It is certainly impossible in hurried notes of this kind to try and analyse Paris in 1915. It is a subject fit for treatment only in a book, and a large book, too. The new wave of sincerity and self-sacrifice has swept away habits and men, affectation and vices; and one feels that in the future Paris will never again be quite the same as before the war.
Forty-five years ago the siege destroyed for ever the society Zola has snapshotted for us in the "Rougon-Macquard." Probably Paris will come out of the present crisis purified of the arrivistes, politicians, snobs, and pseudo-artists that we all know, thanks to French literature and the French theatre of to-day.
Then there will be room for a new society, possibly as bad as the former, and, for a few writers, not quite as entertaining to write about.
CHAPTER X HOLLAND
During my war wanderings I crossed Holland several times, and each time I spent a few days there. I did this because of the difficulty of getting the signatures of the different foreign Consuls, because of the irregular service run by the Channel boats, and because I wanted to witness the change which, little by little, came over Dutch public opinion and altered the Germanophile tendencies of the early days of the war to the sympathy for the Entente of the last months.
This does not mean to say that Holland was wildly pro-German in August and is enthusiastically pro-British now.
Holland is essentially pro-Holland, for can we blame her for this attitude, which has been christened by an eminent writer of a neutral country "sacred egoism"?