Dinner at Monsieur Guérin’s. Monsieur Keller, the celebrated mayor of Lunéville, whose tact, courage, and good sense saved Lunéville many tragedies at the time of the German entry, took me out. He has a lively, perceptive eye, and, all in all, life seems not to have been unkind to him, though he has been invaded, and his parents before him. He received the Germans and said adieu to them all in that month of August. His fine old dwelling, where the treaty of peace was signed in 1801 between France and Austria, is next to E. M.’s, and housed at one time one hundred German soldiers, and the general and his staff were quartered in it. He was, of course, the bright particular hostage during the occupation, and was followed about by two officers and four soldiers wherever he went. “I kept them moving,” he added, with a snap of his perceptive eye. At Lunéville one hundred and thirty houses were destroyed and there was much loss of life among civilians. The mayor has, or rather had, a property near Vitrimont, called Léomont, on a hill where there was formerly a Roman temple to the moon, and from this Lunéville is supposed to take its name. The great farm and its ancient buildings were destroyed during the bombardments of Lunéville and Vitrimont. “It’s only a war monument now,” he added, philosophically. It’s the atmosphere of Lunéville that’s so charming to me—this drop into full eighteenth century, with the boom of twentieth-century cannon in the distance. In spite of the sound of guns, there is some peace they can’t destroy. I knew nothing about the French provinces till I got to Lunéville, and I suppose it’s their immemorial and quite special atmosphere that I have received. Here the war seems to be a thing of the past; they think of their _secteur_ only, and of themselves as _libérés_, and talk of the war in the past tense, and it might be 1814 just as well as 1914.