There
were various tasks, I knew, that should have claimed me; a visit to the
police to secure a _carte de sejour_, the presentation of my credentials
as an ambulance-driver, a polite notification to friends that I had
arrived. These things should have been my duty and pleasure, but somehow
they were uninviting. Nothing appealed to me, I realized with sudden
enlightenment, except a certain appointment that I had already made.
I went out, to find that the fog was lifting and spring was in the air.
Since my dinner the previous night I had felt an odd exhilaration, a
pleasure quickened by the staccato sparkle of the French tongue against
my ears, the pale-blue uniforms, and gay French faces glimpsed as the
train had stopped at various lighted stations. Saluting Napoleon's
statue, I strolled up the rue de la Paix, took a table on a cafe
pavement, and, ordering a glass of something fizzy for the form of it,
sat content and happy, watching the whole gigantic pageant of Paris in
war-time defile before my eyes.
The Cook's tourists and their like, bane of the past, had disappeared;
but all nationalities that the world holds seemed to be about.
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