"Yes, that's his name," replied Gazonal. "Massol and Vignon--there you
have Social Reason, in which there's no reason at all."
"There must be some way out of it," said Leon de Lora. "You see,
cousin, all things are possible in Paris for good as well as for evil,
for the just as well as the unjust. There's nothing that can't be
done, undone, and redone."
"The devil take me if I stay ten days more in this hole of a place,
the dullest in all France!"
The two cousins and Bixiou were at this moment walking from one end to
the other of that sheet of asphalt on which, between the hours of one
and three, it is difficult to avoid seeing some of the personages in
honor of whom Fame puts one or the other of her trumpets to her lips.
Formerly that locality was the Place Royale; next it was the Pont
Neuf; in these days this privilege had been acquired by the Boulevard
des Italiens.
"Paris," said the painter to his cousin, "is an instrument on which we
must know how to play; if we stand here ten minutes I'll give you your
first lesson. There, look!" he said, raising his cane and pointing to
a couple who were just then coming out from the Passage de l'Opera.
"Goodness! who's that?" asked Gazonal.
THAT was an old woman, in a bonnet which had spent six months in a
show-case, a very pretentious gown and a faded tartan shawl, whose
face had been buried twenty years of her life in a damp lodge, and
whose swollen hand-bag betokened no better social position than that
of an ex-portress.
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