_J'avais de la chance._ Because I am by profession a painter and a
writer. Whereas my very good friends, all of them deeply suspicious
characters, most of them traitors, without exception lucky to have the
use of their cervical vertebrae, etc., etc., could (with a few
exceptions) write not a word and read not a word; neither could they
_faire la photographie_ as Monsieur Auguste chucklingly called it (at
which I blushed with pleasure): worst of all, the majority of these dark
criminals who had been caught in nefarious plots against the honour of
France were totally unable to speak French. Curious thing. Often I
pondered the unutterable and inextinguishable wisdom of the police,
who--undeterred by facts which would have deceived less astute
intelligences into thinking that these men were either too stupid or too
simple to be connoisseurs of the art of betrayal--swooped upon their
helpless prey with that indescribable courage which is the prerogative of
policemen the world over, and bundled it into the La Fertes of that
mighty nation upon some, at least, of whose public buildings it seems to
me that I remember reading:

Liberte.

Egalite.

Fraternite.

And I wondered that France should have a use for Monsieur Auguste, who
had been arrested (because he was a Russian) when his fellow munition
workers struck and whose wife wanted him in Paris because she was hungry
and because their child was getting to look queer and white. Monsieur
Auguste, that desperate ruffian exactly five feet tall who--when he could
not keep from crying (one must think about one's wife or even one's child