days and weeks for an audience of the greater plenipotentiaries, and some of them sued in vain.  Russian diplomatists were refused permission to travel in France or were compelled to undergo more than average discomfort and delay there.  More than once I sat down to lunch or dinner with brilliant commensals, one of whom was understood to have made away with a well-known personage in order to rid the state of a bad administrator, and another had, at a secret Vehmgericht in Turkey, condemned a friend of mine, now a friend of his, to be assassinated.

In Paris, this temporary capital of the world, one felt the repercussion of every event, every incident of moment wheresoever it might have occurred.  To reside there while the Conference was sitting was to occupy a comfortable box in the vastest theater the mind of men has ever conceived.  From this rare coign of vantage one could witness soul-gripping dramas of human history, the happenings of years being compressed within the limits of days.  The revolution in Portugal, the massacre of Armenians, Bulgaria’s atrocities, the slaughter of the inhabitants of Saratoff and Odessa, the revolt of the Koreans—­all produced their effect in Paris, where official and unofficial exponents of the aims and ambitions, religions and interests that unite or divide mankind were continually coming or going, working aboveground or burrowing beneath the surface.

It was within a few miles of the place where I sat at table with the brilliant company alluded to above that a few individuals of two different nationalities, one of them bearing, it was said, a well-known name, hatched the plot that sent Portugal’s strong man, President Sidonio Paes, to his last account and plunged that ill-starred land into chaotic confusion.  The plan was discovered by the Portuguese military attache, who warned the President himself and the War Minister.  But Sidonio Paes, quixotic and foolhardy, refused to take or brook precautions.  A few weeks later the assassin, firing three shots, had no difficulty in taking aim, but none of them took effect.  The reason was interesting:  so determined were the conspirators to leave nothing to chance, they had steeped the cartridges in a poisonous preparation, whereby they injured the mechanism of the revolver, which, in consequence, hung fire.  But the adversaries of the reform movement which the President had inaugurated again tried and planned another attempt, and Sidonio Paes, who would not be taught prudence, was duly shot, and his admirable work undone[2] by a band of semi-Bolshevists.

Less than six months later it was rumored that a number of specially prepared bombs from a certain European town had been sent to Moscow for the speedy removal of Lenin.  The casual way in which these and kindred matters were talked of gave one the measure of the change that had come over the world since the outbreak of the war.  There was nobody left in Europe whose death, violent or peaceful, would have made much of an impression on the dulled sensibilities of the reading public.  All values had changed, and that of human life had fallen low.