Villes
The official acropolis surpasses the most colossal conceptions of modern barbarism. Impossible to express the flat daylight produced by this unchanging gray sky, the imperial glitter of the buildings, and the eternal snow on the ground. In a singular taste for the enormous they reproduced all the classical architectural marvels, and I visit exhibitions of paintings in rooms twenty times larger than Hampton Court. What paintings! A Norwegian Nebuchadnezzar built the stairways of the government buildings; the subalterns I saw are already prouder than Brahmins and I trembled at the sight of the guards of the colossi and the building officials. By arranging the buildings into squares, closed courtyards and terraces, they cheat the cab-drivers. The parks represent a primitive nature artfully and proudly laid out. The upper part of the city has inexplicable parts: a river from the sea, without boats, unfolds its blue slate water between wharves supporting tremendous candelabra. A short bridge leads to a postern right under the dome of Saint-Chapelle. This dome is an artistic framework of steel, about fifteen thousand feet in diameter.
From a few points of the copper foot-bridges and platforms and stairways surrounding the markets and pillars, I thought I could estimate the depth of the city: this is the miracle I was not able to judge: what are the levels of the other parts above or below the acropolis? For the foreigner of our day, reconnoitering is impossible. The business quarter is a circus constructed in a uniform style, with arcade galleries. You cannot see any shops. But the snow on the highway is flattened; a few moguls as rare as Sunday morning walkers in London are moving toward a diamond coach. A few divans of red velvet. They serve North Pole drinks at a price between eight hundred and eight thousand rupees. While on the point of looking for theaters in this circus, I tell myself that the shops must contain fairly tragic dramas (?) I think there are policeman. But the law must be so unusual that I give up imagining what adventurers are like here.
The suburb as elegant as a beautiful street in Paris enjoys an air of light. The democratic constituency numbers a few hundred souls. Here too the houses do not follow one another. The suburb melts strangely into the country, the "Country" filling the eternal west with forests and gigantic plantations, where country gentlemen savages hunt their news columns in the light which they invented.
