* * *
Paris, February.
"Paris is desperately dull," said a club acquaintance whose weakness it is to affect a blasé manner. He made the remark to me just before I left London, he being newly returned from a tour in France. "Nothing on; nothing left of what we call Paris! It is really the most boring place on earth."
So it would be for most people, I am afraid—people who have always refused to see Paris as it is, but who pretend to see it as a town in which pleasure and habits, life and morals, are abnormal, different, and possibly opposite to those of all other places on earth.
Such people have never seen—or, at any rate, never understood Paris. They have only seen the gay if somewhat professional, amusing if somewhat vulgar, mask the capital of France shows to most foreigners who do not trouble or who do not wish to see her real face.
At the moment of the declaration of war this mask suddenly dropped, and Paris appeared to the few foreigners who were there at that time to be completely altered; anxiety instead of cynicism; patriotism instead of that curious pose of French people which makes them enjoy running down their rulers and reading about Government scandals.
All these sentiments, which were either asleep or kept concealed because they were thought to be much too vieux jeux, came out again. The motto of Republican France, Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité (which appears so often on the buildings of Paris), ceased to sound ironic and anachronistic.
Maybe all this seems extremely boring to the more or less real viveur, who cannot conceive Paris without cafés du nuit and absinthe, shocking little theatres, and all the rest of Parisian pleasures which are by no means only Parisian nowadays, and which, in any case, are mostly organised for foreigners and by foreigners.
To my eyes, Paris has never been so wonderful a city as since the war broke out.
I saw it astonished and overrun by the mobilising troops at the beginning of the war; ready to fight the invaders and to again undergo the calamities of 1871, when the investment of the town appeared unavoidable; full of hope when the tide of the German advance was suddenly stopped, not a day too soon; decided to make all efforts and sacrifices to end the war as soon and as gloriously as possible now that everybody in France is certain of final victory.