Yet amid this chaos I seem also to have before my eyes the picture of a city, a city of very ancient days. Characteristics of civic order are plainly manifest. A semblance of social life declares itself. Broken to pieces a few months ago by the sudden call to arms, flattened out and pulverized by the forces of hunger and tedium, the world that existed before the mobilization begins to reconstitute itself. By a sort of spontaneous generation, the eternal society rises anew from the void, with its groups of leaders and of poets, of traders and of artisans, with its classes of profiteers and of exploited, of originators and of simple executants. It is reborn, but in a less intricate form, with plainer contrasts, accentuated to caricature. Here, temperament, initiative, and energy have replaced tradition. There are no privileged positions. Social functions are not acquired as a right, but are seized. There is free competition. We all start from scratch. Each man takes his place in the natural hierarchy by the sole right of conquest. He can retain it only by cunning, force, or the power of genius, and at the price of a persistent victory. Hence there have been strange changes of fortune. A man who arrived without a farthing, sold for sixpence a cigar he had been given, bought chocolate with the sixpence, resold it at 1,000 per cent., and, continually bargaining, always turning over his money with increased profit, has succeeded in this way in amassing a capital. I have several times come across this brilliant trader on the slopes at nightfall, when he believed himself alone. Leaning forward on his hands, he was contemplating his greasy handkerchief stretched out on the grass, covered with little piles of silver. Another, who was scullion in a drinking-booth, has taken to writing poems; at the Saturday concerts in No. 7 he sings them to well-known airs, amid universal applause. A man named Tarbouriech, a farmer from the Agen district, has made himself graving tools and carves pebbles for French and Bavarian customers. He gets a mark for each carving, and can thus from time to time buy himself a supplementary loaf. He is a real decorative artist, a good sculptor, and he did not know it. As I lounge in the last rays of sunshine, I admire the spontaneous manifestation of creative energy. I am astonished at the superabundance of talents in so restricted a group. Yet there is a sadness in the sight of this poor primitive city which has set itself to sprout upon the levelled bed of servile equality.