Old sentiments, old songs and verses return in this strange, gray stillness--that spirit so gracious, delicate, penetrating, and personal, which has drawn so many through the years, becomes more moving and real. There is more animation in the streets now: shops are opening, cabs tooting down the Avenue de l'Opera the greater part of the night; but most of the house-fronts are still shuttered and still. Tourists, pleasure-seekers, and the banalities they bring are gone--every thought and energy is with the men fighting on that long line across the north. It is a Paris of the French--of a France united as never before, perhaps, purified by fire, ardent, resolute, defending her life and her precious inheritance. The Temporary Capital Tuesday. A journalist actually protests in print against the big loaves of coarse bread, long as half a stick of cord-wood and almost as hard--remember the almost carnivorous joy with which a Frenchman devours bread!--to which the military government, at the beginning of the war, condemned Paris. The explanation was that rolls and fancy bread took too much time and there were not enough bakers left to do the work--and inspectors see that the law is obeyed, whether amiable bakers think they have time or not. And people want light bread, curly rolls, "pain de fantaisie." All very well for General Gallieni! says the journalist; he likes hard bread; but why must several million people go on cracking their teeth because of that idiosyncrasy? The government is obdurate. If fancy bread were made, only the big bakers would have time to make it, little ones would be without clients, and that this highly centralized, paternal government cannot allow. Hard bread it is, then, for another while at least--"C'est la guerre!" Thursday. We have a dining-car on our Bordeaux express to-day, the first since war was declared. To-morrow night sleeping-cars go back again--more significant than one might think who had not seen the France of a few months ago, when everything was turned over to the army and people sat up all night in day coaches to cover the usual three hours from Dieppe to Paris. Down through the heart of France--Tours, Poitiers, Angouleme--past trim little French rivers, narrow, winding, still, and deep, with rows of poplars close to the water's edge, and still a certain air of coquetry, in spite of bare branches and fallen leaves--past brown fields across which teams of oxen, one sedate old farm horse in the lead, are drawing the furrow for next spring's wheat. It's the old men who are ploughing --except for those in uniform, there is scarce a young man in sight. And everywhere soldiers--wounded ones bound for southern France, reserves not yet sent up. Vines begin to appear, low brown lines across stony fields; then, just after dark, across the Garonne and into Bordeaux, where the civil government obligingly fled when the enemy was rolling down on Paris in the first week of September. Bordeaux, Monday.