Impossible to tell in what quarter of the city caprice might have cast her, I sought her in all. Montmartre and La Villette, the Quartier Latin and the great boulevards: I dreaded only one thing--night. Night, when my search must cease; night and the pitiless gas-lamps, the terrible gas-lamps. Then it was that light, the angel that all day had helped my search, became a devil, contracting itself, and spreading into a million heartless points to show me the darkness. Then it was that the stars burning in the clear sky above the city became part of my sorrow. All things bright and all things fair were leagued against me, in that they fed the flame of my suffering; and the happiness and gaiety of others became the last insult of the world. Then it was that Joubert showed himself in his true form. Not one word did he ever say to me, though my conduct, my manners, my disordered dress, must have given him food for the deepest speculation and disquiet. He would put out my clothes and attend to my wants, speak to me about ordinary topics, never heed my silence or my harsh replies. You see, he was an old soldier; he had seen men stricken so often that he knew the language and the signs of real grief and real suffering. I lost count of the days, and from opium alone could I get any sleep. Absorbed in my grief, I took no heed of the events around me. I remember distinctly in cafés and at my club hearing men talking of the Hohenzollerns and the succession to the Spanish throne. Men talking vehemently about a subject which was to me as uninteresting and as unintelligible as algebra to a child. But I could feel the ferment and unrest around me. On the 15th of July, at ten o'clock in the morning, I was passing across the Place de la Concorde, when a roar like the sound of a great and distant sea broke on the summer air. It came from the direction of the Rue St. Honoré. People were running across the Place de la Concorde, and pouring from the Rue de Rivoli and from the bridges. The Champs Elysées behind me had become alive with people; cabmen were standing up on the driving-seats of their carriages, waving their hats and shouting; windows of houses were alive and white with fluttering handkerchiefs; and now, again and again, came the storm of sound, unlike anything I had ever heard before, unlike anything I will ever hear again; wave after wave, storm after storm, and through it all the drums of a marching regiment. The Ninety-first Regiment of the Line were marching down the Rue St. Honoré, bayonets fixed, haversacks filled, drums beating, and colours fluttering. Paris was marching with them. And then through the storm came the cry uttered by a thousand throats: "À Berlin! À Berlin!" "What is it?" I asked of a passer-by. "War has been declared with Prussia!" "With Prussia?" "Bismarck----" I did not hear what else he had to say, deafened and dazed by the roar that now surrounded me. "À Berlin! À Berlin!"