alone
here!"

I was glad to have added a little item of history to that old mansion
where the Duc de Noailles lived, where Lafayette was married, and
where Marie Antoinette saw old ghost faces--the dead faces of
laughing girls--when she passed on her way to the scaffold. It was a
queer incident in its story when three English journalists opened it
after the great flight from Paris.

Early that morning, after a snatch of sleep, we three friends walked
up the Avenue des Champs Elysees and back again from the Arc de
Triomphe. The autumn foliage was beginning to fall, and so
wonderfully quiet was the scene that almost one might have heard a
leaf rustle to the ground. Not a child scampered under the trees or
chased a comrade round the Petit Guignol. No women with twinkling
needles sat on the stone seats. No black-haired student fondled the
hand of a pretty couturiere. No honest bourgeois with a fat stomach
walked slowly along the pathway meditating upon the mystery of life
which made some men millionaires. Not a single carriage nor any
kind of vehicle, except one solitary bicycle, came down the road
where on normal days there is a crowd of light-wheeled traffic.

The Philosopher was silent, thinking tremendous things, with his
sallow face transfigured by some spiritual emotion. It was when we
passed the Palais des Beaux-Arts that he stood still and raised two
fingers to the blue sky, like a priest blessing a kneeling multitude.

"Thanks be to the Great Power!" he said, with the solemn piety of an
infidel who knows God only as the spirit is revealed on lonely waters
and above uprising seas, and in the life of flowers and beasts, and in
the rare pity of men.

We did not laugh at him. Only those who have known Paris and loved
her beauty can understand the thrill that came to us on that morning
in September when we had expected to hear the roar of great guns
around her, and to see the beginning of a ghastly destruction. Paris
was still safe! By some kind of miracle the enemy had not yet touched
her beauty nor tramped into her streets. How sharp and clear were all
the buildings under that cloudless sky! Spears of light flashed from
the brazen-winged horses above Alexander's bridge, and the dome
of the Invalides was a golden crown above a snow-white palace. The
Seine poured in a burnished stream beneath all the bridges and far
away beyond the houses and the island trees, and all the picture of
Paris etched by a master-hand