The lost years were being recovered when we reached Paris in the last days of November. We had seen the war ending in London; here we watched it being buried. Every one who could get a passport and a ticket seemed, like us, to be heading for the Riviera and spending a week in Paris on the way. Every one, too, seemed to share our vagueness and indifference to what lay ahead of this holiday. For the first time in four years, our time was our own; for the first time in four years Paris could dine and dance without fear of being bombed or shelled. Barbara bought frocks; Lucien arranged parties; and I added the hall of the Ritz to the brief list—headed by Port Said and Charing Cross—of the places where a man, without waiting unduly long, can be sure of meeting every one who has ever crossed his path before. I doubt if in any other single week I have eaten so many meals or spent so much money. From time to time Lucien grumbled half-heartedly at all this waste of time: he had been recalled from the embassy in London to assist in drafting the agenda for the conference, and I felt he owed a grumble to his conscience. For myself, I blessed every hour of delay that enabled us to shed the memories of the last five years and to forget the acerbities of the last five months. Lucien had long been an old enough friend to drop his diplomatic reserve in talking to me; and there were times, before and after the expeditions to Gallipoli and Salonica, before and after the United States entered the war, before and after the Italian reverse and the Russian collapse, when the alliance would have been severed if we had been responsible for it. Now, as I told him, this brief spell of dissipation had saved us from becoming stale. With Victor Boscarelli, from the Italian embassy, and Clifford van Oss, from the American Red Cross, we formed a private international alliance, each entertaining the others by turn and all swearing friendships that death itself would be powerless to sunder. A critic might have been puzzled to say whether Clifford’s Italian was worse than my French; but our radiant good-will transcended the halting interpretation of words, and I felt a warmer liking for my neighbours than I had ever, in my pitiable insularity, been able to achieve before with men of another race. “At last,” I pointed out to Lucien, “we can talk amicably without discussing whether one country did all the work and another made all the money. There’s a real understanding. France, England, America: all are at the very top of their prestige. If we can pull together, we can make what we like of the peace.” “I still think we ought to have gone on to Berlin,” he persisted. “However, if you back us up and if we can get what we want without it, I shan’t complain.” “Remember you’re all coming to stay with us at Cannes,” I said. And, on that word, we set out for a house where the rumour of war and world-settlement seemed never to have penetrated.