met the pressing demand.

To the gaping tourist the Ville Lumière resembled nothing so much as a
huge world fair, with enormous caravanserais, gigantic booths, gaudy
merry-go-rounds, squalid taverns, and huge inns. Every place of
entertainment was crowded, and congregations patiently awaited their
turn in the street, undeterred by rain or wind or snow, offering
absurdly high prices for scant accommodation and disheartened at having
their offers refused. Extortion was rampant and profiteering went
unpunished. Foreigners, mainly American and British, could be seen
wandering, portmanteau in hand, from post to pillar, anxiously seeking
where to lay their heads, and made desperate by failure, fatigue, and
nightfall. The cost of living which harassed the bulk of the people was
fast becoming the stumbling-block of governments and the most powerful
lever of revolutionaries. The chief of the peace armies resided in
sumptuous hotels, furnished luxuriously in dubious taste, flooded after
sundown with dazzling light, and filled by day with the buzz of idle
chatter, the shuffling of feet, the banging of doors, and the ringing of
bells. Music and dancing enlivened the inmates when their day's toil was
over and time had to be killed. Thus, within, one could find anxious
deliberation and warm debate; without, noisy revel and vulgar brawl.
"Fate's a fiddler; life's a dance."

To few of those visitors did Paris seem what it really was--a nest of
golden dreams, a mist of memories, a seed-plot of hopes, a storehouse of
time's menaces.


THE PARIS CONFERENCE AND THE CONGRESS OF VIENNA