other while they walked in the shadows, they wept
gently with tenderness. The ground crackled underfoot with the broken
glass and the sidewalk was bloody. Death and the night were lying in
ambush round about their love. But above their heads like a magic circle
beyond the embrasure of the two black walls in the narrow street, as
through a chimney, the heart of a star throbbed against the deep pulpy
grain of the sky....

Lo and behold! The voices of the bells sing out, lights are rekindled
and the streets are animate once more. The air is free of foes. Paris
breathes again. Death has flown.

* * * * *

THEY had come to the day preceding Palm Sunday. Every day they saw each
other for hours together; and they did not even try to hide themselves
any more. They no longer had any accounts to render the world. By such
gossamer threads were they attached to it and so near to breaking!--Two
days before, the German grand offensive had been started. The wave
advanced along a front of nearly a hundred kilometers. Fast following
emotions caused the City to vibrate: the explosion of Courneuve, which
had shaken Paris like an earthquake; the incessant air-bomb alarms which
broke in on sleep and wore out nerves. And on this morning of Saturday
after a troubled night all those who were not able to close an eyelid
until very late were roused again by the thunder of the mysterious
cannon buried in the far distance, which, beyond the Somme, launched
death in trial shots, as if from another planet. In the course of the
earlier shots, which were attributed to the coming back of the aerial
Gothas, people had taken refuge in a docile way inside their cellars;
but a danger that continues becomes in time a habit to which life
accommodates itself; and the peril is not far from turning out an
attraction even, when the risks run are common to all and are not too
great. Besides, the weather was too lovely; it was a pity to bury one's
self alive: before noon all the world was out of doors; and the streets
and gardens, the terraces of the cafes had a festival air on this
radiant and burning afternoon.

It was this afternoon Pierre and Luce had selected to pass, far from the
crowd, in the forest of Chaville. For the past ten days they had existed
in an uplifted calm. Profound peace at the heart, and nerves on edge.
They had a feeling like existing on an islet, about which rushed a
frantic current: a vertigo of sight and hearing carried them aw