The Doll - Bolesaw Prus [221]
Here the street curved somewhat to the right. For the first time, Wokulski noticed a three-storey house and a kind of melancholy overcame him. A three-storey house among the five-storeyed!…What a pleasant surprise…
Suddenly a carriage with a groom on the box passed by, with two women inside. One was unknown, the other…‘Can it be?’ Wokulski whispered, ‘no, impossible…’ Nevertheless, he felt his energies ebb away. Fortunately there was a café alongside. He threw himself into a chair close to the pavement, a waiter appeared, asked something and then brought iced coffee and cognac. At the same time a flower-girl pinned a rose in his button-hole, and a newspaper vendor laid Figaro in front of him. He tossed her ten francs, gave him a franc, drank the coffee and began reading: ‘Her Majesty Queen Izabela…’
He crumpled the newspaper, thrust it into his pocket, paid for the coffee without finishing it, and rose. The waiter was eyeing him surreptitiously; two customers, twirling light canes, crossed their legs still higher and one of them stared insolently at him through a monocle. ‘Suppose I were to hit that nincompoop on the jaw?’ Wokulski thought, ‘tomorrow a duel, perhaps he’d kill me…But if I killed him?’ He walked past the nincompoop and stared into his face. The nincompoop’s monocle fell down his waistcoat and he lost his inclination to scoff.
Wokulski walked on and looked attentively at the buildings. What splendid shops! Even the most paltry looked better than his, although it was the finest in Warsaw. Stone houses: almost each floor had great balconies or balustrades along the entire façade. ‘This Paris looks as though all the inhabitants must feel the need of constant communication, either in the cafés or on their balconies,’ Wokulski thought. The roofs were impressive too, high, loaded with chimney-stacks, prickly with chimney-pots and spires. A tree or lamp or kiosk or column mounted with a globe rose every few paces along the streets. Life was effervescent here, so powerfully that it was unable to use up its energies in the neverending traffic, in the swift rush of people, in the erection of five-storey houses, so it had also burst out of walls in the forms of statues or bas-reliefs, and out of the streets in the shape of innumerable kiosks.
Wokulski felt he had been extricated from stagnant water and suddenly plunged into boiling water which ‘storms and roars and foams’. He, a grown man, energetic in his own climate, felt like a sensitive child here, impressed by everything and everyone. Meanwhile, all around him, the city ‘seethed and boiled and roared and foamed’. Unable to see any end to the crowds, carriages, trees or dazzling store windows, or even of the street itself, Wokulski was gradually overcome with stupefaction. He stopped hearing the passers-by chattering, then grew deaf to the cries of the street traders, finally to the rattle of the wheels. Then it seemed to him he had seen such houses, traffic, cafés before: still later, he thought that it wasn’t so impressive after all, and finally his critical faculties awoke and he told himself that although more French was to be heard in the streets of Paris than in Warsaw, yet the local accent here was worse, the pronunciation less clear.
Pondering thus, he slowed down and ceased stepping aside for people. And when he thought that the French would now surely begin pointing him out, to his surprise he saw that he attracted less attention. After an hour in the streets he had become an ordinary drop in the ocean of Paris. ‘So much the better,’ he muttered.
Hitherto, houses had risen to his right and left at every few dozen paces, then a side-street would appear. But now a monotonous