he flaming vault of heaven lay Paris, a mass of yellow,
striped with huge shadows. On the vast square below Helene, in an
orange-tinted haze, cabs and omnibuses crossed in all directions,
amidst a crowd of pedestrians, whose swarming blackness was softened
and irradiated by splashes of light. The students of a seminary were
hurrying in serried ranks along the Quai de Billy, and the trail of
cassocks acquired an ochraceous hue in the diffuse light. Farther
away, vehicles and foot-passengers faded from view; it was only by
their gleaming lamps that you were made aware of the vehicles which,
one behind the other, were crossing some distant bridge. On the left
the straight, lofty, pink chimneys of the Army Bakehouse were belching
forth whirling clouds of flesh-tinted smoke; whilst, across the river,
the beautiful elms of the Quai d'Orsay rose up in a dark mass
transpierced by shafts of light.

The Seine, whose banks the oblique rays were enfilading, was rolling
dancing wavelets, streaked with scattered splashes of blue, green, and
yellow; but farther up the river, in lieu of this blotchy coloring,
suggestive of an Eastern sea, the waters assumed a uniform golden hue,
which became more and more dazzling. You might have thought that some
ingot were pouring forth from an invisible crucible on the horizon,
broadening out with a coruscation of bright colors as it gradually
grew colder. And at intervals over this brilliant stream, the bridges,
with curves growing ever more slender and delicate, threw, as it were,
grey bars, till there came at last a fiery jumble of houses, above
which rose the towers of Notre-Dame, flaring red like torches. Right
and left alike the edifices were all aflame. The glass roof of the
Palais de l'Industrie appeared like a bed of glowing embers amidst the
Champs-Elysees groves. Farther on, behind the roof of the Madeline,
the huge pile of the Opera House shone out like a mass of burnished
copper; and the summits of other buildings, cupolas, and towers, the
Vendome column, the church of Saint-Vincent de Paul, the tower of
Saint-Jacques, and, nearer in, the pavilions of the new Louvre and the
Tuileries, were crowned by a blaze, which lent them the aspect of
sacrificial pyres. The dome of the Invalides was flaring with such
brilliancy that you instinctively feared lest it should suddenly
topple down and scatter burning flakes over the neighborhood. Beyond
the irregular towers of Saint-Sulpice, the Pantheon