, since no rendering of any object and no
painting of any picture can take effect without some form of reference and
control, so these guarantees could but reside in a high probity of observation.
I must decidedly have supposed, all the while, that I was acutely observing -
and with a blest absence of wonder at its being so easy. Let me certainly at
present rejoice in that absence; for I ask myself how without it I could have
written The American.
    Was it indeed meanwhile my excellent conscience that kept the charm as
unbroken as it appears to me, in rich retrospect, to have remained? - or is it
that I suffer the mere influence of remembered, of associated places and hours,
all acute impressions, to palm itself off as the sign of a finer confidence than
I could justly claim? It is a pleasure to perceive how again and again the
shrunken depths of old work yet permit themselves to be sounded or - even if
rather terrible the image - dragged: the long pole of memory stirs and rummages
the bottom, and we fish up such fragments and relics of the submerged life and
the extinct consciousness as tempt us to piece them together. My windows looked
into the Rue de Luxembourg - since then meagrely re-named Rue Cambon - and the
particular light Parisian click of the small cab-horse on the clear asphalt,
with its sharpness of detonation between the high houses, makes for the faded
page to-day a sort of interlineation of sound. This sound rises to a martial
clatter at the moment a troop of cuirassiers charges down the narrow street,
each morning, to file, directly opposite my house, through the plain portal of
the barracks occupying part of the vast domain attached in a rearward manner to
one of the Ministères that front on the Place Vendôme; an expanse marked, along
a considerable stretch of the street, by one of those high painted and
administratively-placarded garden walls that form deep, vague, recurrent notes
in the organic vastness of the city. I have but to re-read ten lines to recall
my daily effort not to waste time in hanging over the window-bar for a sight of
the cavalry the hard music of whose hoofs so directly and thrillingly appealed;
an effort that inveterately failed - and a trivial circumstance now dignified,
to my imagination, I may add, by the fact that the fruits of this weakness, the
various items of the vivid picture, so constantly recaptured, must have been in
themselves suggestive and inspiring, must have been rich strains, in their way,
of the great Paris harmony. I have ever