Our rooms were sad, things moved back and covered over, blinds closed. I did not stay long in those rooms.
I did not try to see any one. It was not people I had wanted, only Paris. I started back early.
I want to remember all the things of the way back into the country; every thing of the fields, red warm ploughed earth and fresh-cut grass and tall clover; every thing of the forests, lights and mists and shadows, depths of moss and fern; every thing of the villages, stone stairways and hearth fires, the pot-au-feu, cows and people's living.
At Compiègne I stopped in the Grand' Place to read the news scrawled in chalk on the blackboard before the Mairie.
A sense of things that were happening came to me less from the words on the bulletin than from the faces of the people in the crowd before it.
Thursday, July 30th
Early in the morning a friend of mine telephoned from her people's château across the two forests, to tell me that her husband was arranging for her to take the babies to-morrow up to Paris.
He said that in '70 the Germans had come that way, by the grand old historic road, down upon Paris. The château had then passed through dreadful times. If there were war he would have to go out on the first day. He would have his babies then far off from the danger he did not, of course, believe in.
She told me all he said. She thought it was a great bother. Would we come over that afternoon to tea?