They need not have feared, those Ministers of France.  Paris had more courage than some of them, with a greater dignity and finer faith.  When the French Ministry fled to Bordeaux without having warned the people that the enemy was at their gates, Paris remained very quiet and gave no sign of wild terror or of panic-stricken rage.  There was no political cry or revolutionary outburst.  No mob orator sprang upon a cafe chair to say “Nous sommes trahis!” There was not even a word of rebuke for those who had doctored the official communiques and put a false glamour of hope upon hideous facts.  Hurriedly and dejectedly over a million people of Paris fled from the city, now that the Government had led the way of flight.  They were afraid, and there was panic in their exodus, but even that was not hysterical, and men and women kept their heads, though they had lost their hopes.  It was rare to see a weeping woman.  There was no wailing of a people distraught.  Sadly those fugitives left the city which had been all the world to them, and the roads to the south were black with their multitudes, having left in fear but full of courage on the road, dejected, but even then finding a comedy in the misery of it, laughing —­as most French women will laugh in the hour of peril—­even when their suffering was greatest and when there was a heartache in their humour.

6

After all the soul of Paris did not die, even in those dark days when so many of its inhabitants had gone, and when, for a little while, it seemed a deserted city.  Many thousands of citizens remained, enough to make a great population, and although for a day or two they kept for the most part indoors, under the shadow of a fear that at any moment they might hear the first shells come shrieking overhead, or even the clatter of German cavalry, they quickly resumed the daily routine of their lives, as far as it was possible at such a time.  The fruit and vegetable-stalls along the Rue St. Honore were thronged as usual by frugal housewives who do their shopping early, and down by Les Halles, to which I wended my way through the older streets of Paris, to note any change in the price of food, there were the usual scenes of bustling activity among the baskets and the litter of the markets.  Only a man who knew Paris well could detect a difference in the early morning crowds—­the absence of many young porters who used to carry great loads on their heads before quenching their thirst at the Chien Qui Fume, and the presence of many young girls of the midinette class, who in normal times lie later in bed before taking the metro to their shops.