“That is nothing,” he said vigorously.  “It is Christmas, and I must have a chat with you.  We cannot chat here.  I have not had a true little chat with you since you were ill.  You will come with me to a restaurant for lunch.”

She laughed.  “And the lunch of my lodgers?”

“You will serve it a little earlier.  We will go out immediately afterwards, and we will return in time for you to prepare dinner.  It is quite simple.”

She shook her head.  “You are mad,” she said crossly.

“It is necessary that I should offer you something,” he went on scowling.  “You comprehend me?  I wish you to lunch with me to-day.  I demand it, and you are not going to refuse me.”

He was very close to her in the little kitchen, and he spoke fiercely, bullyingly, exactly as she had spoken to him when insisting that he should live on credit with her for a while.

“You are very rude,” she parried.

“If I am rude, it is all the same to me,” he held out uncompromisingly.  “You will lunch with me; I hold to it.”

“How can I be dressed?” she protested.

“That does not concern me.  Arrange that as you can.”

It was the most curious invitation to a Christmas dinner imaginable.

At a quarter past twelve they issued forth side by side, heavily clad, into the mournful streets.  The sky, slate-coloured, presaged snow.  The air was bitterly cold, and yet damp.  There were no fiacres in the little three-cornered place which forms the mouth of the Rue Clausel.  In the Rue Notre Dame de Lorette, a single empty omnibus was toiling up the steep glassy slope, the horses slipping and recovering themselves in response to the whip-cracking, which sounded in the streets as in an empty vault.  Higher up, in the Rue Fontaine, one of the few shops that were open displayed this announcement:  “A large selection of cheeses for New Year’s gifts.”  They laughed.

“Last year at this moment,” said Chirac, “I was thinking of only one thing—­the masked ball at the opera.  I could not sleep after it.  This year even the churches, are not open.  And you?”

She put her lips together.  “Do not ask me,” she said.

They proceeded in silence.

“We are triste, we others,” he said.  “But the Prussians, in their trenches, they cannot be so gay, either!  Their families and their Christmas trees must be lacking to them.  Let us laugh!”

The Place Blanche and the Boulevard de Clichy were no more lively than the lesser streets and squares.  There was no life anywhere, scarcely a sound; not even the sound of cannon.  Nobody knew anything; Christmas had put the city into a lugubrious trance of hopelessness.  Chirac took Sophia’s arm across the Place Blanche, and a few yards up the Rue Lepic he stopped at a small restaurant, famous among the initiated, and known as “The Little Louis.”  They entered, descending by two steps into a confined and sombrely picturesque interior.