ss the road, the
pavement was blocked by their tables and chairs and customers. All Paris
seemed to have come down thither to enjoy that delightful evening. There
was endless elbowing, endless mingling of breath as the swelling crowd
sauntered along. Couples lingered before the sparkling displays of
jewellers' shops. Middle-class families swept under dazzling arches
of electric lamps into cafes concerts, whose huge posters promised
the grossest amusements. Hundreds and hundreds of women went by with
trailing skirts, and whispered and jested and laughed; while men darted
in pursuit, now of a fair chignon, now of a dark one. In the open
cabs men and women sat side by side, now husbands and wives long since
married, now chance couples who had met but an hour ago. But Mathieu
went on again, yielding to the force of the current, carried along
like all the others, a prey to the same fever which sprang from the
surroundings, from the excitement of the day, from the customs of the
age. And he no longer took the Beauchenes, the Moranges, the Seguins as
isolated types; it was all Paris that symbolized vice, all Paris that
yielded to debauchery and sank into degradation. There were the folks of
high culture, the folks suffering from literary neurosis; there were
the merchant princes; there were the men of liberal professions, the
lawyers, the doctors, the engineers; there were the people of the lower
middle-class, the petty tradesmen, the petty clerks; there were even
the manual workers, poisoned by the example of the upper spheres--all
practising the doctrines of egotism as vanity and the passion for money
grew more and more intense.. .. No more children! Paris was bent on
dying. And Mathieu recalled how Napoleon I., one evening after battle,
on beholding a plain strewn with the corpses of his soldiers, had put
his trust in Paris to repair the carnage of that day. But times
had changed. Paris would no longer supply life, whether it were for
slaughter or for toil.

And as Mathieu thought of it all a sudden weakness came upon him. Again
he asked himself whether the Beauchenes, the Moranges, the Seguins, and
all those thousands and thousands around him were not right, and whether
he were not the fool, the dupe, the criminal, with his belief in life
ever renascent, ever growing and spreading throughout the world. And
before him arose, too, the image of Seraphine, the temptress, opening
her perfumed arms to him and carrying him off to