not dully or uncomprehendingly, but consciously, advisedly, and in silence; as if already foreseeing all it would cost to keep that flag and add to it others like it; forseeing the cost and accepting it.  There seemed to be men’s hearts even in the children of that crowd, and in the mothers whose weak arms held them up.  So they gazed and went on, and made way for others like them, who gazed in their turn and went on too.  All day the crowd renewed itself, and it was always the same crowd, intent and understanding and silent, who looked steadily at the flag, and knew what its being there meant.  That, in August, was the look of Paris.

III

FEBRUARY

February dusk on the Seine.  The boats are plying again, but they stop at nightfall, and the river is inky-smooth, with the same long weed-like reflections as in August.  Only the reflections are fewer and paler; bright lights are muffled everywhere.  The line of the quays is scarcely discernible, and the heights of the Trocadero are lost in the blur of night, which presently effaces even the firm tower-tops of Notre-Dame.  Down the damp pavements only a few street lamps throw their watery zigzags.  The shops are shut, and the windows above them thickly curtained.  The faces of the houses are all blind.

In the narrow streets of the Rive Gauche the darkness is even deeper, and the few scattered lights in courts or “cites” create effects of Piranesi-like mystery.  The gleam of the chestnut-roaster’s brazier at a street corner deepens the sense of an old adventurous Italy, and the darkness beyond seems full of cloaks and conspiracies.  I turn, on my way home, into an empty street between high garden walls, with a single light showing far off at its farther end.  Not a soul is in sight between me and that light:  my steps echo endlessly in the silence.  Presently a dim figure comes around the corner ahead of me.  Man or woman?  Impossible to tell till I overtake it.  The February fog deepens the darkness, and the faces one passes are indistinguishable.  As for the numbers of the houses, no one thinks of looking for them.  If you know the quarter you count doors from the corner, or try to puzzle out the familiar outline of a balcony or a pediment; if you are in a strange street, you must ask at the nearest tobacconist’s—­for, as for finding a policeman, a yard off you couldn’t tell him from your grandmother!

Such, after six months of war, are the nights of Paris; the days are less remarkable and less romantic.

Almost all the early flush and shiver of romance is gone; or so at least it seems to those who have watched the gradual revival of life.  It may appear otherwise to observers from other countries, even from those involved in the war.  After London, with all her theaters open, and her machinery of amusement almost unimpaired, Paris no doubt seems like a city on whom great issues weigh.  But to those who lived through