o'clock that afternoon, it rejoiced
my heart to breathe in the sunny air. The sky was bland, the river
gleamed, the foliage was fresh and green. Everything seemed to whisper
an invitation to idleness. Along the Pont de la Concorde, in the
direction of the Champs-Elysees, victorias and landaus kept rolling by.
In the shadow of the lowered carriage-hoods, women's faces gleamed clear
and radiant and I felt a thrill of pleasure as I watched them flash by
like hopes vanishing and reappearing in endless succession. Every woman
as she passed by left me with an impression of light and perfume.
I think a man, if he is wise, will not ask much more than that of a
beautiful woman. A gleam and a perfume! Many a love-affair leaves even
less behind it. Moreover, that day, if Fortune herself had run with her
wheel a-spinning before my very nose along the pavement of the Pont
de la Concorde, I should not have so much as stretched forth an arm to
pluck her by her golden hair. I lacked nothing that day; all was mine.
It was five o'clock and I was free till dinner-time. Yes, free! Free
to saunter at will, to breathe at my ease for two hours, to look on at
things and not have to talk, to let my thoughts wander as I listed. All
was mine, I say again. My happiness was making me a selfish man. I
gazed at everything about me as though it were all a picture, a splendid
moving pageant, arranged for my own particular delectation. It seemed
to me as though the sun were shining for me alone, as though it were
pouring down its torrents of flame upon the river for my special
gratification. I somehow thought that all this motley throng was
swarming gaily around me for the sole purpose of animating, without
destroying, my solitude. And so I almost got the notion that the
people about me were quite small, that their apparent size was only an
illusion, that they were but puppets; the sort of thoughts a man has
when he has nothing to think about. But you must not be angry on that
score with a poor man who has had his head crammed chock-full for ten
years on end with politics and law making and is wearing away his life
with those trivial preoccupations men call affairs of state.

In the popular imagination, a law is something abstract, without form or
colour. For me a law is a green baize table, sealing-wax, paper, pens,
ink-stains, green-shaded candles, books bound in calf, papers yet damp
from the printer's and all smelling of printer's ink, conversations