It was late, and when we arrived at the restaurant in the rue Montmartre, it was closed and guarded by police.
“What has happened?” I asked, and some one in the crowd answered with intense emotion:
“Jaurès is assassinated! He was shot there, as he sat at dinner.”
He was shot from behind a curtain, in a plush-covered seat where often I had sat, by some young man who believed that, in killing Jaurès, he was helping to secure the victory of France.
I saw his funeral cortège. They gave him a great funeral. Ministers of France, men of all parties, dignitaries of the Church, marched behind his coffin, and behind the red flags which were blown by a strong wind. It was not love for him, but fear of the people which caused that demonstration at his burial. It was an appeal for that Union Sacrée of all classes by which alone the menace to the life of France might be resisted. There need have been no fear. There was hardly a man in France who did not offer his life as a willing sacrifice, in that war which seemed not only against France and her friends, but against civilization itself and all humanity. So the poilus believed, with simple faith, unshaken by any doubt—in the peaceful policy of France and the unprovoked aggression of Germany.
The restaurant in which Jaurès was killed—the Croissant, with the sign of the Turkish Crescent—was one of the few in Paris open all night for the use of journalists who slept by day. Needless to say, other night birds, even more disreputable, found this place a pleasant sanctuary in the wee sma’ hours. I went there often for some meal which might have been dinner, lunch, or breakfast, any time between 2 and 5 A.M. I was with my colleague, Henri Bourdin, during the Italian war in Tripoli.
Our job was to receive long dispatches over the telephone, from Italian correspondents, and transmit them by telephone to London. It was a maddening task, because after very few minutes of conversation, the telephone cut us off from one of the Italian cities, or from London, and only by curses and prayers and passionate pleading to lady operators could we establish contact again.
Though the war in Tripoli was a trivial episode, wiped out in our memory by another kind of war, the Italian correspondents wrote millions of words about every affair of outposts—all of which streamed over the telephone in florid Italian. I had a Sicilian who translated that Italian into frightful French, which I, in turn, translated into somewhat less frightful English, and conveyed by telephone to London.
It went on hour after hour, day after day, and night after night, especially from a man named Bevione. I hated his eloquence so much that I made a solemn vow to kill him, if ever I met him in the flesh.... I met him in Bulgaria, during another war, but he was so charming that I forgave him straightway for all the agony he had inflicted on me. Besides, undoubtedly, he would have killed me first.
The Sicilian was a marvel. Between the telephone calls he narrated all his love affairs since the age of fourteen, and they were innumerable. During the telephone calls, it was he who pleaded with the lady operators not to cut him off, or to get his call again. He punctuated every sentence with a kiss. “Madonna!... Bacio!... Bacio!” He gave these unknown beauties (perhaps they were as ugly as sin!) a million kisses over the telephone wires, and by this frenzy of amorous demonstration seriously disturbed the Paris exchange, and held up all our rivals.