I looked back at the gilded mass of the Opera—that great pile of stone set lightly there as the toe of a ballet-girl's satin slipper—— [Pg 45] [Pg 45] "What are you thinking, papa?" asked Alida. "Nothing," I said hastily, amazed at my own frivolity. "Notice," said I, "the exquisite harmony of the sky-line. Here in Paris the Government regulates the height of buildings. Nothing inharmonious can be built; the selfishness and indifference of private ownership which in New York erects skyscrapers around our loveliest architectural remains, the City Hall, would not be tolerated here, where artistic ensemble is as necessary to people as the bread they eat." "Dear me, where have I read that?" exclaimed Alida innocently. I said nothing more. We were now passing through that wing of the Louvre which faces the Carousal, and we turned sharply to the right under the little arc, and straight past the Tuileries Gardens, all blooming with tulips and hyacinths, past the quaint weather-stained statues of an epoch as dead as its own sculptors, past the long arcades of the Rivoli, under which human spiders lurk for the tourist of Cook, and out into the Place de la Concorde—the finest square in the world. The sun glittered on the brass inlaid base on which towered the monolyth. The splashing of the great fountains filled the air with a fresh sweet sound. Round us, in a vast circle, sat the "Cities of France,"[Pg 46] with "Strasburg" smothered in crêpe and funeral wreaths, each still stone figure crowned with battlemented crowns and bearing the carved symbols of their ancient power on time-indented escutcheons, all of stone. [Pg 46] The fresh wet pavement blazed in the sunshine; men wheeled handcarts filled with violets or piled high with yellow jonquils and silvery hyacinths. Violet, white, and yellow—these are the colors which Paris wears in springtime, twined in her chaplet of tender green. I said this aloud to Dulcima, who replied that they were wearing blue in Paris this spring, and that she would like to know how soon we were going to the dressmakers. Now at last we were rolling up the Champs Elysées, with the Arc de Triomphe, a bridge of pearl at the end of the finest
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