lmost of rural type, with a relative and doubtless rather dusty
ruralism, spreading away to the River and the Wood. What was the Jardin
d'Hiver, a place of entertainment standing quite over against us and
that looped itself at night with little coloured oil-lamps, a mere
twinkling grin upon the face of pleasure? Dim my impression of having
been admitted--or rather, I suppose, conducted, though under
conductorship now vague to me--to view it by colourless day, when it
must have worn the stamp of an auction-room quite void of the "lots."
More distinct on the other hand the image of the bustling barriere at
the top of the Avenue, on the hither side of the Arch, where the old
loose-girt _banlieue_ began at once and the two matched lodges of the
octroi, highly, that is expressly even if humbly, architectural, guarded
the entrance, on either side, with such a suggestion of the generations
and dynasties and armies, the revolutions and restorations they had
seen come and go. But the Avenue of the Empress, now, so much more
thinly, but of the Wood itself, had already been traced, as the Empress
herself, young, more than young, attestedly and agreeably _new_, and
fair and shining, was, up and down the vista, constantly on exhibition;
with the thrill of that surpassed for us, however, by the incomparable
passage, as we judged it, of the baby Prince Imperial borne forth for
his airing or his progress to Saint-Cloud in the splendid coach that
gave a glimpse of appointed and costumed nursing breasts and laps, and
beside which the _cent-gardes_, all light-blue and silver and intensely
erect quick jolt, rattled with pistols raised and cocked. Was a public
holiday ever more splendid than that of the Prince's baptism at Notre
Dame, the fete of Saint-Napoleon, or was any ever more immortalised, as
we say, than this one was to be by the wonderfully ample and vivid
picture of it in the Eugene Rougon of Emile Zola, who must have taken it
in, on the spot, as a boy of about our own number of years, though of so
much more implanted and predestined an evocatory gift? The sense of that
interminable hot day, a day of hanging about and waiting and shuffling
in dust, in crowds, in fatigue, amid booths and pedlars and performers
and false alarms and expectations and renewed reactions and rushes, all
transfigured at the last, withal, by the biggest and brightest
illumination up to that time offered even the Parisians, the blinding
glare of the new Empir