Paris permits herself to be betrayed by her literature. Those who speak in her name are the most soiled of all. And besides, one only knows too well that a false human consideration often prevents the pure from avowing their innocence.—Pierre did not yet understand love; and he was delivered up to the first appeal love made.

This also added to the enchantment of his thought: that love had been born under the wing of death. In that moment of emotion when they felt the menace of the bombs pass over their heads, when the bloodstained apparition of the wounded man contracted their hearts, then it was their fingers groped toward each other; and both of them had read therein, at the same time with the quivering of the flesh that was frightened, the loving consolation of an unknown friend. Fleeting pressure! One of the two hands, that of the man, says: "Lean upon me!" And the other, the maternal one, pushes aside her own fear in order to say: "My little dear!"

Nothing of all this was uttered or heard. But that inward murmur filled the soul far better than words, that curtain of foliage which masks our thought. Pierre allowed himself to be cradled by this humming. Such the song of a golden wasp that floats through the chiaroscuro of one's thought. His days became numb things in this new languor. That solitary and naked heart dreamed of the warmth of a nest.

During these first weeks of February, Paris was counting her ruins from the last raid and licking her wounds. The press, locked up in its kennel, was barking for reprisals. And, according to the statement of "the Man who put the fetters on," the government was making war on the French. The open season for suits at law for treasonable acts commenced. The spectacle of a wretched creature who was defending his own head, bitterly demanded by the public accuser, was a matter of amusement for Tout-Paris, whose appetite for the theatre had not yet been satisfied by four years of war and ten millions of dead men dissolving behind the flies.

But the youth remained completely and solely absorbed in the mysterious guest who had just come to make him a visit. Strange intensity of these visions of love printed on the very floor of his thought and nevertheless lacking in contour! Pierre would have been incapable of saying what was the form of her features or what the color of her eyes or the modeling of her lips. All he could bring back was the emotion already in himself. All his attempts to give precision to the image merely ended in deforming it. He was no more successful when he went to work to find her in the streets of Paris. At every turn he believed he had seen her. It was either a smile or a white young neck or a gleam in some eyes. And then the blood shook in his heart. There was no resemblance, none whatever, between these flying images and the real image which he sought and which he believed he loved. Well, then, he did not love her? Surely he loved her; and that is why he saw her everywhere and under every shape. For she just is every smile, each radiance, all life. And the exact form would be a limitation.—But one longs for that limitation in order to clasp love and to possess it.

Though he might never see her again he knew that she existed, she existed, and that she was the nest. In the hurricane a port. A lighthouse in the night. Stella Maris, Amor. Oh, Love, watch over us at the hour of death!...

Along the quay of the Seine beside the Institute he wandered, looking with little attention at the shelves of the few bouquinistes who had stuck to their posts. He found himself at the foot of the steps of the Pont des Arts. Raising his eyes he perceived her for whom he had waited. A portfolio of drawings under her arm, she came down the steps like a little doe. He did not reflect for the shadow of a second; he rushed forward to meet her and while he ascended toward her who was coming down, for the first time their gaze rested the one on the other and entered. Arrived in front of her and stopping short, he began to blush. Surprised, seeing that he blushed, she reddened too. Before he could get his breath again the little deerlike step had already gone beyond him. When strength returned and he was able to turn about her skirt was disappearing at the turning of the arcade which looks upon the Rue de Seine. He did not try to follow her. Leaning against the balustrade of the bridge, he saw her own look in the stream that flowed below. For some time his heart had a pasture new.... (Oh, dear, stupid children!)....

A week later he was loafing in the Luxembourg Gardens which the sun was filling with a golden softness. Such a radiant February in that funereal year! Dreaming with his eyes open and hardly knowing well whether he was dreaming what he saw, or saw what he was dreaming, steeped in a greedy languor obscurely happy, unhappy, in love, as much filled full of tenderness as with the sun, he smiled as he strolled with inattentive eyes, and without his knowing it his lips moved, reciting words without connection, a song of some kind. He looked down at the sandy path and, like the wingtip of a dove that passes, he had an impression that a smile had just passed along. He whirled about and saw that he had just crossed her path. And just at that moment, without stopping in her walk, she turned her head with a smile in order to observe him. Then he hesitated no longer and went toward her, his hands almost extended in so juvenile and naïve a rush that naïvely she waited for him. He made no excuses for himself. There was no awkwardness between them. It seemed to them they were continuing an interview already begun.

"You are laughing at me," said he; "you are quite right!"

"I'm not laughing at you"—(her voice like her step was lively and supple)—"you were laughing all to yourself; I merely laughed at seeing you."

"Was I laughing, really?"

"You are still laughing now."

"Now I know why."

She did not ask him what he meant. They walked side by side. They were happy.

"What a jolly little sun!" said she.

"Newly born springtide!"

"Was it to him just now you were sending that little smile?"

"Not to him alone. Perhaps to you, too."

"Little liar! Bad boy. You don't even know me."

"As if one could say such a thing! We have seen each other I don't know how often!"

"Thrice, counting this time."

"Ah—you remember, then? You see that we are old acquaintances!"

"Let's talk about it."

"I'm agreed. That's all I want!... Oh, come, let us sit there! Just an instant, won't you please? It's so nice at the edge of the water!"

(They were near the Galathea Fountain, which the masons had covered over with tarpaulins to protect it from the bombs.)

"I really can not, I shall miss my train."

She gave him the hour. He showed her that she had more than twenty-five minutes.

Yes, but she wanted first to buy her lunch at the corner of Rue Racine, where they keep good little buns. He hauled one out of his pocket.

"No better than this one.... Don't you really want to take it?..."

She laughed and hesitated. He put it in her hand and kept hold of her hand.

"You would give me such pleasure!... Come now, come and sit down...."

He led her to a bench in the middle of the walk that runs about the basin.

"I've something else...."

He brought out of his pocket a chocolate tablet.

"Gourmand! ... And what besides?..."

"Only—I'm ashamed. It's not in its wrapper."

"Give it me, give it! It's just the war."

He looked on as she nibbled.

"It's the first time," said he, "that I've thought the war had any good in it."

"Oh, let's not talk of it! It is so completely overwhelming!"

"Yes," he said, enthusiastic, "we shall never speak of it."

(All of a sudden the atmosphere began to grow lighter.)

"Look at those pierrots who are taking their tub."

(She pointed to the sparrows that