Hundreds and hundreds of women went by with trailing
skirts, and whispered and jested and laughed; while men darted in
pursuit, now of a fair chignon, now of a dark one. In the open cabs men
and women sat side by side, now husbands and wives long since married,
now chance couples who had met but an hour ago. But Mathieu went on
again, yielding to the force of the current, carried along like all the
others, a prey to the same fever which sprang from the surroundings, from
the excitement of the day, from the customs of the age. And he no longer
took the Beauchenes, the Moranges, the Seguins as isolated types; it was
all Paris that symbolized vice, all Paris that yielded to debauchery and
sank into degradation. There were the folks of high culture, the folks
suffering from literary neurosis; there were the merchant princes; there
were the men of liberal professions, the lawyers, the doctors, the
engineers; there were the people of the lower middle-class, the petty
tradesmen, the petty clerks; there were even the manual workers, poisoned
by the example of the upper spheres--all practising the doctrines of
egotism as vanity and the passion for money grew more and more intense.
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