I had forgotten that this was an island, or not quite understood the Métro man’s directions because I was surprised to come to another bridge over another branch of the river. There were houseboats lining the bank, children playing in the rain on one deck, a line of laundry hanging limp and sorrowful on another. Bateau-Lavoir, “laundry boats,” I said to myself remembering the name of the building where the artists lived in Montmartre. Then I was on the Left Bank and the feel of the city became quite different from the elegance of the Right Bank I had encountered the day before. This area was full of students, lively young men gesticulating as they walked and talked, smoking little brown cigarettes, with books tucked into their jackets to keep them from getting wet. And on kiosks and walls there were placards advertising cabarets, or with cartoons containing political messages on them. Then there was one that had Justice for Dreyfus written across it in bold black letters while over it someone had painted in bright red paint All Jews Out of Paris. I remembered the young artists talking about the anti-Drefusards and saw that it was indeed a topic that was dividing the city. I passed several more such posters as I went down the Boulevard St. Michel, most of them with a message of hate painted over them. I wondered how many people could possibly agree with this foul sentiment. Enough to deface every placard, I thought.

I stopped to ask about the Rue de Fleurus and learned it was on the other side of the park. On a sunny day I would have welcomed a stroll across such delightful gardens but walking beneath chestnut trees that dripped rain onto me was not quite as desirable. The park was deserted apart from a couple that huddled together under his rain cape and a nursemaid who was stoicly determined to give her young charge his daily fresh air, no matter what the weather was like. There were miniature waves on the boating lake. The carousel stood idle. I was feeling thoroughly damp and bad tempered by the time I finally reached the other side of the gardens and located the Rue de Fleurus.

This was also deserted. I had hoped to find a neighbor and ask where Madame Stein might live, but nobody was venturing out. It was another typical Parisian street of uniform stone buildings and ironwork balconies, as if one giant hand had designed a whole city in one fell swoop. Of course I found out later that this was true. In the mid-nineteenth century the emperor Napoleon III had decided to tear down the unsanitary and crowded medieval city and asked Baron Haussmann to modernize it. Haussmann created the wide, treelined boulevards and uniform style of buildings that make the city so unique and attractive.