On my return from this cafe soon after twelve--I had breakfasted early
that morning--I remember how, overcome by a sudden idleness, I could
not go back to my work, and feeling that I must watch the birds and
the sunlight (they seemed to understand each other so well), I threw
myself on a bench and began to wonder if there was anything better in
the world worth doing than to sit in an alley of clipped limes,
smoking, thinking of Paris and of myself.
Every one, or nearly every one, except perhaps the upper classes,
whose ideas of Paris are the principal boulevards--the Rue de Rivoli,
the Rue de la Paix--knows the Luxembourg Gardens; and watching April
playing and listening to water trickling from a vase that a great
stone Neptune held in his arms at the end of the alley, my thoughts
embraced not only the garden, but all I know of Paris, of the old city
that lies far away behind the Hotel de Ville and behind the Boulevard
St. Antoine. I thought of a certain palace now a museum, rarely
visited, of its finely proportioned courtyard decorated with
bas-reliefs by Jean Goujon. I had gone there a week ago with Mildred;
but finding she had never heard of Madame de Sevigne, and did not care
whether she had lived in this palace or another, I spoke to her of the
Place des Vosges, saying we might go there, hoping that she would feel
interested in it because it had once been the habitation of the old
French nobility.
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