the trees were falling, and the French autumn,
so slow, so golden, and so melancholy, had begun. At the end of the
mighty vista of the Champs Elysees, the Arc de Triomphe rose, brown and
vaporous in the exhalations of the quiet city, and an aeroplane was
maneuvering over the Place de la Concorde, a moving speck of white and
silver in the soft, September blue. From a near-by Punch and Judy show
the laughter of little children floated down the garden in outbursts of
treble shrillness. "Villain, monster, scoundrel," squeaked a voice.
Flopped across the base of the stage, the arms hanging downwards, was a
prostrate doll which a fine manikin in a Zouave's uniform belabored with
a stick; suddenly it stirred, and, with a comic effect, lifted its
puzzled, wooden head to the laughing children. Beneath a little Prussian
helmet was the head of William of Germany, caricatured with Parisian
skill into a scowling, green fellow with a monster black mustache turned
up to his eyes. "Lie down!" cried the Zouave doll imperiously. "Here is
a love pat for thee from a French Zouave, my big Boche." And he struck
him down again with his staff.

Soldiers walked in the garden,--permissionnaires (men on furlough) out
for an airing with their rejoicing families, smart young English
subalterns, and rosy-fleshed, golden-haired Flemings of the type that
Rubens drew. But neither their presence nor the sight of an occasional
mutile (soldier who has lost a limb), pathetically clumsy on his new
crutches, quite sent home the presence of the war. The normal life of
the city was powerful enough to engulf the disturbance, the theaters
were open, there were the same crowds on the boulevards, and the same
gossipy spectators in the sidewalk cafes. After a year of war the
Parisians were accustomed to soldiers, cripples, and people in mourning.
The strongest effect of the war was more subtle of definition, it was a
change in the temper of the city. Since the outbreak of the war, the
sham Paris that was "Gay Paree" had disappeared, and the real Paris, the
Paris of tragic memories and great men, had taken its place. An old
Parisian explained the change to me in saying, "Paris has become more
French." Deprived of the foreigner, the city adapted itself to a taste
more Gallic; faced with the realities of war, it exchanged its
artificiality for that sober reasonableness which is the normal attitude
of the nation.

At noon I left the garden and strolled down the Champ