Ch. 1: The Look of Paris - Page 2

the
blue-pink lustre of an early Monet. The Bois lay about us in the
stillness of a holiday evening, and the lawns of Bagatelle were as
fresh as June. Below the Arc de Triomphe, the Champs Elysees sloped
downward in a sun-powdered haze to the mist of fountains and the
ethereal obelisk; and the currents of summer life ebbed and flowed
with a normal beat under the trees of the radiating avenues. The
great city, so made for peace and art and all humanest graces,
seemed to lie by her river-side like a princess guarded by the
watchful giant of the Eiffel Tower.

The next day the air was thundery with rumours. Nobody believed
them, everybody repeated them. War? Of course there couldn't be war!
The Cabinets, like naughty children, were again dangling their feet
over the edge; but the whole incalculable weight of
things-as-they-were, of the daily necessary business of living,
continued calmly and convincingly to assert itself against the
bandying of diplomatic words. Paris went on steadily about her
mid-summer business of feeding, dressing, and amusing the great army
of tourists who were the only invaders she had seen for nearly half
a century.

All the while, every one knew that other work was going on also. The
whole fabric of the country's seemingly undisturbed routine was
threaded with noiseless invisible currents of preparation, the sense
of them was in the calm air as the sense of changing weather is in
the balminess of a perfect afternoon. Paris counted the minutes till
the evening papers came.

They said little or nothing except what every one was already
declaring all over the country. "We don't want war--_mais it faut
que cela finisse!_" "This kind of thing has got to stop": that was
the only phase one heard. If diplomacy could still arrest the war,
so much the better: no one in France wanted it. All who spent the
first days of August in Paris will testify to the agreement of
feeling on that point. But if war had to come, the country, and
every heart in it, was ready.

At the dressmaker's, the next morning, the tired fitters were
preparing to leave for their usual holiday. They looked pale and
anxious--decidedly, there was a new weight of apprehension in the
air. And in the rue Royale, at the corner of the Place de la
Concorde, a few people had stopped to look at a little strip of
white paper against the wall of the Ministere de la Marine. "General
mobilization" they read--and an armed nation knows what that means.
But the group about the paper was small and quiet. Passers by read
the notice and went on. There were no cheers, no gesticulations: the
dramatic sense of the race had already told them that the event was
too great to be