The Conference of Paris was likewise a laborious body. The gaiety of the Congress of Vienna has become proverbial. “The Congress does not march,” said the Prince de Ligne, “it dances.” “Everybody dances save Talleyrand, who has a club foot. He plays whist.” It is probable, as recent historians of the Vienna assemblage have pointed out, that “the unending series of balls, dinners, reviews, and fêtes did not greatly hinder the work of those whose industry was important.”[2] Nevertheless the presence of a crowd of kings and princes and great ladies--the Prince de Ligne wore out his hat taking it off at every turn--gave the Congress of Vienna an air of splendor and gaiety which was conspicuously lacking at Paris. There were no kings at the Paris Conference, indeed there were few kings left anywhere in Europe by January 1919. There were no balls, no great festivities. If the Conference did not always advance, at least it did not dance. The Marne was too near for that, in space as well as in time. Armageddon was just past. The Germans had barely missed marching up the Champs-Elysées and under the Arc de Triomphe. The American delegates were within an hour’s ride of Château-Thierry and Belleau Wood, where their countrymen had, only a few months before, done “the things that can’t be done.” Two hours would take them to the heart of the devastated region, refugees from which still filled Paris. The regiments of _poilus_ that marched by with steady stride had looked into the mouth of hell, and their eyes showed it. The Paris which Castlereagh had found “a bad place for business” in 1814 was a better place for business in 1919. The world wanted peace, and it wanted it soon. It was also a hungry world. Pliny tells of a fabled people of the East so narrow-mouthed that they lived by the smell of roast meat. Even that gladsome and satisfying odor had long since disappeared from the nostrils of a great part of Europe, and the mouths had not shrunk. “If they have no bread, let them eat cake,” a great lady had said at the time of the French Revolution. The cake had gone with the bread. “The wolf,” said Mr. Hoover, “is at the door of the world.” More than once the Peace Conference had to turn from other matters to feed the peoples whose frontiers it was drawing, to deal earnestly and under pressure with problems of blockade and rationing, of transportation by land and sea. Back of hunger lay anarchy. Great states were on the verge of dissolution, and it was doubtful who, if anyone, could sign the treaty on their behalf. There were times when the Conference had also to interrupt its labors to consider the chaos into which the world seemed to be drifting. The day after the Bolshevist revolution in Hungary one of the sanest of American journalists remarked, “In the race between peace and anarchy, anarchy seems today to be ahead.”