waiter seized it as though it were a rare and
wonderful thing, and then gave me all my change in paper, made up
of new five franc notes issued by the Government. In the evening an
official notice was posted on the walls prohibiting the export of grain
and flour. People stared at it and said, "That means war!" Another
sign of coming events, more impressive to the imagination of the
Parisian, was the sudden dwindling in size of the evening
newspapers. They were reduced to two sheets, and in some cases to
a single broadside, owing to the possibility of a famine in paper if war
broke out and cut off the supplies of Paris while the railways were
being used for the mobilization of troops.

7

The city was very quiet and outwardly as calm as on any day in
August. But beneath this normal appearance of things there was a
growing anxiety and people's nerves were so on edge that any
sudden sound would make a man start on his chair on the terrasse
outside the cafe restaurant. Paris was afraid of itself. What uproar or
riot or criminal demonstration might not burst suddenly into this
tranquillity? There were evil elements lurking in the low quarters.
Apaches and anarchists might be inflamed with the madness of blood
which excites men in time of war. The socialists and syndicalists
might refuse to fight, and fight in maintaining their refusal. Some
political crime might set all those smouldering passions on fire and
make a hell in the streets. So people waited and watched the crowds
and listened to the pulse-beat of Paris.

The sharp staccato of revolver shots heard in the rue Montmartre on
the night of July 31 caused a shudder to pass through the city, as
though they were the signal for a criminal plot which might destroy
France by dividing it while the enemy was on the frontier.

I did not hear those shots but only the newspaper reports which
followed them almost as loudly in the soul of Paris. And yet it was only
the accidental meeting of a friend which diverted my attention of
dining in the Croissant Restaurant in which the crime took place at
the very hour when I should have been there. Some years before in
Paris, when France was in the throes of a railway strike which
developed almost to the verge of revolution, I had often gone to the
Croissant at two, three or four in the morning, because it had police
privileges to keep open all night for the comfort of journalists. Other
night birds had found this roost--ladies wh