Along the road from Tours to Paris there were sixty unbroken miles of people—­on my honor, I do not exaggerate, but write the absolute truth.  They were all people who had despaired of breaking through the dense masses of their fellow-citizens camped around the railway stations, and had decided to take to the roads as the only way of escape.

The vehicles were taxicabs, for which the rich paid fabulous prices; motor cars which had escaped military requisition, farmers’ carts laden with several families and piles of household goods, shop carts drawn by horses already tired to the point of death because of the weight of the people who crowded behind pony traps and governess carts.

Many persons, well dressed and belonging obviously to well-to-do bourgeoisie, were wheeling barrows like costers, but instead of trundling cabbages were pushing forward sleeping babies and little children, who seemed on the first stage to find new amusement and excitement in the journey from home; but for the most part they trudged along bravely, carrying their babies and holding the hands of their little ones.

They were of all classes, rank and fortune being annihilated by the common tragedy.  Elegant women whose beauty is known in Paris salons, whose frivolity, perhaps, in the past was the main purpose of their life, were now on a level with the peasant mothers of the French suburbs and with the midinettes of Montmartre, and their courage did not fail them so quickly.

I looked into many proud, brave faces of these delicate women, walking in high-heeled shoes, all too frail for the hard-dusty roadways.  They belonged to the same race and breed as those ladies who defied death with fine disdain upon the scaffold of the guillotine in the great Revolution.

They were leaving Paris now, not because of any fears for themselves—­I believe they were fearless—­but because they had decided to save the little sons and daughters of soldier fathers.

This great army in retreat was made up of every type familiar in Paris.

Here were women of the gay world, poor creatures whose painted faces had been washed with tears, and whose tight skirts and white stockings were never made for a long march down the highways of France.

Here also were thousands of those poor old ladies who live on a few francs a week in the top attics of the Paris streets, which Balzac knew; they had fled from their poor sanctuaries and some of them were still carrying cats and canaries, as dear to them as their own lives.

There was one young woman who walked with a pet monkey on her shoulder while she carried a bird in a golden cage.  Old men, who remembered 1870, gave their arms to old ladies to whom they had made love when the Prussians were at the gates of Paris then.

It was pitiful to see these old people now hobbling along together.  Pitiful, but beautiful also, because of their lasting love.