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Chapter 17

Many proud automobiles course the length of the Champs Elysees. But proudest of all was Monique Levitan's Hispana Suiza, sleek and streamlined, with elegant scarlet-leather upholstery. Like a black snake it slithered its way under the colored electric lights of advertising displays around and around the Arch of Triumph.

Seven plus seven highways, like unrolled ribbons of silk blown by the wind, radiate outward in an endless race, with the Arch of Triumph as their center. Here, at the Eternal Light, always shining over the grave of the Unknown Soldier, here in the shadow of the cool wreaths of laurel, under the slender, limb-like triumph-columns, is the most beautiful conjunction of avenues anywhere in the wide world.

Monique Levitan loved this enchanted place. Her heart thumped proudly as she drove in her elegant Hispana Suiza along the silken thoroughfares, whether the commercial, brilliantly lighted avenues-Wargram, Victor Hugo and Champs Elysees; or the quiet, aristocratic ones-Kleber, Foch, and Grande Armeé. More than any other, however, it was the Marechal Foch Aleé which drew her. How she relished driving along that street in the cool of evening, her body sunk back luxuriously against the deep red-leather upholstery, the car purring almost noiselessly along in the shadow of the dense-leafed chestnut trees that lined the avenue! A thin beam of light shimmering from the drawn curtains of a

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