"A great misfortune has overtaken us," said a German officer the
next day. It was true. Greater than he suspected.

The horror of what might have happened, the splendour of what did
happen, mingle in the awed mind as you look over the city from the
balcony. The city escaped. And the event seems vaster and more
sublime than the mind can bear.

The streets of Paris have now a perpetual aspect of Sunday
morning; only the sound of church-bells is lacking. A few of the taxi-
cabs have come back; but all the auto-buses without exception are
away behind the front. So that the traffic is forced underground,
where the railways are manned by women. A horse-bus, dug up out
of the past, jogs along the most famous boulevard in the world like a
country diligence, with a fat, laughing peasant-woman clinging to its
back-step and collecting fare-moneys into the immense pocket of
her black apron. Many of the most expensive and unnecessary
shops are shut; the others wait with strange meekness for custom.
But the provision shops and all the sturdy cheap shops of the poor
go on naturally, without any self-consciousness, just as usual. The
pavements show chiefly soldiers in a wild, new variety of uniforms,
from pale blue to black, imitated and adapted from all sources, and
especially from England--and widows and orphans. The number of
young girls and women in mourning, in the heavy mourning affected
by the Latin race, is enormous. This crape is the sole casualty list
permitted by the French War Office. It suffices. Supreme grief is
omnipresent; but it is calm, cheerful, smiling. Widows glance at each
other with understanding, like initiates of a secret and powerful
society.