The Paris of the Conference ceased to be the capital of France.  It became a vast cosmopolitan caravanserai teeming with unwonted aspects of life and turmoil, filled with curious samples of the races, tribes, and tongues of four continents who came to watch and wait for the mysterious to-morrow.  The intensity of life there was sheer oppressive; to the tumultuous striving of the living were added the silent influences of the dead.  For it was also a trysting-place for the ghosts of sovereignties and states, militarisms and racial ambitions, which were permitted to wander at large until their brief twilight should be swallowed up in night.  The dignified Turk passionately pleaded for Constantinople, and cast an imploring look on the lone Armenian whose relatives he had massacred, and who was then waiting for political resurrection.  Persian delegates wandered about like souls in pain, waiting to be admitted through the portals of the Conference Paradise.  Beggared Croesus passed famishing Lucullus in the street, and once mighty viziers shivered under threadbare garments in the biting frost as they hurried over the crisp February snow.  Waning and waxing Powers, vacant thrones, decaying dominations had, each of them, their accusers, special pleaders, and judges, in this multitudinous world-center on which tragedy, romance, and comedy rained down potent spells.  For the Conference city was also the clearing-house of the Fates, where the accounts of a whole epoch, the deeds and misdeeds of an exhausted civilization, were to be balanced and squared.

Here strange yet familiar figures, survivals from the past, started up at every hand’s turn and greeted one with smiles or sighs.  Men on whom I last set eyes when we were boys at school, playing football together in the field or preparing lessons in the school-room, would stop me in the street on their way to represent nations or peoples whose lives were out of chime, or to inaugurate the existence of new republics.  One face I shall never forget.  It was that of the self-made temporary dictator of a little country whose importance was dwindling to the dimensions of a footnote in the history of the century.  I had been acquainted with him personally in the halcyon day of his transient glory.  Like his picturesque land, he won the immortality of a day, was courted and subsidized by competing states in turn, and then suddenly cast aside like a sucked orange.  Then he sank into the depths of squalor.  He was eloquent, resourceful, imaginative, and brimful of the poetry of untruth.  One day through the asphalt streets of Paris he shuffled along in the procession of the doomed, with wan face and sunken eyes, wearing a tragically mean garb.  And soon after I learned that he had vanished unwept into eternal oblivion.