in green papered offices, files, bundles of documents, a stuffy smell,
speeches, newspapers; a law, in short, is all the hundred and one
things, the hundred and one tasks you have to fulfil at all hours, the
grey and gentle hours of the morning, the white hours of middle day, the
purple hours of evening, the silent, meditative hours of night;
tasks which leave you no soul to call your own and rob you of the
consciousness of your own identity.

Yes, it is so. I have left my own _ego_ behind me there. It is scattered
up and down among all sorts of memoranda and reports. Industrious junior
clerks have put away a parcel of it in each one of their beautiful green
filing cases. And so I have had to go on living without my _ego_,
which, moreover, is how all politicians have to live. But an _ego_ is a
strangely subtle thing. And wonder of wonders! mine came back to me just
now on the Pont de la Concorde. 'Twas he without a doubt and, would
you believe it, he had not suffered so very much from his sojourn among
those musty papers. The very moment he arrived I found myself again, I
recognized my own existence, whereof I had not been conscious these
ten years. "Ha ha!" said I to myself, "since I exist, I am just as well
pleased to know it. Behold I will set forth here and now to improve this
new acquaintance by strolling, with a lover's thoughts in my heart, down
the Champs-Elysees."

And this is why I am here, at this hour, beneath the sculptured
steeds of Marly, more high-spirited than those aristocratic quadrupeds
themselves; this is why I am setting foot in the avenue whose entrance
is marked by their hoofs of stone perpetually poised in air. The
carriages flow past endlessly, like a sombre scintillating stream of
lava or molten asphalt, whereon the hats of the women seem borne along
like so many flowers, and like everything else one sees in Paris, at
once extravagant and pretty. I light up a cigar and looking at nothing,
behold everything. So intense is my joy that it scares me. It is the
first cigar I have smoked for ten years. Oh yes, I grant I have begun
as many as ten a day in my room; but those I scorched, bit, chewed and
threw away; I never smoked them. This one I am really and truly smoking
and the smoke it exhales is a cloud of poesy spreading grace and charm
about it. What an interest I take in all I see. These little shops,
which display at regular intervals their motley assortment of wares,
fill me with delight.