To leave one's country is the next best thing to coming back to it. After passing Modane he had felt the strange atmosphere that one breathes at the gates of France, just as though France were not the most entrancing place to remain in (or perhaps because of it), experiencing that pleasure one has when one's relations with someone or something are strained, but all the more precious for that, and which are so well described by the expression "out of tune." Other countries are only parts of a continent or of the world; France is a sealed vessel, a form of diet complete in itself, interesting to, but not interested by Europe. One can feel German villages tremble at the least sign of movement from a Russian army corps, and the whole of Spain heave at a shot fired at one of her governors in the garrisons of Morocco. London, with even more reason, throbs with a kind of terrestrial neuralgia on hearing of oil being struck in Mexico, or of a political murder in the Punjab. But Paris, self-centred Paris, always remains unmoved. International upheavals reach the Paris press agencies with an air of unreality; from there they find their way into the editorial offices and to the caricaturists, and thence to a laughing public which sings songs about them. The more intelligent people never open a paper. So that on leaving France one has more than at other times the impression of escaping at the right moment and taking a holiday from one's domestic happiness, and of avoiding the danger of living with a wife who is completely satisfying.