And then you become conscious of your evening dress and generally dissolute and out-of-place air, and hurry home through the bright sunlight to put out your sputtering candle and to creep shamefacedly to bed.
III
PARIS IN MOURNING
THE news of the assassination of President Carnot at Lyons reached Paris and the Café de la Paix at ten o'clock on Sunday night. What is told at the Café de la Paix is not long in traversing the length of the boulevards, and in crossing the Place de la Concorde to the cafés chantants and the public gardens in the Champs Élysées, so that by eleven o'clock on the night of the 24th of June "all Paris" was acquainted with the fact that the President of the Republic had been cruelly murdered.
There are many people in America who remember the night when President Garfield died, and how, when his death was announced from the stage of the different theatres, the audience in each theatre rose silently as one man and walked quietly out. To them the President's death was not unexpected; it did not stun them, it came with no sudden shock, but it was not necessary to announce to them that the performance for that evening was at an end. They did not leave because the manager had rung down the curtain, but because at such a time they felt more at ease with themselves outside of a place of amusement than in one.
This was not the feeling of the Parisians when President Carnot died. On that night no lights were put out in the cafés; no leader's bâton rapped for a sudden silence in the Jardin de Paris, and the Parisians continued to drink their bock and to dance, or to watch others dance, even though they knew that at that same moment Madame Carnot in a special train was hurrying through the night to reach the death-bed of her husband. It is never possible to tell which way the French people will jump, or how they will act at a crisis. They have no precedents of conduct; they are as likely to do the characteristic thing, which in itself is different from what people of any other nation would do under like circumstances, as the uncharacteristic thing, which is even more unexpected. They complicate history by behaving with perfect tranquillity when other people would become excited, and by losing their heads when there is no occasion for it. As the Yale captain said of the Princeton team, "They keep you guessing."