Orpen in 1919. In some respects, however, there was a difference.
"Isabey," said the Prince de Ligne, "is the Congress become painter.
Come! His talk is as clever as his brush." But Sir William Orpen was so
absorbed by his work that he never uttered a word during a sitting. The
contemporaries of the Paris Conference were luckier than their forebears
of the Vienna Congress--for they could behold the lifelike features of
their benefactors in a cinema. "It is understood," wrote a Paris
journal, "that the necessity of preserving a permanent record of the
personalities and proceedings at the Peace Conference has not been lost
sight of. Very shortly a series of cinematographic films of the
principal delegates and of the commissions is to be made on behalf of
the British government, so that, side by side with the Treaty of Paris,
posterity will be able to study the physiognomy of the men who made
it."[15] In no case is it likely to forget them.

So the great heart of Paris, even to a greater degree than that of
Vienna over a hundred years ago, beat and throbbed to cosmic measures
while its brain worked busily at national, provincial, and economic
questions.

Side by side with the good cheer prevalent that kept the eminent
lawgivers of the Vienna Congress in buoyant spirits went the cost of
living, prohibitive outside the charmed circle in consequence of the
high and rising prices.

"Every article," writes the Comte de la Garde, one of the chroniclers
of the Vienna Congress, "but more especially fuel, soared to incredible
heights. The Austrian government found it necessary, in consequence, to
allow all its officials supplements to their salaries and
indemnities."[16] In Paris things were worse. Greed and disorganization