Even now, when I inquire of my memory, I find it difficult to make clear the elements of this horror of war on Julien’s part. He was by no means a coward. He merely had a distaste for bodily exercises, to which he reckoned abstract mental speculations far superior. To live the life of a learned man or a poet, shut into a quiet room, seemed to him the real end of man on this earth; while the turmoils of the street, battles, whether with fist or sword, and everything which develops the muscles seemed to him only fit for a nation of savages. He despised athletes and acrobats and wild beast tamers. I must add that he had no patriotism. On this subject we heaped contempt upon him, and I can still see the smile and shrug of the shoulders with which he answered us. One of the most vivid memories of that time which remains with me is the memory of the fine summer day on which the news of the victory of Magenta became known in Paris. It was June--a splendid June, such as we seldom have in France. It was Sunday. Julien and I had planned the evening before to take a walk in the Champs Elysées. He was very uneasy about his brother, from whom he had had no letter, and I wanted to distract his thoughts. I called for him at one o’clock, and we strolled down towards the Seine at the idle pace of schoolboys with no usher behind them. Paris on a holiday in very hot weather is something that deserves knowing. The black shadow of the houses cuts the white pavement sharply. Between the shuttered, drowsy house fronts is visible but a strip of sky of a hard blue. I do not know any place in the world where, when it is hot, it is hotter than in Paris; it is a furnace, suffocating, asphyxiating. Some corners of Paris are deserted, among others the quays, whence the loungers have fled to suburban copses. And yet, what a delightful walk it is, along the wide, quiet quays, with their row of little thick trees, and below, the magnificent rush of the river all alive with its moving populace of vessels. Well, we had come to the Seine and were walking along the quays in the shadow of the trees. Slight sounds came up from the river, whose waters quivered in the sun and were marked out as with lines of silver into large wavering patterns. There was something special in the holiday air of this fine Sunday. Paris was positively being filled already by the news of which everybody, and even the very houses, seemed expectant. The Italian campaign, which was, as everybody knows, so rapid, had opened with successes; but so far there had been no important battle, and it was this battle which Paris had for two days been feeling. The great city held her breath and heard the distant cannon.