What wonderful people used to sit at the tables, in those windows!
What is there now on the raised platform of the music? The music used to be so gay. Did people ever really dance there?
How queer pain and grief seem to be, in this place that they have taken over. Was this really ever a place so gay and brilliant, that no other place of the world symbolized quite as fragile a thing?
Thursday, June 1st
Verdun, Verdun, Verdun. The great bells, that are not really bells, are still ringing and ringing. One hears them ringing through the streets of Paris, up and down, all night long. Out in the country they must be ringing, and ringing across all the fields and forests, and through the hills, and along all the roads and rivers, and to all the edges of the land.
Even if they were dirges, tolling, they would yet always have been triumphant bells.
The Queen: To her
A beautiful thing has happened in a beautiful hospital. Going to that hospital from mine, what seems most beautiful about it, and very strange, is its peace. It is so quiet. The little gentle nuns move softly and have sweet low voices. The women who work there are all of them women who choose to serve, and they serve lovingly. One feels there quietness and sympathy, and something that I think must be just the love of God. My hospital seems like a nightmare in that beautiful place.
One day there came to visit that beautiful hospital a very gentle lady, than whose story there is none more tragic in the whole world.
She is a queen who lives in exile. She has known every sorrow that a woman can know, and that a queen can know, every one. And she lives, with the memory of her sorrows, in exile.