had been advised to get out, so that there should be as few people inside the fortifications as possible.  This rumor, however, was prevalent only among foreigners.  No French people that I saw seemed to have any such feeling.  Apart from the excitement which prevailed in the vicinity of the steamship offices and banks the city had a deserted look.  The Paris that you knew exists no longer.  Compared with it this Paris is a dead city.  Almost every shop is closed, and must be until the great number of men gone to the front can be replaced in some way.  There are streets in which every closed front bears, under a paper flag pasted on shutter or door, a sign saying, “Closed on account of the mobilization”; or, “All the men with the colors.”

There are almost no men in the streets.  There are no busses or tramways, and cabs and automobiles are rare.  Some branches of the underground are running at certain hours, and the irregular service must continue until women, and men unfit for military service, replace the men so suddenly called to the flag, and that will take time, especially as so many of the organizers as well as conductors and engineers have gone.  It is the same with the big shops.  However, that is not important.  No one is in the humor to buy anything except food.

It took me a long time to get about.  I had to walk everywhere and my friends live a long way apart, and I am a miserable walker.  I found it impossible to get back that night, so I took refuge with one of my friends who is sailing on Saturday.  Every one seems to be sailing on that day, and most of them don’t seem to care much how they get away—­“ameliorated steerage,” as they call it, seems to be the fate of many of them.  I can assure you that I was glad enough to get back the next day.  Silent as it is here, it is no more so than Paris, and not nearly so sad, for the change is not so great.  Paris is no longer our Paris, lovely as it still is.

I do not feel in the mood to do much.  I work in my garden intermittently, and the harvest bug (bete rouge we call him here) gets in his work unintermittently on me.  If things were normal this introduction to the bete rouge would have seemed to me a tragedy.  As it is, it is unpleasantly unimportant.  I clean house intermittently; read intermittently; write letters intermittently.  That reminds me, do read Leon Daudet’s “Fantomes et Vivantes”—­the first volumes of his memoirs.  He is a terrible example of “Le fils a papa.”  I don’t know why it is that a vicious writer, absolutely lacking in reverence, can hold one’s attention so much better than a kindly one can.  In this book Daudet simply smashes idols, tears down illusions, dances gleefully on sacred traditions, and I lay awake half the night reading him,—­and forgot the advancing Germans.  The book comes down only to 1880, so most of the men he writes about are dead, and most of them, like Victor Hugo, for example, come off very sadly.