Many of the most expensive and unnecessary
shops are shut; the others wait with strange meekness for custom.
But the provision shops and all the sturdy cheap shops of the poor
go on naturally, without any self-consciousness, just as usual. The
pavements show chiefly soldiers in a wild, new variety of uniforms,
from pale blue to black, imitated and adapted from all sources, and
especially from England--and widows and orphans. The number of
young girls and women in mourning, in the heavy mourning affected
by the Latin race, is enormous. This crape is the sole casualty list
permitted by the French War Office. It suffices. Supreme grief is
omnipresent; but it is calm, cheerful, smiling. Widows glance at each
other with understanding, like initiates of a secret and powerful
society.
Never was Paris so disconcertingly odd. And yet never was it more
profoundly itself. Between the slow realisation of a monstrous peril
escaped and the equally slow realisation of its power to punish, the
French spirit, angered and cold, knows at last what the French spirit
is. And to watch and share its mood is positively ennobling to the
stranger. Paris is revealed under an enchantment, On the surface of
the enchantment the pettinesses of daily existence persist queerly.
Two small rooms and a kitchen on a sixth floor. You could put the
kitchen, of which the cooking apparatus consists of two gas-rings, in
the roots of the orange-tree in the Tuileries gardens.
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