_Sunday, August 2._


This is the first day of mobilization. I looked out of the dining-room
window of my apartment at Number 8 Rue Theodule-Ribot at four this
morning. Already the streets resounded with the buzz, whirl, and horns
of motor-cars speeding along the Boulevard de Courcelles, and the
excited conversation of men and women gathered in groups on the
sidewalks. It was warm, rather cloudy weather. Thermometer, 20 degrees
centigrade, with light, southwesterly breezes. My servant, Felicien,
summoned by the mobilization notices calling out the reservists, was
getting ready to join his regiment, the Thirty-second Dragoons. His
young wife and child had arrived the day before from Brittany. My
housekeeper, Sophie, who was born in Baden-Baden and came to Paris with
her mother when a girl of eight, is in great anxiety lest she be
expelled, owing to her German nationality.

I walked to the chancellery of the American Embassy, Number 5 Rue de
Chaillot, where fifty stranded Americans were vainly asking the clerks
how they could get away from Paris and how they could have their letters
of credit cashed. Three stray Americans drove up in a one-horse cab. I
took the cab, after it had been discharged, and went to the Ministry of
Foreign Affairs, where I expected to find our Ambassador, Mr. Myron T.
Herrick. M. Viviani, the President of the Council of Ministers and
Minister of Foreign Affairs, was there awaiting the arrival of Baron de
Schoen, the German Ambassador, who had made an appointment for eleven
o'clock. It was now half-past eleven, and his German excellency had not
yet come.

I watched the arrival of the St. Cyr cadets at the Gare d'Orsay station