Monsieur, would you have America judged by the White Way? What has the White Way to do with the New York of Seventy-second Street or Harlem? It serves the same purpose as the boulevards of furnishing scandalous little paragraphs for foreign newspapers. Foreigners visit it and think that they understand how Americans live in Stockbridge, Mass., or Springfield, Ill. Empty its hotels and nobody but sightseers and people interested in the White Way would know the difference. The other Paris, making ready to stand siege, with the Government gone to Bordeaux with all the gold of the Bank of France, with the enemy’s guns audible in the suburbs and old men cutting down trees and tearing up paving-stones to barricade the streets--never had that Paris been more alive. It was after the death of the old and the birth of the new Paris that an elderly man, seeing a group of women at tea in one of the few fashionable refreshment places which were open, stopped and said: “Can you find nothing better than that to do, ladies, in a time like this?” And the Latin temperament gave the world a surprise. Those who judged France by her playful Paris thought that if a Frenchman gesticulated so emotionally in the course of every-day existence, he would get overwhelmingly excited in a great emergency. One evening, after the repulse of the Germans on the Marne, I saw two French reserves dining in a famous restaurant where, at this time of the year, four out of five diners ordinarily would be foreigners surveying one another in a study of Parisian life. They were big, rosy-cheeked men, country born and bred, belonging to the new France of sports, of action, of temperate habits, and they were joking about dining there just as two sturdy Westerners might about dining in a deserted Broadway. The foreigners and _demi-mondaines_ were noticeably absent; a pair of Frenchmen were in the place of the absentees; and after their dinner they smoked their black briar-root pipes in that fashionable restaurant. Among the picture post-cards then on sale was one of Marianne, who is France, bound for the front in an aeroplane with a crowing French cock sitting on the brace above her. Marianne looked as happy as if she were going to the races; the cock as triumphant as if he had a spur through the German eagle’s throat. However, there was little sale for picture post-cards or other trifles, while Paris waited for the siege. They did not help to win victories. News and not _jeux d’esprit_, victory and not wit, was wanted.