underground are running at certain hours, and the irregular service must
continue until women, and men unfit for military service, replace the
men so suddenly called to the flag, and that will take time, especially
as so many of the organizers as well as conductors and engineers have
gone. It is the same with the big shops. However, that is not
important. No one is in the humor to buy anything except food.

It took me a long time to get about. I had to walk everywhere and my
friends live a long way apart, and I am a miserable walker. I found it
impossible to get back that night, so I took refuge with one of my
friends who is sailing on Saturday. Every one seems to be sailing on
that day, and most of them don't seem to care much how they get
away--"ameliorated steerage," as they call it, seems to be the fate of
many of them. I can assure you that I was glad enough to get back the
next day. Silent as it is here, it is no more so than Paris, and not
nearly so sad, for the change is not so great. Paris is no longer our
Paris, lovely as it still is.

I do not feel in the mood to do much. I work in my garden
intermittently, and the harvest bug (bete rouge we call him here) gets
in his work unintermittently on me. If things were normal this
introduction to the bete rouge would have seemed to me a tragedy. As it
is, it is unpleasantly unimportant. I clean house intermittently; read
intermittently; write letters intermittently. That reminds me, do read
Leon Daudet's "Fantomes et Vivantes"--the first volumes of his memoirs.
He is a terrible example of "Le fils a papa." I don't know why it is
that a vicious writer, absolutely lacking in reverence, can hold one's
attention so much better than a kindly one can. In this book Daudet
simply smashes idols, tears down illusions, dances gleefully on sacred
traditions, and I lay awake half the night reading him,--and forgot the