Below him curled the strong grey river that surged and swirled round the stout central pier of the bridge; barges and boats with drab and russet sails were passing up and down on the tide; from either bank rose the fine tourelles, the splendid buildings, the straight houses and tall churches of Paris. The day was sunless, the sky heavy with loose clouds; the steady, cheerful life of the city passed Luc in chariots, coaches, sedans, on foot, and was absorbed into the fashionable quarters on the left and the poorer quarters on the right. Luc was acutely aware how complete a sense of isolation and of loneliness this standing against the parapet of a bridge with busy footsteps passing and never stopping gave him; all these people were going to, or coming from, somewhere; all might be imagined as having some definite occupation or pleasure or purpose; all might be considered as knowing this city well, as having some claim on it, if only the claim of familiarity, while he was a stranger with his place still to find. He had been in Paris a fortnight, and it was extraordinary how like a shut door the city still seemed to him; he felt more utterly apart from the spirit, motion, and meaning of the capital than he had ever done when in Aix. Inscrutable buildings portentous with locked secrets, inscrutable river laden with boats going with unknown cargoes to unknown destinations, inscrutable faces of rich and poor passing to and fro, beautiful youth in a chariot flashing across the public way to be absorbed in a narrow turning and seen no more, old age on foot vanishing painfully in the dusk; the crowd leaving the opera, the play, with pomp and laughter and comment; the shopkeepers behind their counters, the idlers about the cafés, the priests, the sudden black splendour of a funeral with candles looking strange in the daylight and the crucifix exacting the homage of bent knees, all inscrutable to those who held not the key of it, passing and repassing about the river, and the Louvre and the church on the isle. Mingled with these actual objects were the spiritual forces of which the city was full, and which were to Luc fully as potent as the things he saw; the air was full of an extraordinary inspiration, as if every man who had struggled and thought and died in Paris had left some part of his aspirations behind to enrich the city. A wonderful gorgeous history was held in the stones of the ancient buildings, in the holy glooms of the churches, in the crooked lines of the famous streets; her children bloomed and faded, but the city itself was imperishable, a thing never to be touched with decay. No one once loving this city could ever love another so well.