They and their principal European guests made some feeble attempts to vie with the Vienna of 1814-15 in elegance and taste if not in pomp and splendor.  But the general effect was marred by the element of the nouveaux-riches and nouveaux-pauvres which was prominent, if not predominant.  A few of the great and would-be great ladies outbade one another in the effort to renew the luxury and revive the grace of the past.  But the atmosphere was numbing, their exertions half-hearted, and the smile of youth and beauty was cold like the sheen of winter ice.  The shadow of death hung over the institutions and survivals of the various civilizations and epochs which were being dissolved in the common melting-pot, and even the man in the street was conscious of its chilling influence.  Life in the capital grew agitated, fitful, superficial, unsatisfying.  Its gaiety was forced—­something between a challenge to the destroyer and a sad farewell to the past and present.  Men were instinctively aware that the morrow was fraught with bitter surprises, and they deliberately adopted the maxim, “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.”  None of these people bore on their physiognomies the dignified impress of the olden time, barring a few aristocratic figures from the Faubourg St.-Germain, who looked as though they had only to don the perukes and the distinctive garb of the eighteenth century to sit down to table with Voltaire and the Marquise du Chatelet.  Here and there, indeed, a coiffure, a toilet, the bearing, the gait, or the peculiar grace with which a robe was worn reminded one that this or that fair lady came of a family whose life-story in the days of yore was one of the tributaries to the broad stream of European history.  But on closer acquaintanceship, especially at conversational tournaments, one discovered that Nature, constant in her methods, distributes more gifts of beauty than of intellect.

Festive banquets, sinful suppers, long-spun-out lunches were as frequent and at times as Lucullan as in the days of the Regency.  The outer, coarser attributes of luxury abounded in palatial restaurants, hotels, and private mansions; but the refinement, the grace, the brilliant conversation even of the Paris of the Third Empire were seen to be subtle branches of a lost art.  The people of the armistice were weary and apprehensive—­weary of the war, weary of politics, weary of the worn-out framework of existence, and filled with a vague, nameless apprehension of the unknown.  They feared that in the chaotic slough into which they had fallen they had not yet touched bottom.  None the less, with the exception of fervent Catholics and a number of earnest sectarians, there were few genuine seekers after anything essentially better.

Not only did the general atmosphere of Paris undergo radical changes, together with its population, but the thoroughfares, many of them, officially changed their names since the outbreak of the war.