“The hotel has shut up.  Everybody has fled!  We are quite alone here!”

I was glad to have added a little item of history to that old mansion where the Duc de Noailles lived, where Lafayette was married, and where Marie Antoinette saw old ghost faces—­the dead faces of laughing girls—­when she passed on her way to the scaffold.  It was a queer incident in its story when three English journalists opened it after the great flight from Paris.

Early that morning, after a snatch of sleep, we three friends walked up the Avenue des Champs Elysees and back again from the Arc de Triomphe.  The autumn foliage was beginning to fall, and so wonderfully quiet was the scene that almost one might have heard a leaf rustle to the ground.  Not a child scampered under the trees or chased a comrade round the Petit Guignol.  No women with twinkling needles sat on the stone seats.  No black-haired student fondled the hand of a pretty couturiere.  No honest bourgeois with a fat stomach walked slowly along the pathway meditating upon the mystery of life which made some men millionaires.  Not a single carriage nor any kind of vehicle, except one solitary bicycle, came down the road where on normal days there is a crowd of light-wheeled traffic.

The Philosopher was silent, thinking tremendous things, with his sallow face transfigured by some spiritual emotion.  It was when we passed the Palais des Beaux-Arts that he stood still and raised two fingers to the blue sky, like a priest blessing a kneeling multitude.

“Thanks be to the Great Power!” he said, with the solemn piety of an infidel who knows God only as the spirit is revealed on lonely waters and above uprising seas, and in the life of flowers and beasts, and in the rare pity of men.

We did not laugh at him.  Only those who have known Paris and loved her beauty can understand the thrill that came to us on that morning in September when we had expected to hear the roar of great guns around her, and to see the beginning of a ghastly destruction.  Paris was still safe!  By some kind of miracle the enemy had not yet touched her beauty nor tramped into her streets.  How sharp and clear were all the buildings under that cloudless sky!  Spears of light flashed from the brazen-winged horses above Alexander’s bridge, and the dome of the Invalides was a golden crown above a snow-white palace.  The Seine poured in a burnished stream beneath all the bridges and far away beyond the houses and the island trees, and all the picture of Paris etched by a master-hand through long centuries of time the towers of Notre Dame were faintly pencilled in the blue screen of sky.  Oh, fair dream-city, in which the highest passions of the spirit have found a dwelling-place—­with the rankest weeds of vice—­in which so many human hearts have suffered and strived and starved for beauty’s sake, in which always there have lived laughter and agony and tears, where Liberty was cherished as well as murdered, and where Love has redeemed a thousand crimes, I, though an Englishman, found tears in my eyes because on that day of history your beauty was still unspoilt.