The mayor woke up toward five o’clock and stared at me with owlish gravity as though daring me to say that he had been asleep.
“Um—ah—ma fois oui!” he muttered, blowing his nose loudly in a purple silk bandanna. Then he shrugged his shoulders and added: “C’est la vie, monsieur. Que voulez-vous?”
And it was one kind of life after all—a blessed release from the fever of that fierce farandole which we of the outer world call “life.”
The mayor scratched his ear, yawned, stretched one leg, then the other, and glanced at me.
“Paris still holds out?” he asked, with another yawn.
“Oh yes,” I replied.
“And the war—is it still going badly for us?”
“There is always hope,” I answered.
“Hope,” he grumbled; “oh yes, we know what hope is—we of the coast live on it when there’s no bread; but hope never yet filled my belly for me.”
“Has the war touched you here in Paradise?” I asked.