FIVE o'clock in the afternoon. Rain since morning and
a gray sky low enough to be reached with an umbrella; the
close weather which sticks. Mess, mud, nothing but mud,
in heavy puddles, in shining trails in the gutters, vainly
chased by the street-scrapers and the scavengers, heaved
into enormous carts which carry it slowly towards Mon-
treuil -- promenading it in triumph through the streets, al-
ways moving, and always springing up again, growing
through the pavements, splashing the panels of the car-
riages, the breasts of the horses, the clothes of the passers-
by, spattering the windows, the door-steps, the shop-fronts,
till one feared that the whole of Paris would sink and dis-
appear under this sorrowful, miry soil where everything
dissolves and is lost in mud. And it moves one to pity to see
the invasion of this dirt on the whiteness of the new houses,
on the parapets of the quays, and on the colonnades of the
stone balconies. There is some one, however, who rejoices
at the sight -- a poor, sick, weary being, lying all her length
on a silk-embroidered divan, her chin on her clinched fists.
She is looking out gladly through the dripping windows
and delighting in all the ugliness.

"Look, my fairy! this is indeed the weather I wanted
to-day. See them draggling along! Aren't they hideous?
Aren't they dirty? What mire! It is everywhere -- in the
streets, on the quays, right down to the Seine, right up to
the heavens. I tell you, mud is good when one is sad. I
would like to play in it, to make sculpture with it -- a statue
a hundred feet high, that should be called 'My weariness.'"

"But why are you so miserable, dearest?" said the old
dancer gently, amiable and pink, and sitting straight in her

-211-