It is an old saying that all good Americans go to Paris when they die.
Most of them take no chances and prefer to visit it while they are alive.
Before this war, if the visitor was disappointed, it was the fault of
the visitor, not of Paris. She was all things to all men. To some she
offered triumphal arches, statues, paintings; to others by day racing,
and by night Maxims and the Rat Mort. Some loved her for the book-
stalls along the Seine and ateliers of the Latin Quarter; some for her
parks, forests, gardens, and boulevards; some because of the
Luxembourg; some only as a place where everybody was smiling,
happy, and polite, where they were never bored, where they were
always young, where the lights never went out and there was no early
call. Should they to-day revisit her they would find her grown grave
and decorous, and going to bed at sundown, but still smiling bravely,
still polite.

You cannot wipe out Paris by removing two million people and closing
Cartier's and the Café de Paris. There still remains some hundred
miles of boulevards, the Seine and her bridges, the Arc de Triomphe,
with the sun setting behind it, and the Gardens of the Tuilleries. You
cannot send them to the store-house or wrap them in linen. And the
spirit of the people of Paris you cannot crush nor stampede.

Between Paris in peace and Paris to-day the most striking difference
is lack of population. Idle rich, the employees of the government, and
tourists of all countries are missing. They leave a great emptiness.
When you walk the streets you feel either that you are up very early,
before any one is awake, or that you are in a boom town from which
the boom has departed.

On almost every one of the noted shops "Fermé" is written, or it has