human
One hears it said that the beautiful city on the Seine is but the shadow of what it then was.
gpt
says the Parisian, when he calls to mind the gorgeous days of the Empire. The extravagant elegance, the magnificent luxury, which used to roll in superb carriages along the Boulevards and the Champs Elysées towards the Bois de Boulogne, and exhibited itself in the evening in the boxes of the theatres; the lustre which emanated from the Court, and the concourse of all the nabobs of the world,--all this must in those days have given to Parisian life a sparkling splendour, a something stupefying and intoxicating, an alacrity of enjoyment which had no parallel elsewhere. To the respectable, pedantic _bourgeoisie_ which ruled under Louis Philippe had succeeded a new generation of men of the world, which drank to the lees all the refined pleasures that a modern great city has to offer. The gentlefolk of the Empire understood the art of living better, cultivated and exhausted it after a more inventive fashion, than any generation that had gone before. In the Tuileries sat the man of the Second of December, the connoisseur and promoter of all refined tastes. In his person the age was embodied, that age depicted by Zola in _La Curée_, in the passage where he describes the halls, illumined as if by enchantment, of the imperial palace. There, all the splendour of over-civilisation glitters and gleams, with its bright eyes and sparkling jewels, with its breath of intoxicating perfumes floating from naked shoulders and arms and half-veiled voluptuous bosoms; while the green, sphinx-like eye of Napoleon III rests indifferently on the alabaster sea of white shoulders bowing before him, as he reviews all that he has possessed and all that he can yet enjoy. Dumas' _Dame aux Camélias_, _Diane de Lys_ and _Le Demi-monde_, Barrière's _Filles de Marbre_, Augier's _Mariage d'Olympe_, give the impress of the period upon literature, and the single phrase
human
The Lady of the Camelias