On reaching Paris Odette was singularly impressed. When she had gone to Surville in 1914, to forget the war and think only of her dead, she had been surprised to find herself on the contrary all the nearer to the war. The trains of wounded, life among the wounded, the almost sole society of men but recently escaped from death; all this was far different from her recluse life in the apartment of the Rue de Balzac, which had indeed recalled the memory of Jean, but had also recalled the memory of the time of peace. Monotony of occupation, the continual living-over of the same emotions, at last dulls the sensibilities. The war as it appeared to her after eighteen months of hospital experience was a state of things to which her organism and her thought had become moulded. The long daily weariness, the constantly renewed effort, dulled her senses and confused her perception of events. Paris in March, 1916, seemed to her much more like war than Surville. The battle of Verdun was at its height, and all Paris was ringing with its echoes wherever one might be. Newspapers, conversations, the tramways, the metro, the taxi chauffeur who gave you change, the woman who sold you a magazine, servants, masters, the rich, the poor, bank employees, even to the sellers of violets in the streets, all brought to mind the war and Verdun, yet mutely, less by outcries than by quiet words, less by words than by changed color, the graying of the hair or of the beard, faded eyes, new wrinkles, and a certain indefinable manner. The whole earth and everything that it bears, every creature moving upon it, were a single sensitiveness, raised to its most acute degree. Acts and gestures apparently most remote from the war, receptions, dinners, the crowd at the entrance of the moving-picture shows, of classical concerts, of the few remaining music-halls, only showed the necessity for certain temperaments to tear themselves away from the nightmare of Verdun. Every one was affected by it, and so much the more as they were forced to tell themselves: "There are those who are suffering infinitely more than we."