the scandalmongers to smile as inscrutably as Mona Lisa.


13


The shadow of war crept through every keyhole in Paris, and no man
or woman shut up in a high attic with some idea or passion could
keep out the evil genii which dominated the intellect and the
imagination, and put its cold touch upon the senses, through that
winter of agony when the best blood in France slopped into the
waterlogged trenches from Flanders to the Argonne. Yet there were
coteries in Paris which thrust the Thing away from them as much as
possible, and tried to pretend that art was still alive, and that
philosophy was untouched by these brutalities. In the Restaurant des
Beaux-Arts and other boîtes where men of ideas pander to the baser
appetites for 1 franc 50 (vin compris), old artists, old actors, sculptors
whose beards seemed powdered with the dust of their ateliers, and
littérateurs who will write you a sonnet or an epitaph, a wedding
speech, or a political manifesto in the finest style of French poesy and
prose (a little archaic in expression) assembled nightly just as in the
days of peace. Some of the youngest faces who used to be grouped
about the tables had gone, and now and then there was silence for a
second as one of the habitués would raise his glass to the memory of
a soldier of France (called to the colours on that fatal day in August)
who had fallen on the Field of Honour. The ghost of war stalked even
into the Restaurant des Beaux-Arts, but his presence was ignored as
much as might be by these long-haired Bohemians with grease-
stained clothes and unwashed hands who discussed the spirit of
Greek beauty, the essential viciousness of women, the vulgarity of