and hot water to private
houses, from a bathing establishment near me. The omnibus, as it
passes my window at a solemn jog-trot, is full of patients getting
their airing. I can see them dimly, and I fall into curious fancies
about their various cases, and wonder what proportion of the afflicted
passengers are near the time of emancipation from their sanitary
prison on wheels. As for the little truck, with its empty zinc bath
and barrel of warm water, I am probably wrong in sympathetically
associating it as frequently as I do with cases of illness. It is
doubtless often sent for by healthy people, too luxurious in their
habits to walk abroad for a bath. But there must be a proportion of
cases of illness to which the truck ministers; and when I see it going
faster than usual, I assume that it must be wanted by some person in a
fit; grow suddenly agitated by the idea; and watch the empty bath and
the hot-water barrel with breathless interest, until they rumble away
together out of sight.
So, again, with regard to the men and women who pass my window by
thousands every day; my view of them is just as curiously
circumscribed as my view of the vehicles. Out of all the crowd, I now
find, on taxing my memory, that I have noticed particularly just three
people (a woman and two men), who have chanced to appeal to my invalid
curiosity.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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