I found, instead, writers of letters, arrangers of
precise hours who practise lying as an art and cloak their baseness under
hypocrisy, whose only thought is to give themselves and forget.
The first time I looked on the gaming table I heard of floods of gold, of
fortunes made in the quarter of an hour, and of a lord of the court of
Henry IV who won on one card a hundred thousand _louis_. I found a narrow
room where workmen who had but one shirt, rented a suit for the evening
for twenty _sous_, police stationed at the door and starving wretches
staking a crust of bread against a pistol-shot.
The first time I saw an assembly, public or other, open to one of those
thirty thousand women who are permitted to sell themselves in Paris, I
heard of the saturnalia of all times, of every imaginable orgy, from
Babylon to Rome, from the temple of Priapus to the _Parc-aux-Cerfs_, and
I have always seen written on the sill of that door the word, "Pleasure."
I found nothing suggestive of pleasure but in its place the word,
"Prostitution;" and it has always appeared ineffaceable, not graven in
that metal that takes the sun's light, but in the palest of all, that of
the cold light whose colors seem tinted by the somber hues of night,
silver.
The first time I saw the people--it was a frightful morning of Ash
Wednesday, near Courtille. A cold fine rain had been falling since the
evening before; the streets were covered with pools of water.
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