He was
introspective. It pleased him to watch the early morning stir; to see the
women come out in shawls and slipshod slippers and swill down their bit
of pavement; to see sleepy shopkeepers take down their shutters and
street-vendors set up their stalls; to try to gauge the thoughts and
doings of the place from the shop-windows and the advertisements. His
first need was a wash and a shave, and he got both at a little barber's
in which monsieur attended to him, while madame, in considerable
_negligee_, made her toilette before the next glass. His second was
breakfast, and he got it, _a l'anglaise_, with an omelette and jam, in a
just-stirring hotel; and then, set up, he strolled off for the centre of
things. Many Masses were in progress at the Madeleine, and he heard one
or two with a curious contentment, but they had no lesson for him,
probably because of the foreign element in the atmosphere, and he did
not pray. Still, he sat, chiefly, and watched, until he felt how entirely
he was a stranger here, and went out into the sun.

He made his way to the river, and lingered there long. The great
cathedral, with its bare January trees silhouetted to the last twig
against the clear sky, its massive buttresses, and its cluster of smaller
buildings, held his imagination. He went in, but they were beginning to
sing Mass, and he soon came out. He crossed to the farther bank and found
a seat and lit a pipe. Sitting there, his imagination awoke. He conceived
the pageant of faith that had raised those walls. Kings and lords and
knights, all the glitter and gold of the Middle Ages, had come there--and
gone; Bishops and Archbishops, and even Popes, had had their day of
splendour there--and gone; the humbler sort, in the peasant dress of
the period, speaking quaint tongues, had brought their sorrows there and
their joys--and gone; yet it seemed to him that they had not so surely
gone. The great have their individual day and disappear, but the poor, in
their corporate indistinguishableness remain. The multitude, petty in
their trivial wants and griefs, find no historian and leave no monument.
Yet, ultimately, it was because of the Christian faith in the compassion
of God for such that Notre-Dame lifted her towers to the sky. The stage
for the mighty doings of Kings, it was the home of the people. As he had
seen them just now, creeping about the aisles, lighting little tapers,
crouched in a corner, so had they always been. Kings and Bi