After leaving the restaurant, we took a turn on the boulevards, where the increasing crowd was gathering. Lost in the streams of people, alternately bumped into or elbowed, it was impossible to keep up a connected conversation. So much the better. I was quite willing to forget the presence of my companion. I was haunted by the thought that it was my last evening of liberty ...; after to-morrow my uniform would impose upon me the strictest restraint. I was making use of the final respite. I inhaled without displeasure the dusty air laden with the smells of acetylene gas and human emanations. A lot of the shop windows had their shutters up and looked dismal, and looking up one could make out insolent German inscriptions. Angry _bourgeois_ muttered as they passed, clenching their fists. People were talking of nothing but the hasty dismissals of the day before. The other shops flaunted their dazzling electric lights. The luminous sky-signs, intermittent and hallucinating, unrolled flamboyant zigzags and blazing coils. An unreal scene, well suited to the agitation of the hour! Soon it would be quenched and blotted out and dismal.... Paris was lavishing her final brilliance. What gaps were to be made by to-morrow's call in this multitude promenading their quivering city with such pride! I tried to read his secret on the face of each man of an eligible age for military service. Was he going to rejoin? and I felt inclined to shout to him: "I'm going, you know; I'm one of you!" My glance rested approvingly on the sturdy-looking fellows whose martial air under their _képis_ I could well imagine. With their heads held high and their hands behind their backs, most of them looked about them with a superlatively good-natured expression, quite innocent of swagger. Laquarrière shouted down my ear: "You all look as if you were starting out for a day's shooting!" Oh! so I looked like the rest? Well, I was not sorry for it! My companion persuaded me to finish up the evening in a music hall. The place was full. Lots of people were treating themselves to an evening's amusement before the coming horrors. There was a sketch, followed by several acrobatic turns. The audience was enthusiastic. But I was struck, nevertheless, by the coldness with which "the eccentric" Fergusson, usually the idol of the public, was received. Laquarrière enlightened me by remarking: "That will teach England to buck up a bit!" We laughed together over the childishness of crowds, for this "eccentric" said to be a Londoner, had perhaps been born at Javel. The three Alkenkirch brothers, the Dresden tight-rope walkers, had also disappeared from the programme. Laquarrière whispered: "They would have been torn to pieces! Just look at the brutes." I had to echo him, but I thought to myself that if ever there had been a time when Chauvinism was excusable....