In the Latin Quarter, somewhere about the intersection of the Boulevard Montparnasse with the rue de Rennes--it might have been even a little way back of the Gare Montparnasse, or perhaps in the other direction where the rue Vabin cuts into the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs--any one who knows the Quarter will know about it at once--there lived a little hairdresser by the name of Antoine. Some ten years ago Antoine had moved over from Montmartre, for he was a good hairdresser and a thrifty soul, and he wanted to get on in life, and at that time nothing seemed to him so profitable an investment as to set up a shop in the neighbourhood patronized by Americans. American students were always wanting their hair washed, so he was told--once a week at least--and in that they differed from the Russian and Polish and Roumanian and other students of Paris, a fact which determined Antoine to go into business at the Montparnasse end of the Quarter, rather than at the lower end, say round the Pantheon and Saint-Etienne-du-Mont. And as he determined to put his prices low, in order to catch the trade, so later on when his business thrived enormously, he continued to keep them low, in order to maintain his clients. For if you once get used to having your hair washed for two francs, and very well done at that, it is annoying to find that the price has gone up over night to the prices one pays on the Boulevard Capucines. Therefore for ten years Antoine continued to wash hair at two francs a head, and at the same time he earned quite a reputation for himself as a marvellous good person when it came to waves and curls. So that when the war broke out, and his American clients broke and ran, he had a neat, tidy sum saved up, and could be fairly complacent about it all. Moreover, he was a lame man, one leg being some three inches shorter than the other, due to an accident in childhood, so he had never done his military service in his youth, and while not over military age, even yet, there was no likelihood of his ever being called upon to do it. So he stood in the doorway of his deserted shop, for all his young assistants, his curlers and shampooers, had been mobilized, and looked up and down the deserted street, and congratulated himself that he was not in as bad a plight, financially and otherwise, as some of his neighbours.