Early the next morning it was when I found myself looking upon these mighty diversions, but I had so much rather been asleep. My bedroom looked down on these things, but unfortunately not from a great height, for they are not tall, the hotels of Paris; and men are sent round the streets of Paris first thing in the morning, to the end that people may not fail to be aware of the beauty of shuttered shops, some of these men being directed to push along enormous tin barrels with which to make a _carmagnole_ of dust, whilst others are placed on ancient taxi-cabs with especially adjusted gears and magnified horn-power. There is no peace in the world, that is what it is. There is no peace in Paris. I lay in bed, staring through the lace curtains. What had happened, what were the alarums and excursions of that grey day yesterday, which had leapt at me from the darkness as I made to return to England after four months of pleasant wandering? Iris was ill unto death, Napier was enchanted.... Men, some in shirt-sleeves, were taking down the heavy, grey, burglar-proof shutters of the shops opposite. Set in the small windows above the shops, the modistes’ assistants seemed to be talking and talking. Some had hats in their nimble hands, some other things. It is pleasant, maybe it is the only pleasant pastime that does not ever pall, to see and not be seen. And now the shop windows began one and all to glitter in the stormy brittle sunlight which transmuted the pearls and diamonds on yellow velvet into celestial jewels fit to adorn the crown of the word _printemps_, than which there is not a more beautiful word in all the languages of the world. In the great window of _Edouard Apel et Cie._, whence in the long ago had come to this person such polite but manly notepaper, stood richly white and coloured papers, boxes of lacquer, ebony, and cedarwood, flaming quills and great cut-glass bottles for ink, and many another devise to make one realise how pleasant writing must be for those who do not have to write. Before a shop not far from Tecla’s which displayed the most charming baubles of all and completely deceived the sun, two short dark Semitic men and a lanky Semitic youth were having some difficulty with their shutters. The shutters did not look new, far from new, but maybe, I thought, a new burglar-proof arrangement has been wrought on them, and that would be causing the difficulty. The traffic had as yet but caressed the rue de la Paix, and through the open window one might hear the rising anger of the two short Semitic men with the lanky Semitic youth, an anger which seemed to call for and to attain a cuneiform language. Then a fourth man, also in shirt-sleeves, came out of the shop, a patriarchal mountain of a man with a great black beard and a mighty nose, who might that very moment have come from a breakfast of dates in a tent over against Ur of the Chaldees, and instantly I knew him for what he was, a millionaire.