PARIS is the place where everything begins and ends. From here during the four years of war there has been the constant departure of men bound for the great adventure, and it is Paris that has received with open arms the greater bulk of the _permissionnaires_ and the _réformés_. Gay, very gay on the surface, but below the crust it is the saddest of all places. When a man is in great agony he laughs. It is so with the great city, and the laugh of delirium is a poor sham indeed. The shortage of necessities has also been a damper on the city. In Neuilly, a suburb of Paris, a man was carrying a bag of coal. A few paces behind him a well-dressed woman was walking home. The man dropped a piece of coal from his sack and the woman eagerly picked it up and placed it in her gold bag. The war hangs over all in a dismal cloud and is in the back of every one’s mind; although it is rare to hear it mentioned it is always before one. There is no Parisian who has not lost some one very dear to him or her, and nineteen out of every twenty women are in deep mourning. The social activities, therefore, are greatly curtailed, and the gay life is left only to the people of the street, the majority of whom have been driven to that life by the reaction of despair and sadness, and in lonesomeness seek the only companionship that they know. * * * * * THE old chateau at 21, rue Raynouard, so kindly loaned to the American Field Service for its headquarters by the Comtesse de la Villestreux, is a place of traditions. The great Napoleon has walked here. Rousseau wrote part of his works here, and Franklin walked in the park daily while he was Ambassador to France. The park is the most extensive and beautiful within the fortifications of Paris, and contains the largest grove of chestnuts in the city. The water in the springs on the place was famous in the seventeenth century as the “_eaux de Passy_.” In the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, located on the banks of the Seine, the place breathes an atmosphere of rest and beauty and solidity, springing from the traditions of age. The men of the American Field Service, we who have had this place as the home to which we would return _en permission_, can never fully express our sincere gratitude to the Comtesse de la Villestreux and the other members of the Hottinguer family, who so graciously extended to us, Americans, the hospitality of their beautiful estate. * * * * * A DREAM of a town, hot but not oppressive under the sun of the Midi, with quaint streets meandering through it, little blue tables set in the sunlight and a park filled with gay-colored soldiers and drab women, was my first impression of Bordeaux. Dilapidated _fiacres_ in tow of hungry horses transport one from place to place, and give the newcomer his first taste of the haggling, without which a Latin would be disconsolate.