n so suddenly called to the flag, and that will take time, especially
as so many of the organizers as well as conductors and engineers have
gone. It is the same with the big shops. However, that is not
important. No one is in the humor to buy anything except food.

It took me a long time to get about. I had to walk everywhere and my
friends live a long way apart, and I am a miserable walker. I found it
impossible to get back that night, so I took refuge with one of my
friends who is sailing on Saturday. Every one seems to be sailing on
that day, and most of them don't seem to care much how they get
away--"ameliorated steerage," as they call it, seems to be the fate of
many of them. I can assure you that I was glad enough to get back the
next day. Silent as it is here, it is no more so than Paris, and not
nearly so sad, for the change is not so great. Paris is no longer our
Paris, lovely as it still is.

I do not feel in the mood to do much. I work in my garden
intermittently, and the harvest bug (bete rouge we call him here) gets
in his work unintermittently on me. If things were normal this
introduction to the bete rouge would have seemed to me a tragedy. As it
is, it is unpleasantly unimportant. I clean house intermittently; read
intermittently; write letters intermittently. That reminds me, do read
Leon Daudet's "Fantomes et Vivantes"--the first volumes of his memoirs.
He is a terrible example of "Le fils a papa." I don't know why it is
that a vicious writer, absolutely lacking in reverence, can hold one's
attention so much better than a kindly one can. In this book Daudet
simply smashes idols, tears down illusions, dances gleefully on sacred
traditions, and I lay awake half the night reading him,--and forgot the
advancing Germans. The book comes down only to 1880, so most of the men
he writes about are dead, and most of them, like Victor Hugo, for
example, come off very sadly.

Well, I am reconciled to living a long time now,--much longer than I
wanted to before this awful thing came to pass,--just to see all the
mighty good that will result from the struggle. I am convinced, no
matter what happens, of the final result. I am sure even now, when the
Germans have actually crossed the frontier, that France will not be
crushed this time, even if she be beaten down to Bordeaux, with her back
against the Bay of Biscay. Besides, did you ever know the English
bulldog to let go? But it is the horror of su