lons_, each immeasurably bigger, and innumerable smaller shows into
the bargain. And yet, that laborious May week never seemed to me so much
toil as pleasure.

There was a great deal about Paris the toil left me no chance to find
out. I should not like to say how many of its sights I have failed
regularly to see during the visit I have paid to it every year now for
over a quarter of a century. But at least I have learned the best thing
worth knowing about it, which is that in no other town can toil look so
uncommonly like pleasure, in no other town is it so easy to play hard
and to work hard at the same time: precisely the truth the Baedeker
student has a knack of missing, the truth the special kind of foreigner,
for whom Paris would not be Paris if he could not believe it the
abomination of desolation, goes out of his way to miss. I have met some
of my own countrymen who have seen everything in Paris but never Paris
itself--the old story of not seeing the wood for the trees--and who are
absolutely convinced that it is a town in which all the people think of
is amusement and that a more frivolous creature than the Parisian never
existed. From their comfortable seat of judgment in the correct hotels
and the correct show places, they cannot look as far as the schools and
factories that make Paris the centre of learning for the world and of
industry for France, and they are in their way every bit as dense as the
English who take their pleasure so seriously they cannot understand the
French who take their work gaily. "_Des blagueurs meme au feu_," a
Belgian officer the other day described to me the French soldiers who
had been fighting at his side, and I think it rather finer to face
Death--or Work--laughing than in tears. If Paris were not so gay on the
surface I am sure I should not find it so stimulating, though how it
would be if I lived there I have never dared put to the test, unwilling
to run whatever risk there might be if I did. I prefer to keep Paris in
reserve for a working holiday or, indeed, any sort of holiday, a
preference which, if Heine is to be trusted, I share with _le bon Dieu_
of the old French proverb who, when he is bored in Heaven, opens a
window and looks down upon the _Boulevards_ of Paris.

At the first sight, the first sound, the first smell of Paris, the
holiday feeling stirred within us. The minute we arrived we began to
play at our work as we never did in London, as it never would have
occurr