e talk of some
young worldly girl or of some student who knows everything and
understands nothing! In the heart of Paris there are provinces most
naive, little gardens as of cloisters, pure existences as of springs.
Paris permits herself to be betrayed by her literature. Those who speak
in her name are the most soiled of all. And besides, one only knows too
well that a false human consideration often prevents the pure from
avowing their innocence.--Pierre did not yet understand love; and he was
delivered up to the first appeal love made.

This also added to the enchantment of his thought: that love had been
born under the wing of death. In that moment of emotion when they felt
the menace of the bombs pass over their heads, when the bloodstained
apparition of the wounded man contracted their hearts, then it was their
fingers groped toward each other; and both of them had read therein, at
the same time with the quivering of the flesh that was frightened, the
loving consolation of an unknown friend. Fleeting pressure! One of the
two hands, that of the man, says: "Lean upon me!" And the other, the
maternal one, pushes aside her own fear in order to say: "My little
dear!"

Nothing of all this was uttered or heard. But that inward murmur filled
the soul far better than words, that curtain of foliage which masks our
thought. Pierre allowed himself to be cradled by this humming. Such the
song of a golden wasp that floats through the chiaroscuro of one's
thought. His days became numb things in this new languor. That solitary
and naked heart dreamed of the warmth of a nest.

During these first weeks of February, Paris was counting her ruins from
the last raid and licking her wounds. The press, locked up in its
kennel, was barking for reprisals. And, according to the statement of
"the Man who put the fetters on," the government was making war on the
French. The open season for suits at law for treasonable acts commenced.
The spectacle of a wretched creature who was defending his own head,
bitterly demanded by the public accuser, was a matter of amusement for
_Tout-Paris_, whose appetite for the theatre had not yet been satisfied
by four years of war and ten millions of dead men dissolving behind the
flies.

But the youth remained completely and solely absorbed in the mysterious
guest who had just come to make him a visit. Strange intensity of these
visions of love printed on the very floor of his thought and
nevertheless lack