The little sin of flattery is so easily forgiven when it is accompanied by that frank, fascinating smile, and when you have all been tasting a drop of good French liqueur. You wend your way up creaky old stairs to No. 13, or is it 31, and, luxury of luxuries, you find a tub of hot water--or it was hot at the hour for which you ordered it--awaiting you. Divesting yourself of your clothes you double your body this way and that in a vain endeavor to dip more than half of yourself at once. At last you feel clean, and you struggle into pyjamas, and crawl into bed between real, white, clean linen sheets for the first time in six months, and you sleep as no emperor can sleep on the most silken of divans, while you dream of the morrow when you really begin your leave. Leave! Ah, we were speaking of leave! Well, let us, you and I, take it together. Let us enjoy to the full the flesh-pots of London. For our leave lasts only ten days, and the war must go on till we have shown the Hun that he cannot autocratically put his Prussian militaristic crown of thorns on the fair brow of Civilization. CHAPTER XX PARIS DURING THE WAR Paris, that queen of cities, has been an interesting study to all who have paid her a visit at any time, but particularly interesting is that study since the war began. Previous to the war I had the good fortune to visit this city on a number of occasions, my last visit having been but a few months before the beginning of this great militaristic conflagration which is still sweeping over the civilized world. At that time I had just returned from a "grand tour," taking in Italy, Austria, and Southern Germany, where no signs were discernible on the horizon of the stupendous attempt at world domination which the Prussian junkers were to engineer within four months' time. Paris at that time was enjoying bright and balmy spring weather; the boulevards were crowded with visiting tourists, the Champs-Elysées with gay and merry crowds, and the Bois de Boulogne with riders and motorists in its wooded avenues, and rowers and paddlers on its lakes. It remained in my memory a picture of beauty, peace, gayety, and prosperity. My return to it came within the year, at the beginning of 1915, when the war cloud that hung over the whole of Europe particularly dimmed the sun of Paris. I came into it in the afternoon from the north, and my first view of it showed that beautiful edifice, the Church of the Sacre Coeur, on the hill of Montmartre standing out _en silhouette_, "just as if cut from paper," as a traveling companion remarked.