The reason is very simple. Merely because la rue Geoffrey L'Asnier was built before carriages were invented, the man who gave it its name having doubtless dwelt there during the fourteenth or fifteenth century, as one could easily infer after inspecting the choir of our parish church. But last Good Friday, the Germans in trying out their super-cannon, bombarded St. Gervais. The roof caved in, killing and wounding many innocent persons, and completely destroying that choir. Elsewhere a panic might have ensued, but residents of our quarter are not so easily disturbed. The older persons distinctly recall the burning of the Hotel de Ville and the Archbishop's Palace in 1870. And did they not witness the battles in the streets, all the horrors of the Commune, after having experienced the agonies and privations of the Siege? I have no doubt that among them there are persons who were actually reduced to eating rats, and I feel quite certain that many a man used his gun to advantage from between the shutters of his own front window. Their fathers had seen the barricades of 1848 and 1830, their grandfathers before them the Reign of Terror--and so on one might continue as far back as the Norman invasion. The little cafe on the rue du Pont Louis-Philippe serves as meeting place for all the prophets and strategists of the quarter, who have no words sufficient to express their disdain for the Kaiser's heavy artillery. "It's all bluff, they think they can frighten us! Why, I, Madame, I who am speaking to you--I saw the Hotel de Ville, the Theatre des Nations, the grain elevators, all in flames and all at once, the whole city seemed to be ablaze. Well, do you think that prevented the Parisians from fishing in the Seine, or made this cafe shut its doors? There was a barricade at either end of this street--the blinds were up and you could hear the bullets patter against them. The insurgents, all covered with powder, would sneak over and get a drink--and when finally their barricade was taken, it was the Republican soldiers who sat in our chairs and drank beer and lemonade! _Their_ guns, humph! Let them bark!" It is at this selfsame cafe that gather all the important men of our district, much as the American would go to his club. They are serious _bourgeois_, well along in the fifties, just a trifle ridiculous, perhaps on account of their allure and their attire. But should one grow to know them better he would soon realise that most of them are shrewd, hard-working business men, each burdened with an anxiety or a sorrow which he never mentions.