The night was full of great bells booming, Verdun, Verdun, Verdun. And yet there were no bells.
I never saw a darker morning come to Paris. The darkness came into the room, thick and wet and cold.
I had my breakfast by firelight.
The crows are back already in the garden; the bare black treetops were full of them this dark morning, and not one of them stirred or made a sound.
The lamps of the trams were lighted, and the lamps of the streets and quays and bridges.
The river is very high, the trees of the margins stand drowning.
The snow of these last days has stayed on in places, as yellow as fog and smoke.
In the old great beautiful courtyards of the hospital the snow is quite deep, on the roofs and ledges of red brick and grey stone, and on the huge square old cobbles, and on the black tracery of trees and bushes and of the vines along the walls.
The buds, that were soft and green last week, are black now; I was afraid to go and touch them and find them frozen hard.