It was worth while to spend an evening, and a louis, at Maxim’s, or at Henry’s, to see the company that came to dine there when the German army was still entrenched within sixty miles of Paris.  They were not crowded, those places of old delight, and the gaiety had gone from them, like the laughter of fair women who have passed beyond the river.  But through the swing doors came two by two, or in little groups, enough people to rob these lighted rooms of loneliness.  Often it was the woman who led the man, lending him the strength of her arm.  Yet when he sat at table—­this young officer of the Chasseurs in sky-blue jacket, or this wounded Dragoon with a golden casque and long horse-hair tail—­hiding an empty sleeve against the woman’s side, or concealing the loss of a leg beneath the table cloth, it was wonderful to see the smile that lit up his face and the absence of all pain in it.

“Ah! comme il fait bon!”

I heard the sigh and the words come from one of these soldiers—­not an officer but a fine gentleman in his private’s uniform—­as he looked round the room and let his brown eyes linger on the candle-lights and the twinkling glasses and snow-white table-cloths.  Out of the mud and blood of the trenches, with only the loss of an arm or a leg, he had come back to this sanctuary of civilization from which ugliness is banished and all grim realities.

So, for this reason, other soldiers came on brief trips to Paris from the front.  They desired to taste the fine flavour of civilization in its ultra-refinement, to dine delicately, to have the fragrance of flowers about them, to sit in the glamour of shaded lights, to watch a woman’s beauty through the haze of cigarette-smoke, and to listen to the music of her voice.  There was always a woman by the soldier’s side, propping her chin in her hands and smiling into the depths of his eyes.  For the soul of a Frenchman demands the help of women, and the love of women, however strong his courage or his self-reliance.  The beauty of life is to him a feminine thing, holding the spirit of motherhood, romantic love and comradeship more intimate and tender than between man and man.  Only duty is masculine and hard.

9

The theatres and music-halls of Paris opened one by one in the autumn of the first year of war.  Some of the dancing girls and the singing girls found their old places behind the footlights, unless they had coughed their lungs away, or grown too pinched and plain.  But for a long time it was impossible to recapture the old spirit of these haunts, especially in the music-halls, where ghosts passed in the darkness of deserted promenoirs, and where a chill gave one goose-flesh in the empty stalls,

Paris was half ashamed to go to the Folies Bergeres or the Renaissance, while away la-bas men were lying on the battlefields or crouching in the trenches.  Only when the monotony of life without amusement became intolerable to people who have to laugh so that they may not weep, did they wend their way to these places for an hour or two.  Even the actors and actresses and playwrights of Paris felt the grim presence of death not far away.  The old Rabelaisianism was toned down to something like decency and at least the grosser vulgarities of the music-hall stage were banned by common consent.