her face was hideously puckered up, all the features meeting in the middle, lest she should weep on to her bodice.

At the foot of the hill Paris wept, too, muffled in a crape of mist, clammy and cold and grey. You could see nothing but one or two tall chimneystacks the mist blotted out everything else and rolled up to the cemetery. In the fading light

:

the hill with the mourners on it became an island of death, rising alone out of a sea of cold, grey emptiness.

The night before I had been to a music-hallan elegant place. In morning dress, coats buttoned. up, hands in trousers pockets, most of them wearing folding eye-glasses, young Frenchmen came forward and sang songs full of every kind of brilliant scurrility and neatly hinted filthiness, aimed at everybody in France. The ladies in the audience, understanding every innuendo, laughed and whispered, "C'est chic." How Parisian," you say. But then the tender mourners at Père Lachaise were quite Parisian too. Here were family affection, deep love, quiet self-restraint, yet passionate regretjust what we sometimes tend to think the French character lacks. Of course there is no essential contradiction between the two; but the Day of the Dead is a warning to those of us who incline. not to see the kindlier side of our neighbours.

119

III.

IN THE CAFÉ.

IT is a familiar remark among foreigners visiting London for a short acquaintance that all Englishmen look exactly alike. To the fugitive observer of Paris all Frenchmen look almost entirely different. The eye least trained to look beneath the superficial can distinguish a dozen types along a dozen yards of boulevard. The man of fashion, whom nothing in his clothes differentiates from an Englishman; the solid bourgeois in his black overcoat, tight just below the waist and loose everywhere else, his dark trousers and straight-brimmed hat; the young man with tendencies to the Bohemian, with a loose tie cascading in dark green silk halfway down his waistcoat; the provincial in bowler and rough-hewn black cloth, stepping heavily and looking heavily at everything about him — of course there is nothing strange in all this.

We

have all these types in London, but they are not

sharply enough defined for the foreigner to mark them. In Paris they leap to the eye. Perhaps it is not fanciful to suppose from this that in France divisions of class, of place, of origin, of pursuit, are deeper down than in England. There seem to be a dozen kinds of life in Paris, each in its own enclosure, living for itself and caring little for the interests, the pursuits, the manner of existence of the others.

Come now, for example, into one of the higher restaurants at the hour of déjeuner on Sunday. It is a place that had a reputation all over Europe as long as anybody under fifty can well remember; and it is about the size of your drawing-room. There is room in it for some forty guests, by dint of a great deal of crowding. At the moment it is quite empty. But the position of the tables has not been changed for five-and-twenty years. Such restaurants are nearly the only conservative things in Paris. Public men cheapen; voisin does not. Governments pass away; the Café Anglais

does not pass away.

Into our restaurant enter three people an elderly man and elderly woman, and a private soldier. In England you would stare; but in France and elsewhere on the conscriptive Continent you may naturally see private soldiers anywhere. I have seen privates in line regiments going into

the stalls for "Parsifal "

at Bayreuth with the full orchestral score beneath their arms.

The position soon explains itself. The soldier is the lady's son; he has got a few hours' leave from the barracks, and his mother is bringing him to get a good meal, of which he is probably much in need. They sit down side by side. Out of the képi, the long blue coat with red braid epaulettes, the red bags of trousers, appears a boy's face, podgy and pasty like the faces of most French boys, not without refinement, but without a single sign of health or strength a strange face, you think, for a soldier. The mother is voluminously attired in black crape, with a worn face, and alas! one of the complexions which we shall know better in a few years than we do now-a complexion that looks as if it had been much scraped with a blunt razor, that tells tales of paint and powder. The gentleman, grey beard, tight frock-coat, red ribbon of the Legion of Honour in his button-hole, sits opposite. (Having regard to the crape, I am not clear in my mind whether he ought to be called father or next-of-kin.)

The waiter brings the bill of fare, and immediately three heads go down together for a consultation of breathless seriousness. When you order your lunch at a restaurant you run your eye hurriedly down the bill and dash at the first thing you think you can

eat. Here

especially at this restaurant

on a

Sunday out, the matter is far too vital to be treated So. One does not pay this money every day. So every dish is debated as if it were a clause in an Act of Parliament. We should not think it worth while; but then French people would not think the Act of Parliament worth while-it is a question of the point of view. Finally it is ordered-rich beyond the dreams of extravagance. For one course the bill is found quite inadequate, despite its half-dozen suggestions; something must be specially prepared. The oysters come and the wine. "You do not drink wine yet?" asks the next-of-kin-he must be the next-of-kin of the soldier.

"Mais si!" "Oh yes:" the cry of enthusiasm, mixed with apprehension, almost shook the room. "He is a man now," says the mother; and, indeed, if one is old enough to serve one's country one is surely old enough to take a share of its wine. And how it repaid itself! He came in sallow, worn by exercise that left him spiritless and not in condition. When

I went away they had eaten enormously of four courses and were well on their way through two large lobsters-his cheek was pink, his eyes sparkled, he talked and laughed under the approving eye of his mother. The service which was a martyrdom before was now a mine of jokes and stories. Especially it was on evidence that now he was a man.