The Doll - Bolesaw Prus [227]
‘Bah!’ he muttered. ‘But the Exhibition, the museums, the balloon?…’
Continuing along the rue de Rivoli, at around seven o’clock he reached the square on which, solitary as a finger, rose a gothic tower surrounded by trees and a low fence of iron bars. More streets again branched off from here.
Feeling tired, Wokulski beckoned to a horse-drawn cab and within half an hour was back in his hotel, having passed the already familiar Porte St-Denis on the way.
The meeting with ship-builders and engineers lasted until midnight, accompanied by many bottles of champagne. Wokulski, who had to substitute for Suzin in the talks and to take copious notes, did not feel at ease until he had this work. Refreshed, he hurried to his room and, instead of tormenting himself with the mirror, took a plan of Paris to bed with him. ‘Nothing to it,’ he thought, ‘some hundred square miles in area, two million inhabitants, thousands of streets, ten thousand public conveyances…’ Then he read a long list of the most celebrated buildings in Paris and thought with shame that he would never find his way around this city. ‘The Exhibition…Notre-Dame…Les Halles…the Bastille…the Madeleine…the sewers…goodness!’ he said.
He turned out the light. The street was quiet; a grey glow of light, probably reflected from the clouds, entered at the window. But there was a roaring and a ringing in Wokulski’s ears, and before his eyes stretched streets as smooth as floors, trees surrounded by iron fences, buildings of hewn stone, throngs of people and carriages coming and going Heaven knows where. He fell asleep watching this crowd of sights, and thought, that come what may, he would remember his first day in Paris for the rest of his life.
Then he dreamed that the ocean of houses and forests of statues and endless lines of trees were falling in upon him, and that he himself was asleep in a profound tomb, alone, tranquil, almost happy. He was asleep, thinking of nothing, forgetful of everyone, and would sleep thus for ever were it not, alas, for a drop of grief that lay within or alongside him, so minute that the human eye could not perceive it, yet so bitter that it could poison the whole world.
From the day when he first plunged into Paris, a life that was almost mystical started for Wokulski. Apart from a few hours devoted to advising Suzin with the ship-builders, Wokulski was entirely free, and he spent the time in perfectly disorganised visits to the city. He would choose a neighbourhood from the index in his Guide, and would go there in an open carriage without even looking at the street-plan. He climbed steps, walked around buildings, hurried through halls, stopped at interesting sights, and drove on again according to the alphabetical index, in the same carriage, which he hired for the day. But, since what he most feared was the lack of something to do, he spent his evenings looking at the city plan, crossing out the places he had visited and making notes.
Sometimes Jumart accompanied him on these excursions and took him to places the guidebooks did not mention: to merchant stores, to factory workshops, to the homes of craftsmen, to student quarters, to the cafés and restaurants along the streets of the fourth quarter. It was here at last that Wokulski became acquainted with the real life of Paris.
In the course of these trips he climbed towers: St-Jacques, Notre-Dame and the Panthéon; he went up the Trocadéro in a lift, descended into the Parisian sewers and to the catacombs decorated with human skulls; he visited the world exhibition, the Louvre, and Cluny, the Bois de Boulogne, and cemeteries, the cafés de la Rotonde, du Grand Balcon, and fountains, schools and hospitals, the Sorbonne and the fencing halls,