Paris immediately after the Armistice was a woeful spectacle of neglect and dirt. It was not much better six months ago. In those early days it was like a handsome slut in need of a bath; which in view of its sufferings was not surprising. The paint on the woodwork of houses and shops was almost all peeled away. Shutters hung awry on their broken hinges. Roads were unspeakably filthy, and full of dangerous holes and swampy gutters. The parks and gardens looked ragged and tattered. The Bois de Boulogne and the Champs Elysées were marred with the shreds and patches of war equipment. Dismal weather made everything look a hundred times worse than it really was. We were wise enough not to come to a hasty judgment about Paris. After all, we had a vast gay literature to contradict the sad story written _on_ Paris when first we saw it! The living in the hotels and restaurants was riotous and expensive. In the homes of Paris it was another story, we were told. Foods were strictly rationed, but of some kinds it was difficult to get even the meagre portion allowed. The strain was heavy upon the city housewife of the humbler classes. Prices were ruinously high. Wages scarcely kept pace with them. Strikes were frequent and menacing, apt to hold up one or another of the public services at any time, as in England. But in the public cafés, the dance-halls, and the hotels, nothing dimmed the joyousness of the Parisians, set free at last from the haunting fear of the German invasion. Day and night, and night after night, a lively, exuberant, passionate crowd in each of these public places abandoned itself to an ecstasy of song and dance and play, in utter and unrestrained intoxication. M. Jean Longuet, the grandson of Karl Marx, and at that time a Deputy in the French Chamber, invited Mr. Macdonald and myself to lunch with him at a little Italian café near his business quarters. We called for him at the office of his newspaper, _Le Populaire_. On our way all together he took us past the restaurant where Jaurès was shot. He pointed to the window at which Jaurès was sitting at the time of his murder. If I understood him rightly Longuet was present when the awful thing occurred; particularly awful in view of the certainty that the issue of affairs for France might have been infinitely happier, and for Europe infinitely less sorrowful, if this great man had lived during the war.