What are the Parisians doing meanwhile?  For one thing—­and the sign is a good one—­they are refilling the shops, and especially, of course, the great “department stores.”  In the early war days there was no stranger sight than those deserted palaces, where one strayed between miles of unpurchased wares in quest of vanished salesmen.  A few clerks, of course, were left:  enough, one would have thought, for the rare purchasers who disturbed their meditations.  But the few there were did not care to be disturbed:  they lurked behind their walls of sheeting, their bastions of flannelette, as if ashamed to be discovered.  And when one had coaxed them out they went through the necessary gestures automatically, as if mournfully wondering that any one should care to buy.  I remember once, at the Louvre, seeing the whole force of a “department,” including the salesman I was trying to cajole into showing me some medicated gauze, desert their posts simultaneously to gather about a motor-cyclist in a muddy uniform who had dropped in to see his pals with tales from the front.  But after six months the pressure of normal appetites has begun to reassert itself—­and to shop is one of the normal appetites of woman.  I say “shop” instead of buy, to distinguish between the dull purchase of necessities and the voluptuousness of acquiring things one might do without.  It is evident that many of the thousands now fighting their way into the great shops must be indulging in the latter delight.  At a moment when real wants are reduced to a minimum, how else account for the congestion of the department store?  Even allowing for the immense, the perpetual buying of supplies for hospitals and work-rooms, the incessant stoking-up of the innumerable centres of charitable production, there is no explanation of the crowding of the other departments except the fact that woman, however valiant, however tried, however suffering and however self-denying, must eventually, in the long run, and at whatever cost to her pocket and her ideals, begin to shop again.  She has renounced the theatre, she denies herself the teo-rooms, she goes apologetically and furtively (and economically) to concerts—­but the swinging doors of the department stores suck her irresistibly into their quicksand of remnants and reductions.

No one, in this respect, would wish the look of Paris to be changed.  It is a good sign to see the crowds pouring into the shops again, even though the sight is less interesting than that of the other crowds streaming daily—­and on Sunday in immensely augmented numbers—­across the Pont Alexandre III to the great court of the Invalides where the German trophies are displayed.  Here the heart of France beats with a richer blood, and something of its glow passes into foreign veins as one watches the perpetually renewed throngs face to face with the long triple row of German guns.  There are few in those throngs to whom one of the deadly pack has not dealt a blow; there are personal losses, lacerating