Yet there was one human figure here on the banks of the Seine reassuring in this solitude which was haunted by the shadow of fear.  It was a fisherman.  A middle-aged man with a straw hat on the back of his head and a big pair of spectacles on the end of his nose, he held out his long rod with a steady hand and waited for a bite, in an attitude of supreme indifference to Germans, guns, hatred, tears and all the miserable stupidities of people who do not fish.  He was at peace with the world on this day of splendour, with a golden sun and a blue sky, and black shadows flung across the water from the tree trunks.  He stood there, a simple fisherman, as a protest against the failure of civilization and the cowardice in the hearts of men.  I lifted my hat to him.

Close to Paris, too, in little market gardens and poor plots of land, women stooped over their cabbages, and old men tended the fruits of the earth.  On one patch a peasant girl stood with her hands on her hips staring at her fowls, which were struggling and clucking for the grain she had flung down to them.  There was a smile about her lips.  She seemed absorbed in the contemplation of the feathered crowd.  Did she know the Germans were coming to Paris?  If so, she was not afraid.

How quiet it was in the great city!  How strangely and deadly quiet!  The heels of my two companions, and my own, made a click-clack down the pavements, as though we were walking through silent halls.  Could this be Paris—­this city of shuttered shops and barred windows and deserted avenues?  There were no treasures displayed in the Rue de la Paix.  Not a diamond glinted behind the window panes.  Indeed, there were no windows visible, but only iron sheeting, drawn down like the lids of dead men’s eyes.

In the Avenue de l’Opera no Teutonic tout approached us with the old familiar words, “Want a guide, sir?” “Lovely ladies, sir!” The lovely ladies had gone.  The guides had gone.  Life had gone out of Paris.

It was early in the morning, and we were faint for lack of sleep and food.

“My kingdom for a carriage,” said the Philosopher, in a voice that seemed to come from the virgin forests of the Madeira in which he had once lost hold of all familiar things in life, as now in Paris.

A very old cab crawled into view, with a knock-kneed horse which staggered aimlessly about the empty streets, and with an old cocher who looked about him as though doubtful as to his whereabouts in this deserted city.

He started violently when we hailed him, and stared at us as nightmare creatures in a bad dream after an absinthe orgy.  I had to repeat an address three times before he understood.

“Hotel St. James...  Ecoutez donc, mon vieux!”

He clacked his whip with an awakening to life.

“Allez!” he shouted to his bag of bones.

Our arrival at the Hotel St. James was a sensation, not without alarm.  I believe the concierge and his wife believed the Germans had come when they heard the outrageous noise of our horse’s hoofs thundering into the awful silence of their courtyard.  The manager, and the assistant manager, and the head waiter, and the head waiter’s wife, and the chambermaid, and the cook, greeted us with the surprise of people who behold an apparition.