Suddenly their conversation turns to strikes—and naturally my three neighbours are indignant with the strikers. The strikers spoil affairs; the strikers should therefore be arrested, imprisoned, transported. Half-a-dozen of them might be executed, as an example. The Bourse du Travail and the offices of the General Confederation of Labour should be razed to the ground. No other country but France would tolerate such anarchy. One is on the verge of a revolution, and—— At this point the scores of electric lights jump excitedly—turn dim—go out. And it is darkness. “The strikers!” exclaims the first bourgeois. “The electricians!” cries the second. “Ah, the scoundrels, the brigands, the assassins!” shouts the third. Mercy me, the excitement! The three bourgeois light matches, everyone lights matches,—and in the light from the matches I see the proprietor standing on a chair in the middle of the café. Loudly he claps his hands; loudly he cries to the waiters: “Candles.” Then, for some mysterious reason, the customers also mount chairs. The lights have gone out, so one mounts chairs! If you don’t immediately mount a chair when the lights have gone out, heaven only knows what will not happen to you. And so I, too, stand on a chair, and light matches, and join in the cries of: “It’s a strike; it’s a strike.” For my own part, I rejoice. I love the cries, the confusion, the amazing aspect of Paris—when it is dark. Here, in this café, the band is idle; the card-players have stopped their games; the proprietor is still clapping his hands and clamouring for candles. However, no candlesticks: so, vulgarly, as in low places, one uses bottles. A bottle for every table and the grease (another low spectacle) trickles down the bottles. The lady at the desk, whose highly important duty it is to keep the accounts, is given a dilapidated old lantern. Very old and very dilapidated, too, are the petroleum lamps brought up from the cellars where they have remained hidden so long as to acquire a sinister coating of verdigris. “It’s deadly poison,” says one of the bourgeois next to me. “I won’t have it. Fetch me a candle.” So the waiter bringeth the bourgeois a candle, and, no sooner has he placed the bottle on the table than it topples over and falls against the breast of the bourgeois. “A cloth, a cloth!” he shouts. “I am covered with grease.” And he storms. And he goes purple in the face. And violently he rubs his waistcoat, making the stains worse. And as he rubs he cries furiously, of the strikers: “Ah, the scoundrels, the brigands, the assassins.” In the street, only gas. And as I make my way to the _grands boulevards_, I perceive waiters speeding about in all directions, and hear them asking policemen for the nearest grocer’s shop. The waiters are in quest of candles. The waiters dare not return to their cafés without packets and packets of candles. But most of the grocers are closed: and so on speed the waiters, flushed, breathless, through the gloom.