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But all over now, and nothing but memories and souvenirs about: broken clay pipes, splinters of bottles and wood, shavings, scraps of cloth, hand-bills and rusty, bent nails, the eternal old battered hat, the equally inevitable old boot, and a hoof or two from the rickety horses that revolved to the haunting tune of the Valse Bleue.
The usual mounds of refuse. Also, the turf damaged with ruts, and burnt away in places by the fair people’s fires. The annual fête over, not a soul but myself loiters on this portion of the Seine river-bank. Only gloom and desolation. Nothing but waste. Again, terrain vague.
II
IN A CELLAR
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Bright things and sombre things, tarnished things and threadbare things, frail things, fast-fading things; things and things, and all of them old things.... The past in this cellar; in every nook and corner of it—the past. Come here through a hole in the wall of a narrow, cobbled Paris street—come down a number of crooked stone steps—I now look curiously about me, and wonder what to do next. No one challenges me: the cellar appears to be uninhabited. Yet above its crude, primitive entrance, on a weather-beaten board, I discern the name—Veuve Mollard.