The sound came very near indeed. Kendall could not see what caused this, but it was an anti-aircraft gun mounted on a truck which had come to a stop at an open space at the mouth of the Avenue de l’Opéra and was industriously blazing away at the moon.... Kendall wished he were dressed and down-stairs with company at hand; he would even have consented to descend into an abri, an experience which had not so far been his. He wondered what an abri looked like. At any rate, there were plenty of them, for nearly every building in Paris was defaced by a poster announcing, “Abri, 30 places.... Abri, 60 places.”
The sound, the terrific crashings and retchings and tearing bursts of tremendous potentiality, gradually ebbed, then surged up with renewed vigor for a time, then subsided again, and, after a series of fitful outbursts, ceased.... But the light which glowed and danced over the roofs from the distant Faubourg St.-Antoine silhouetting the tangle of chimney-pots on the Palais Royal did not subside. The fire burned on....
Kendall returned to bed—and slept.
If that raid had made Kendall Ware fearful, what had it done to the teeming populations of the Faubourg St.-Antoine, to the closely packed poor who massed about the Bastille, and to the eastward of this monument to an event that owed its being to their own ancestors, to those who used to dwell in St.-Antoine, mother of revolutions!
Next noon Bert Stanley and Kendall lunched at a table on the sidewalk of a little café on the Place de Ternes and then walked down the Boulevard de Courcelles a few hundred feet or so to the number that had been given Bert as a place where a desirable furnished apartment was to let.
They entered through an archway and rang the bell of the concierge’s apartment. A pleasant, motherly, smiling old woman came to the door and bowed them in. It was not difficult to make her understand that they were in search of an appartement meublé, whereupon she jangled a huge bunch of keys and invited them to follow her up four flights of stairs, and ushered them into the rooms that were for hire.... The apartment of five rooms was to be had for three hundred francs a month, with twenty francs extra for the concierge. Yes, a cook could be obtained, and madame would undertake to have her on hand when needed. Her wages would be seventy francs a month. Everything was very easy.
“Where is the bath?” asked Kendall.
“Oh, monsieur, we have a bath. Of a surety. It is but three blocks away....”
So it was arranged. They were to move in when they desired, and they left the building feeling quite like family men and proprietors. They discussed the apartment from all angles and were exceedingly pleased with themselves for accomplishing it....
“All France needs,” said Bert, quoting some epigrammatic American friend, “is open plumbing to make it the greatest country in the world.”