The train steamed into the glare of the electric lights, and, getting into a fiacre, I breathed again.

I seemed to be at the entrance of a new life, a better sort of paradise, during that drive across the night city.

In London one is always a passenger, in Paris one has reached a goal.

The crowds on the pavements, under the plane-trees, in the black shadows, in the white glare of the open spaces, are at leisure--they go nowhere, seek nothing beyond.
We crossed the river, the unwinking towers of Notre Dame towering pallidly against the dark sky behind us; rattled into the new light of the resuming boulevard; turned up a dark street, and came to a halt before a half-familiar shut door.

You know how one wakes the sleepy concierge, how one takes one's candle, climbs up hundreds and hundreds of smooth stairs, following the slipshod footfalls of a half-awakened guide upward through Rembrandt's own shadows, and how one's final sleep is sweetened by the little inconveniences of a strange bare room and of a strange hard bed..