The Wicker-Work Woman by Anatole France

The cab which was carrying Madame Worms-Clavelin into Paris passed through the Porte Maillot between the gratings crowned in civic style with a hedge of pike-heads. Near these lay dusty custom-house officers and sunburnt flower-girls asleep in the sun. As it passed, it left, on the right, the Avenue de la Révolte, where low, mouldy, red-bedaubed inns and stunted arbours face the Chapel of Saint-Ferdinand, which crouches, lonely and dwarfish, on the edge of a gloomy military moat covered with sickly patches of scorched grass. Thence it emerged into the melancholy Rue de Chartres, with its everlasting pall of dust from the stone-cutting yards, and passed down it into the beautiful shady roads that open into the royal park, now cut up into small, middle-class estates.

As the cab rumbled heavily along the causeway down an avenue of plane-trees, every second or so, through the silent solitude, there passed lightly-clad bicyclists who skimmed by with bent backs and heads cutting the air like quick-moving animals. With their rapid flight and long, swift, bird-like movements, they were almost graceful through sheer ease, almost beautiful by the mere amplitude of the curves they described. Between the bordering tree-trunks Madame Worms-Clavelin could see lawns, little ponds, steps, and glass-door canopies in the most correct taste, cut off by rows of palings. Then she lost herself in a vague dream of how, in her old age, she would live in a house like those whose fresh plaster and slate she could see through the leaves. She was a sensible woman and moderate in her desires, so that now she felt a dawning love of fowls and rabbits rising in her breast.