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"I felt like a farmer come to town. Immediately I was dazzled, dazzled by the sea of faces, by the fetid warmth radiating from hundreds of overexcited bodies….everyone was keyed to fever pitch. Everyone looked intent and alert, intensely intent, intensely alert. The air crackled with this electric desire, this all consuming concentration. A thousand different perfumes clashed with one another…."

It is all opportunity, opportunity that we like cavalierly to assume we can take or leave at choice. Baudelaire writes in A Une Passante:

"La rue assourdissante autour de moi hurlait, longue, mince, en grand deuil, douleur majestueuse,
Une femme passa…..

Un eclair…puis la nuit! -fugitive beaute Dont le regard m'a fait soudainment renaitre ne te verrai-je plus que dans l'etermnite?

O toi que j'eusse aimée, o toi qui le savais!"

Aragon watches "women walk by. There are great patches of radiance, flashes of light not yet stripped of their furs, of brilliant, restless mysteries...
...sometimes I have returned home late at night, after passing an infinity of these desirable shimmerings without having attempted to take possession of a single one of these lives left rashly within my reach."

(There is hardly need to point out the presumption in both passages: "toi que j'eusee aime"…"without having attempted to take possession….left rashly within my reach..".

Like most men, presumably most women too, I am on constant alert in the street. It may be a relaxed alert, automatic pilot almost; but yes, I check women out. I can hardly venture home without falling in love, seriously or idly fancying one or other of my fellow pedestrians, The truth is, of course that almost always we find ourselves, like Baudelaire or Aragon back at home, alone, muttering "toi que j'eusse aime, or more vernacularly Hmmm...I could have had her!"

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