The Paris the host of the idler and the traveller; the Paris of the boulevards and the night life provided for the tourist; the Paris that sparkled and smiled in entertainment; the Paris exploited to the average American through Sunday supplements and the reminiscences of smoking-rooms of transatlantic liners, was dead.  Those who knew no other Paris and conjectured no other Paris departed as from the tomb of the pleasures which had been the passing extravaganza of relief, from dull lives elsewhere.  The Parisienne of that Paris spent a thousand francs to get her pet dog safely away to Marseilles.  Politicians of a craven type, who are the curse of all democracies, had gone to keep her company, leaving Paris cleaner than ever she was after the streets had had their morning bath on a spring day when the horse chestnuts were in bloom and madame was arranging her early editions on the table of her kiosk—­a spiritually clean Paris.

Monsieur, would you have America judged by the White Way?  What has the White Way to do with the New York of Seventy-Second Street or Harlem?  It serves the same purpose as the boulevards of furnishing scandalous little paragraphs for foreign newspapers.  Foreigners visit it and think that they understand how Americans live in Stockbridge, Mass., or Springfield Illinois, Empty its hotels and nobody but sightseers and people interested in the White Way would know the difference.

The other Paris, making ready to stand siege, with the Government gone to Bordeaux with all the gold of the Bank of France, with the enemy’s guns audible in the suburbs and old men cutting down trees and tearing up paving-stones to barricade the streets—­never had that Paris been more alive.  It was after the death of the old and the birth of the new Paris that an elderly man, seeing a group of women at tea in one of the few fashionable refreshment places which were open, stopped and said: 

“Can you find nothing better than that to do, ladies, in a time like this?”

And the Latin temperament gave the world a surprise.  Those who judged France by her playful Paris thought that if a Frenchman gesticulated so emotionally in the course of everyday existence, he would get overwhelmingly excited in a great emergency.  One evening, after the repulse of the Germans on the Marne, I saw two French reserves dining in a famous restaurant where, at this time of the year, four out of five diners ordinarily would be foreigners surveying one another in a study of Parisian life.  They were big, rosy-cheeked men, country born and bred, belonging to the new France of sports, of action, of temperate habits, and they were joking about dining there just as two sturdy Westerners might about dining in a deserted Broadway.  The foreigners and demimondaines were noticeably absent; a pair of Frenchmen were in the place of the absentees; and after their dinner they smoked their black brier-root pipes in that fashionable restaurant.