It gives one a tug at the heart to re-read
Trilby and to live for a few hours in the Paris before the Commune and before the first Sedan. The wounds which she then suffered were bitter wounds and left their scars. This afternoon the leaves float down upon the round pool of the Tuileries and the great road to the Arc de Triomphe opens undamaged but ashamed. The column still stands erect in the Place Vendome, but they are German sentries who mount guard outside the Ritz. It seems incredible to me that it was only last year that I was in Paris and saw the ante-chambers of Daladier crowded with expectant suitors, heard. the gay quick laugh of Paul Reynaud echoing in the saloons of the Duc de Morny, and watched Mandel rummage impatiently among the files that encumbered his desk. I am glad that I am not Monsieur Caours, who this week presides over the trial at Riom of Gamelin. Daladier and Leon Blum. How can the lucid legal luminaries of France, in their desire to provide Dr. Goebbels with a few sordid rags with which to patch the tattered banners of his propaganda, arraign good Frenchmen simultaneously for having willed, and been unprepared for, war? Mandel and Reynaud are, it would seem, to be reserved for some more special form of revenge. And in the background, rubbing damp hands, lurks Georges Bonnet with his sly subservient smile.
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