The “Conqueror” at Paris
There lay the white church of Sacré Cœur, there the Gare du Nord, from which the French thought to leave for across the Rhine; there Notre Dame, there the old “Boul Mich,” the Boulevard St. Michel, in the Latin Quarter, where I Bohemianized so long as an art student, and over which I now flew as a conqueror. Unprotected beneath me lay the heart of the enemy, the proud glittering Babel of the Seine. The thought of everything hateful, always attached to the great city, was swallowed up; an emotion of possession, of power, alone remained. And doubly joyful we felt ourselves. Doubly conquerors! In a great circle I swept over the sea of houses. In the streets raised itself a murmuring of the people, whom the bold “German bird” astonished, who cannot understand how the Germans are turning the French discovery to their own service more cleverly and advantageously than the French themselves.