I did not hear those shots but only the newspaper reports which followed them almost as loudly in the soul of Paris.  And yet it was only the accidental meeting of a friend which diverted my attention of dining in the Croissant Restaurant in which the crime took place at the very hour when I should have been there.  Some years before in Paris, when France was in the throes of a railway strike which developed almost to the verge of revolution, I had often gone to the Croissant at two, three or four in the morning, because it had police privileges to keep open all night for the comfort of journalists.  Other night birds had found this roost—­ladies who sleep by day, and some of the queer adventurers of the city which never goes to bed.  One night I had come into the midst of a strange company—­the inner circle of Parisian anarchists who were celebrating a victory over French law.  Their white faces had eyes like live coals.  They thrust long thin fingers through shaggy hair and spoke passionate orations nose to nose.  Their sluttish women shrieked with mirth and gave their kisses to the leader of the gang, who had the face of Christ as painted by Ary Scheffer.

It was in this interesting place, on the very velvet cushions where I used to sit to watch the company, that Jaures was killed on the eve of the war.  The veteran orator of French socialism, the man who could stir the passions of the mob—­as I had seen more than once—­so that at his bidding they would declare war against all the powers of Government, was struck down as he sat with his back to an open window divided from the street by a thin curtain.  The young assassin —­a patriot he called himself—­had been excited to an hysteria of hate for a man who had tried to weaken the military power of France by opposing the measure for a three years’ service.  It was the madness of war which had touched his brain, and although Jaures had called upon the Socialists of France to march as one man in defence of “La Patrie,” this young neurasthenic made him the first victim of that enormous sacrifice of blood which has since reeked up to God.  Jaures, an honest man, perhaps, in spite of all his theatrical appeals to mob passion—­honest at least in his desire to make life more tolerable for the sweated workers of France—­was mortally wounded by those shots through the window blind, and the crimson cushions of his seat were dyed with deeper stains.

8

For twenty-four hours France was scared by the murder.  It seemed possible that the crime might let loose a tide of passion among the followers of the Socialist leader.  Placards were hastily posted on the walls by the military governor of Paris professing abhorrence of the assassination of a great Frenchman, promising a just punishment of the crime, and calling upon the people to remain calm in this great national crisis which would decide the destiny of France.