All these sentiments, which were either asleep or kept concealed because they were thought to be much too _vieux jeux_, came out again. The motto of Republican France, _Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité_ (which appears so often on the buildings of Paris), ceased to sound ironic and anachronistic. Maybe all this seems extremely boring to the more or less real _viveur_, who cannot conceive Paris without _cafés du nuit_ and absinthe, shocking little theatres, and all the rest of Parisian pleasures which are by no means only Parisian nowadays, and which, in any case, are mostly organised for foreigners and by foreigners. To my eyes, Paris has never been so wonderful a city as since the war broke out. I saw it astonished and overrun by the mobilising troops at the beginning of the war; ready to fight the invaders and to again undergo the calamities of 1871, when the investment of the town appeared unavoidable; full of hope when the tide of the German advance was suddenly stopped, not a day too soon; decided to make all efforts and sacrifices to end the war as soon and as gloriously as possible now that everybody in France is certain of final victory. It is certainly impossible in hurried notes of this kind to try and analyse Paris in 1915. It is a subject fit for treatment only in a book, and a large book, too. The new wave of sincerity and self-sacrifice has swept away habits and men, affectation and vices; and one feels that in the future Paris will never again be quite the same as before the war. Forty-five years ago the siege destroyed for ever the society Zola has snapshotted for us in the "Rougon-Macquard." Probably Paris will come out of the present crisis purified of the _arrivistes_, politicians, snobs, and pseudo-artists that we all know, thanks to French literature and the French theatre of to-day. Then there will be room for a new society, possibly as bad as the former, and, for a few writers, not quite as entertaining to write about. CHAPTER X HOLLAND During my war wanderings I crossed Holland several times, and each time I spent a few days there. I did this because of the difficulty of getting the signatures of the different foreign Consuls, because of the irregular service run by the Channel boats, and because I wanted to witness the change which, little by little, came over Dutch public opinion and altered the Germanophile tendencies of the early days of the war to the sympathy for the Entente of the last months. This does not mean to say that Holland was wildly pro-German in August and is enthusiastically pro-British now. Holland is essentially pro-Holland, for can we blame her for this attitude, which has been christened by an eminent writer of a neutral country "sacred egoism"?