Now Asnieres itself is forgotten; the modern youth has chosen
another suburb to disport himself in; the ballroom has been pulled
down, and never again will an orchestra play a note of these poor
scores; even their names are unknown. A few bars of a chorus of pages
came back to me, remembered only by me, all are gone, like Hortense
and Blanche and Julia.
But after all I am in Paris. Almost the same Paris; almost the same
George Moore, my senses awake as before to all enjoyment, my soul as
enwrapped as ever in the divine sensation of life. Once my youth moved
through thy whiteness, O City, and its dreams lay down to dreams in
the freedom of thy fields! Years come and years go, but every year I
see city and plain in the happy exaltation of Spring, and departing
before the cuckoo, while the blossom is still bright on the bough, it
has come to me to think that Paris and May are one.
CHAPTER III
A WAITRESS
Feeling that he would never see Scotland again, Stevenson wrote in a
preface to "Catriona":--"I see like a vision the youth of my father,
and of his father, and the whole stream of lives flowing down there
far in the north, with the sound of laughter and tears, to cast me out
in the end, as by a sudden freshet, on these ultimate islands.
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