in Stockbridge, Mass., or Springfield Illinois, Empty its hotels and
nobody but sightseers and people interested in the White Way would
know the difference.

The other Paris, making ready to stand siege, with the Government
gone to Bordeaux with all the gold of the Bank of France, with the
enemy's guns audible in the suburbs and old men cutting down trees
and tearing up paving-stones to barricade the streets--never had that
Paris been more alive. It was after the death of the old and the birth of
the new Paris that an elderly man, seeing a group of women at tea in
one of the few fashionable refreshment places which were open,
stopped and said:

"Can you find nothing better than that to do, ladies, in a time like
this?"

And the Latin temperament gave the world a surprise. Those who
judged France by her playful Paris thought that if a Frenchman
gesticulated so emotionally in the course of everyday existence, he
would get overwhelmingly excited in a great emergency. One
evening, after the repulse of the Germans on the Marne, I saw two
French reserves dining in a famous restaurant where, at this time of
the year, four out of five diners ordinarily would be foreigners
surveying one another in a study of Parisian life. They were big, rosy-
cheeked men, country born and bred, belonging to the new France of
sports, of action, of temperate habits, and they were joking about
dining there just as two sturdy Westerners might about dining in a
deserted Broadway. The foreigners and demimondaines were
noticeably absent; a pair of Frenchmen were in the place of the
absentees; and after their dinner they smoked their black brier-root