Paris is reminded every morning of duty and discipline when it begins by doing without its beloved petits pains and croissants for breakfast, the order having gone forth that bakers, being short-handed, are to make only pain de menage. Similarly, because the majority of journalists and popular writers are under arms, Paris does without its accustomed daily refreshment of ephemeral literature, its comic and illustrated press, its literary and artistic causeries, its feuilletons, and chroniques. It does without its theatres, its music halls, without politics, art, and social amenities, without barbers, florists, and motor cars, partly because there are not men enough to keep these things going, and partly because, even if there were, la patrie comes first, so that thrifty self-denial has become the duty of every good citizen. If the telephone breaks down, (as it usually does,) there is no one to repair it, so the subscriber goes without; if the trains and trams cease running on regular schedules the Parisian accepts the fact and stays at home. In normal times life is made up of the sum of little things, but at great moments the little things cease to count. How true this is in Paris today one may judge from the correspondence and records of the "Secours National"; they reveal an intense and widespread impulse of personal pride in self-denial, and prove that the heart of the Parisian bourgeoisie is sound to the core. To a foreigner, accustomed to the Paris of literary and artistic traditions, perhaps the most remarkable feature in the life of the city today lies in the absence of articulate public opinion, and apparently of public interest, in everything outside the immediate issues of the war. With one or two exceptions, such as the Temps and the Debats, the press of the capital practically confines itself to recording the events and progress of the campaign; nothing else matters. So far as Paris is concerned, all the rest of the world, from China to Peru, might be non-existent. Neither the political nor the economic consequences of the war are seriously examined or discussed; the sole business of the newspapers consists in supplementing, to the best of their abilities, the meagre war news supplied through official channels. Some interest attaches, of course, to the attitude of Italy; but, beyond that, all things sublunary seem to have faded into a remote distance of unreality--sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.