After dinner we walked in the garden and along the rampart walls. We went to feed the rabbits. How absurd to be heartbroken because it may be the last time that we ever shall feed cabbage-leaves to the rabbits! Now, writing in the north-tower room, I feel a strange commotion in the village. How wide-awake the village is, so late! There are footsteps going up and down the streets, up and down, and voices, under the ramparts. The sound of footsteps and voices is strange in the night. Why are the people going up and down like that? Of what are they talking? There is the sound of a drum. The sound of the drum comes across the moat, past the Dungeon Tower, through the lime trees of the entrance court, along the dim halls and corridors. The drumming stops. A man's voice takes up the reading out, very loud, of something, to the hush that has fallen on footsteps and voices. Saturday, August 1st This has been the day of waiting. Everywhere, every one waited. In the Place aux Armes people stood and waited. The men waited to be told what to do. The women waited, each one of them staying close to her man. The children hung on to their fathers' hands. In all the little towns along the road to Paris it was like that. In the larger towns there was much movement of soldiers about in the streets. All the red képis were covered with blue. I wondered why. The fields were empty. The work of the fields was left, flung down. The scythe lay in the sweep it had only half cut. From Louvres already the men were gone. Only women and old people and children were left, in the length of the long street. At the porte de La Chapelle we and a hay-cart going into Paris, and a small poor funeral coming out to the cemetery of St. Ouen, were all blocked together. The gendarmes were questioning the peasant of the hay-cart, who stood in his blue blouse at the head of a big sleepy white horse, and answered sulkily. One of the croquemorts told us that the order for general mobilization was posted up on the walls of Paris. I stared at his shiny top hat and black gloves that were too long in the fingers, and tried to realize what it meant. The streets of our quarter are empty, and more strange than the streets and the boulevards we came through, where crowds were swaying up and down. Madame Boudet and I were afraid to go across and read the words of the white oblong placard that is pasted up on the wall of the Palace. Paris, Sunday, August 2nd First day of the mobilization, the state of siege is declared throughout France. Already the many gardens of this old quarter are deep in the colours and odours and melancholy of autumn, and give autumn's fatefulness and foreboding to all the streets and rooms. I thought when I waked to it, has this sense of autumn always meant the end of many more things than summer? With one's coffee to read-- First day of the mobilization, the state of war is declared throughout France.