In 1815, as in 1919, the world pacifiers had their court painters, and Isabey, the French portraitist, was as much run after as was Sir William Orpen in 1919.  In some respects, however, there was a difference.  “Isabey,” said the Prince de Ligne, “is the Congress become painter.  Come!  His talk is as clever as his brush.”  But Sir William Orpen was so absorbed by his work that he never uttered a word during a sitting.  The contemporaries of the Paris Conference were luckier than their forebears of the Vienna Congress—­for they could behold the lifelike features of their benefactors in a cinema.  “It is understood,” wrote a Paris journal, “that the necessity of preserving a permanent record of the personalities and proceedings at the Peace Conference has not been lost sight of.  Very shortly a series of cinematographic films of the principal delegates and of the commissions is to be made on behalf of the British government, so that, side by side with the Treaty of Paris, posterity will be able to study the physiognomy of the men who made it."[15] In no case is it likely to forget them.

So the great heart of Paris, even to a greater degree than that of Vienna over a hundred years ago, beat and throbbed to cosmic measures while its brain worked busily at national, provincial, and economic questions.

Side by side with the good cheer prevalent that kept the eminent lawgivers of the Vienna Congress in buoyant spirits went the cost of living, prohibitive outside the charmed circle in consequence of the high and rising prices.

“Every article,” writes the Comte de la Garde, one of the chroniclers of the Vienna Congress, “but more especially fuel, soared to incredible heights.  The Austrian government found it necessary, in consequence, to allow all its officials supplements to their salaries and indemnities."[16] In Paris things were worse.  Greed and disorganization combined to make of the French capital a vast fleecing-machine.  The sums of money expended by foreigners in France during all that time and a much longer period is said to have exceeded the revenue from foreign trade.  There was hardly any coal, and even the wood fuel gave out now and again.  Butter was unknown.  Wine was bad and terribly dear.  A public conveyance could not be obtained unless one paid “double, treble, and quintuple fares and a gratuity.”  The demand was great and the supply sometimes abundant, but the authorities contrived to keep the two apart systematically.

THE COST OF LIVING

In no European country did the cost of living attain the height it reached in France in the year 1919.  Not only luxuries and comforts, but some of life’s necessaries, were beyond the reach of home-coming soldiers, and this was currently ascribed to the greed of merchants, the disorganization of transports, the strikes of workmen, and the supineness of the authorities, whose main care was to keep the nation tranquil by