The broken-down fiacre dragged through scarcely lit streets that were all empty, and across the great Place, where nothing stirred, and over the bridge of the river, that was as lonely as a river of the wilderness. And then there was my home, where I must dream, all the nights, of homeless people, thousands and thousands of homeless people.
London, November
I go to the little Soho church of Our Lady of France, to just stay there, not praying or anything.
I go just to be with a people who are far from their country in her great need.
Most of them are very humble people. There is a smell of poverty always in the little dark church. They are people to whom "home" can mean only some small poor place and things, a thatched cabin, a vineyard, a mansarde over a cobbled street.
They kneel in the little dark church and sing—
Sauvez, sauvez la France
Au nom du Sacré Cœur—
while alien feet tread hearts down into the stains and bruises of the roads between shattered poplar trees and thatched roofs burning.