From the balcony you look down upon massed and variegated tree-
tops as though you were looking down upon a valley forest from a
mountain height. Those trees, whose hidden trunks make alleys and
squares, are rooted in the history of France. On the dusty gravel of
the promenade which runs between the garden and the street a
very young man and a girl, tiny figures, are playing with rackets at
one of those second-rate ball games beloved by the French petite
bourgeoisie. Their jackets and hats are hung on the corner of the
fancy wooden case in which an orange-tree is planted. They are
certainly perspiring in the heavy heat of the early morning. They are
also certainly in love. This lively dalliance is the preliminary to a
day's desk-work. It seems ill-chosen, silly, futile. The couple have
forgotten, if they ever knew, that they are playing at a terrific and
long-drawn moment of crisis in a spot sacred to the finest
civilisation.
From the balcony you can see, close by, the Louvre, with its
sculptures extending from Jean Goujon to Carpeaux; the Church of
St. Clotilde, where Cesar Franck for forty years hid his genius away
from popularity; the railway station of the Quai d'Orsay, which first
proved that a terminus may excite sensations as fine as those
excited by a palace or a temple; the dome of the Invalides; the
unique facades, equal to any architecture of modern times, to the
north of the Place de la Concorde, where the Ministry of Marine has
its home. Nobody who knows Paris, and understands what Paris
has meant and still means to humanity, can regard the scene
without the most exquisite sentiments of humility, affection, and
gratitude. It is impossible to look at the plinths, the mouldings, the
carving of the Ministry of Marine and not be thrilled by that supreme
expression of national art.
And all this escaped! That is the feeling which one has. All this
beauty was menaced with disaster at the hands of beings who
comprehended it even less than the simple couple playing
ball, beings who have scarcely reached the beginnings of
comprehension, and who joined a barbaric ingenuousness to a
savage cruelty. It was menaced, but it escaped. Perhaps no city
was ever in acuter peril; it escaped by a miracle, but it did escape. It
escaped because tens of thousands of soldiers in thousands of taxi-
cabs advanced more rapidly than any soldiers could be expected to
advance. "The population of Paris has revolted and is hurrying to
ask mercy from us!" thought the reconnoitring simpletons in Taubes,
when they noted beneath them the incredible processions of taxi-
cabs going north. But what they saw was the Sixth Army, whose
movement changed the campaign, and perhaps the whole course
of history.
"A great misfortune has overtaken us," said a German officer the
next day. It was true. Greater than he suspected.
The horror of what might have happened, the splendour of what did
happen, mingle in the awed mind as you look over the city from the
balcony. The city escaped. And the event seems vaster and more
sublime than the mind can bear.
The streets of Paris have now a perpetual aspect of Sunday
morning; only the sound of church-bells is lacking. A few of the taxi-
cabs have come back; but all the auto-buses without exception are
away behind the front. So that the traffic is forced underground,
where the railways are manned by women. A horse-bus, dug up out
of the past, jogs along the most famous boulevard in the world like a
country diligence, with a fat, laughing peasant-woman clinging to its
back-step and collecting fare-moneys into the immense pocket of
her black apron. Many of the most expensive and unnecessary
shops are shut; the others wait with strange meekness for custom.
But the provision shops and all the sturdy cheap shops of the poor
go on naturally, without any self-consciousness, just as usual. The
pavements show chiefly soldiers in a wild, new variety of uniforms,
from pale blue to black, imitated and adapted from all sources, and
especially from England--and widows and orphans. The number of
young girls and women in mourning, in the heavy mourning affected
by the Latin race, is enormous. This crape is the sole casualty list
permitted by the French War Office. It suffices. Supreme grief is
omnipresent; but it is calm, cheerful, smiling. Widows glance at each
other with understanding, like initiates of a secret and powerful
society.
Never was Paris so disconcertingly odd. And yet never was it more
profoundly itself. Between the slow realisation of a monstrous peril
escaped and the equally slow realisation of its power to punish, the
French spirit, angered and cold, knows at last what the French spirit
is. And to watch and share its mood is positively ennobling to the
stranger. Paris is revealed under an enchantment, On the surface of
the enchantment the pettinesses of daily existence persist queerly.
Two small rooms and a kitchen on a sixth floor. You could put the
kitchen, of which the cooking apparatus consists of two gas-rings, in
the roots of the orange-tree in the Tuileries gardens. Everything is
plain, and stringently tidy; everything is a special item, separately
acquired, treasured. I see again a water-colour that I did years ago
and had forgotten; it lives, protected by a glazed frame and by the
pride of possession. The solitary mistress of this immaculate home
is a spinster sempstress in the thirties. She earns three francs a
day, and is rich because she does not spend it all, and has never
spent it all. Inexpressibly neat, smiling, philosophic, helpful, she has
within her a contentious and formidable tiger which two
contingencies, and two only, will arouse. The first contingency
springs from any threat of marriage. You must not seek a husband
for her; she is alone in the world, and she wants to be. The second
springs from any attempt to alter her habits, which in her sight are
as sacredly immutable as the ritual of an Asiatic pagoda.
Last summer she went to a small town, to which is attached a very
large military camp, to help her sister-in-law in the running of a cafe.
The excursion was to be partly in the nature of a holiday; but,
indefatigable on a chair with a needle, she could not stand for hours
on her feet, ministering to a sex of which she knew almost nothing.
She had the nostalgia of the Parisian garret. She must go home to
her neglected habits. The war was waging. She delayed, from a
sense of duty. But at last her habits were irresistible. Officers had
said lightly that there was no danger, that the Germans could not
possibly reach that small town. Nevertheless, the train that the
spinster-sempstress took was the last train to leave. And as the
spinster-sempstress departed by the train, so the sister-in-law
departed in a pony-cart, with a son and a grandmother in the pony-
cart, together with such goods as the cart would hold; and, through
staggering adventures, reached safety at Troyes.
"And how did you yourself get on?" I asked the spinster-sempstress.
She answered:
"It was terrible. Ordinarily it is a journey of three or four hours. But
that time it lasted three days and two nights. The train was crammed
with refugees and with wounded. One was obliged to stand up. One
could not move."
"But where did you sleep?"
"I did not sleep. Do I not tell you one was obliged to stand up? I
stood up all the first night. The floor was thirty centimetres deep in
filth. The second night one had settled down somewhat. I could sit."
"But about eating?"
"I had a little food that I brought with me."
"And drinking?"
"Nothing, till the second day. One could not move. But in the end we
arrived. I was broken with fatigue. I was very ill. But I was home. The
Boches drank everything in the cafe, everything; but the building
was spared--it stood away from the firing. How long do you think the
war will last?"
"I'm beginning to think it will last a long time."
"So they say," she murmured, glancing through the window at the
prospect of roofs and chimney-cowls. "Provided that it finishes
well..."
Except by the look in her eyes, and by the destruction of her once
good complexion, it was impossible to divine that this woman's
habits had ever been disturbed in the slightest detail. But the gaze
and the complexion told the tale.
Next: the Boulevard St. Germain. A majestic flat, heavily and
sombrely furnished. The great drawing-room is shut and sheeted
with holland. It has been shut for twenty years. The mistress of this
home is an aged widow of inflexible will and astounding activity. She
gets up at five a.m., and no cook has ever yet satisfied her. The
master is her son, a bachelor of fifty. He is paralysed, and always
perfectly dressed in the English taste, he passes his life in a
wheeled chair. The home is centred in his study, full of books,
engravings, a large safe, telephone, theatrophone, newspapers,
cigarettes, easy-chairs. When I go in, an old friend, a stockbroker, is
there, and "thees" and "thous" abound in the conversation, which
runs on investments, the new English loan, banking accounts in
London, the rent moratorium in Paris, and the war. It is said that
every German is a critic of war. But so is every Frenchman a critic of
war. The criticism I now hear is the best spoken criticism, utterly
impartial, that I have heard.
"In sum," says the grey-headed stockbroker, "there disengages
itself from the totality of the facts an impression, tolerably clear, that
all goes very well on the West front."
Which is reassuring. But the old lady, invincible after seven-and-a-
half decades spent in the hard acquirement of wisdom, will not be
reassured. She is not alarmed, but she will not be reassured. She
treats the two men with affectionate malice as children. She knows
that "those birds"--that is to say, the Germans--will never be beaten,
because they are for ever capable of inventing some new trick.
She will not sit still. A bit of talk, and she runs off with the agility
of a girl to survey her household; then returns and cuts into the
discussion.
"If you are coming to lunch, Bennett," she says, "come before
Monday, because on Monday my cook takes herself away, and as
for the new one, I should dare to say nothing. . . . You don't know,
Bennett, you don't know, that at a given moment it was impossible
to buy salt. I mean, they sold it to you unwillingly, in little screws of
paper. It was impossible to get enough. Figure that to yourself, you
from London! As for chicory for the morning cafe-au-lait, it existed
not. Gold could not buy it."
And again she said, speaking of the fearful days in September
1914:
"What would you? We waited. My little coco is nailed there. He
cannot move without a furniture-van filled with things essential to his
existence. I did not wish to move. We waited, quite simply. We
waited for them to come. They did not come. So much the better
That is all."
I have never encountered anything more radically French than the
temperament of this aged woman.
Next: the luxury quarter--the establishment of one of those
fashionable dressmakers whom you patronise, and whose bills
startle all save the most hardened. She is a very handsome woman.
She has a husband and two little boys. They are all there. The
husband is a retired professional soldier. He has a small and easy
post in a civil administration, but his real work is to keep his wife's
books. In August he was re-engaged, and ready to lead soldiers
under fire in the fortified camp which Gallieni has evolved out of the
environs of Paris; but the need passed, and the uniform was laid
aside. The two little boys are combed and dressed as only French
and American children are combed and dressed, and with a more
economical ingenuity than American children. Each has a beautiful
purple silk necktie and a beautiful silk handkerchief to match. You
may notice that the purple silk is exactly the same purple silk as the
lining of their mother's rich mantle hanging over a chair back.
"I had to dismiss my last few work-girls on Saturday," said the
dressmaker. It was no longer possible to keep them. "I had seventy,
you know. Now--not one. For a time we made considerably less
than the rent. Now we make nothing. Nevertheless, some American
clients have been very kind."
Her glance went round the empty white salons with their mirrors in
sculptured frames. Naught of her stock was left except one or two
fragile blouses and a few original drawings.
Said the husband:
"We are eating our resources. I will tell you what this war means to
us. It means that we shall have to work seven or eight years longer
than we had the intention to work. What would you?"
He lifted his arms and lowered the corners of his mouth. Then he
turned again to the military aspect of things, elaborating it.
The soldier in him finished:
"It is necessary, all the same, to admire these cursed Germans."
"Admire them!" said his wife sharply. "I do not appreciate the
necessity. When I think of that day and that night we spent at
home!" They live in the eastern suburbs of the city. "When I think of
that day and that night! The cannon thundering at a distance of ten
kilometres!"
"Thirty kilometres, almost thirty, my friend," the husband corrected.
"Ten kilometres. I am sure it was not more than ten kilometres, my
friend."
"But see, my little one. It was at Meaux. Forty kilometres to Meaux.
We are at thirteen. That makes twenty-seven, at least."
"It sounded like ten."
"That is true."
"It sounded like ten, my dear Arnold. All day, and all night. We could
not go to bed. Had one any desire to go to bed? It was anguish. The
mere souvenir is anguish."
She kissed her youngest boy, who had long hair.
"Come, come!" the soldier calmed her.
Lastly: an interior dans le monde; a home illustrious in Paris for the
richness of its collections--bric-a-brac, fans, porcelain, furniture,
modern pictures; the walls frescoed by Pierre Bonnard and his
compeers; a black marble balcony with an incomparable view in the
very middle of the city. Here several worlds encountered each other:
authors, painters, musicians, dilettanti, administrators. The hostess
had good-naturedly invited a high official of the Foreign Office,
whom I had not seen for many years; she did not say so, but her
aim therein was to expedite the arrangements for my pilgrimages in
the war-zone. Sundry of my old friends were present. It was
wonderful how many had escaped active service, either because
they were necessary to central administration, or because they were
neutrals, or because they were too old, or because they had been
declined on account of physical unfitness, reformes. One or two who
might have come failed to do so because they had perished.
Amid the abounding, dazzling confusion of objects which it was a
duty to admire, people talked cautiously of the war. With tranquillity
and exactness and finality the high official, clad in pale alpaca and
yellow boots, explained the secret significance of Yellow Books,
White Books, Orange Books, Blue Books. The ultimate issues were
never touched. New, yet unprinted, music was played; Schumann,
though German enough, was played. Then literature came to the
top. A novelist wanted to know what I thought of a book called "The
Way of All Flesh," which he had just read. It is singular how that
ruthless book makes its way across all frontiers. He also wanted to
know about Gissing, a name new to him. And then a voice from the
obscurity of the balcony came startlingly to me in the music-room:
"Tell me! Sincerely--do they hate the Germans in England? Do they
hate them, veritably? Tell me. I doubt it. I doubt strongly."