and shifts and tricks, and denials of self-indulgences and starvings of soul might be suddenly snatched from them and leave them beggared.  A shudder went through one such crowd when a young man came to speak to them from the steps of the bank.  It was a kind of shuddering sigh, followed by loud murmurings, and here and there angry protests.  The cashiers had been withdrawn from their desks and cheques could not be paid.

“We are ruined already!” said a woman.  “This war will take all our money!  Oh, my God!”

She made her way through the crowd with a fixed white face and burning eyes.

6

It was strange how in a day all gold disappeared from Paris.  I could not see the glint of it anywhere, unless I drew it from my own purse.  Even silver was very scarce and everybody was trying to cash notes, which were refused by the shopkeepers.  When I put one of them down on a table at the Cafe Tourtel the waiter shook his head and said, “La petite monnaie, s’il vous plait!” At another place where I put down a gold piece the waiter seized it as though it were a rare and wonderful thing, and then gave me all my change in paper, made up of new five franc notes issued by the Government.  In the evening an official notice was posted on the walls prohibiting the export of grain and flour.  People stared at it and said, “That means war!” Another sign of coming events, more impressive to the imagination of the Parisian, was the sudden dwindling in size of the evening newspapers.  They were reduced to two sheets, and in some cases to a single broadside, owing to the possibility of a famine in paper if war broke out and cut off the supplies of Paris while the railways were being used for the mobilization of troops.

7

The city was very quiet and outwardly as calm as on any day in August.  But beneath this normal appearance of things there was a growing anxiety and people’s nerves were so on edge that any sudden sound would make a man start on his chair on the terrasse outside the cafe restaurant.  Paris was afraid of itself.  What uproar or riot or criminal demonstration might not burst suddenly into this tranquillity?  There were evil elements lurking in the low quarters.  Apaches and anarchists might be inflamed with the madness of blood which excites men in time of war.  The socialists and syndicalists might refuse to fight, and fight in maintaining their refusal.  Some political crime might set all those smouldering passions on fire and make a hell in the streets.  So people waited and watched the crowds and listened to the pulse-beat of Paris.

The sharp staccato of revolver shots heard in the rue Montmartre on the night of July 31 caused a shudder to pass through the city, as though they were the signal for a criminal plot which might destroy France by dividing it while the enemy was on the frontier.