tes in our note-books--nights not the least
stirring and tempestuous of the many I have spent in Paris, but nights
of which my safe rule of silence where the living are concerned forbids
me to tell the tale.

And one special year stands out when the little hotel in the Rue St.
Roch was deserted for the Grand Hotel, and when all the nights seemed
swallowed up in the International Society's business--not the
International Society of Anarchists, but the International Society of
Sculptors, Painters, and Gravers in London, which, in those terribly
enterprising Nineties, sent its deputation--J. included in it--to
collect all that was most individual and distinguished in the _Salons_
for its next Exhibition. It was a year of many wanderings in many
directions to many studios of French artists, or foreign artists working
in Paris--a year of many meetings of many artists night after night. But
this clearly is not a story for me to tell, since the International was
J.'s concern, not mine. In the hours away from my work I looked on, an
outsider, but an amused outsider, marvelling as I have never ceased to
marvel since the faraway nights in Rome, at the inexhaustible wealth of
art as a subject of talk wherever artists are gathered together.

And rambling still further into that past, I would stumble into
American nights--nights with old friends, established there or passing
through and run across by chance--nights of joy in being with my own
people again, of hearing not English, but my native tongue and having
life readjusted to the American point of view. Nobody knows how good it
is to be with one's fellow-countrymen who has not been years away from
them. But these also are nights that come within the forbidden zone--the
zone where Silence is Golden.

VIII

I have put down these memories of Paris nights and my yearly visit to
Paris in the year when, for the first time since I began my work in its
galleries, no _Salon_ has opened to take me there in the springtime.
With the coming of May the lilacs and horse-chestnuts bloomed with the
old beauty and fragrance along the _Champs-Elysees_ outside the _Grand
Palais_, but inside no prints and paintings were on the walls, no
statues in the great courts. To those admitted, the only exhibition was
of the wounded, the maimed, the dying. Does it mean, I wonder, the end
of all old days and nights for me in Paris, as the war that has shut
fast the _Salon_ door means the end of the old or