Now why were the people yelling here, what was the matter? Millions of them there were, joined in some strife between the Bon Marché, the Hôtel Lutetia and the entrance of the Nord-Sud railway, while omnibuses and trams made strategic movements against each other, while _facteurs_ in dirty blue, fabulously moustachioed, pushed carts about in all directions, irritating any one they could, and a motionless _gendarme_ or two played with his bâton, heedless, unheeded. The eager face of a young artist I knew, shadowed by a great black hat, artistic, anarchistic, strode out of the white mass of the Hôtel Lutetia and turned greedily towards Montparnasse. At last my clever little Citroën and I plunged into quieter wastes, lit here and there by the bastard glitter of a Cinema Theatre falling on posters livid with three colours, red, blue, and yellow. That strange unstormy exquisite, Cherry-Marvel! That most æsthetic creator of a monster more terrible than Frankenstein’s, for it devoured the spirit of all who passed beside it! Why I should be worried about Iris I could not tell, indeed I was too tired to inquire, but worried I was despite Cherry-Marvel’s so well-informed badinage about the white woman’s burden, and the more worried too, as the taxi plunged into nameless darknesses beyond the Bal Bullier, towards the address of the nursing-home which Cherry-Marvel, that confidant at third-hand, had of course known. Montparnasse lay somewhere behind, or to the east, or to the west. We were in unknown Paris, silent, ill-lit, fantastic Paris: silent but for a rending crash here, a jarring cry there. Cold as the devil it was now, as though because the prickly warmth of many lamps and shops was withdrawn. Carefully we traversed a broad avenue as yet scarcely paved, beneath the skeleton shapes of great tenement-houses. Ah, Paris, that we should have come to this, you and I! Paris, that we should have come together down to this! In how many moods you and I have passed the time of day and night together, we have sat in strange places and dared the most devilish shadows, we have wandered from the Rotonde to the crowning grubbiness of the Butte, we have raced in the Bois and up the Mont Valérien, we have laughed at painted boys and been reviled by painted women, we have danced, loved, gambled, drunk, and together we have been bored by the unmentionable and terrified by that which makes the eyes bright and the face white as a soiled handkerchief, while Mio Mi Marianne danced a _minuet du cœur_ with a crimson garter and the moon fell across the French-windows of Berneval’s house to be lost in the soft shadows of giant poppies. Paris, that we should now have come down to this, lost together in these nameless darknesses beyond even the low darkness of the Bal Bullier, that glory of another time than ours....