The little Dauphin shuffled his feet through the fallen leaves as he went to the burial service of kingdoms, across the garden, in the old riding academy.
I imagine his loving the sound of the dead leaves about his feet, as I used to love it when I was a child.
The sense of autumn and the end of things is heavy upon Paris.
All the news is good. It is just the sadness of autumn--
Les sanglots longs des violons de l'automne.
I went to meet Chantal in the Cour la Reine.
We sat on the top of the river wall. No boats passed along the river, and few people passed under the slowly falling leaves.
An old shabby man came by, reading an evening paper as he walked slowly. We asked him what the news was. He stopped and stood by the wall with us and read good news to us. He said, "I fought through '70. It was just so in '70."
Chantal said to me, "How dreadful to be old! The night of the first big victory, let's get somebody to take us out with the crowd on the boulevards."
Eliane let me come to-day, for the first time since her boy went, on the Tuesday. She has changed so, one can scarcely believe it, in just these few days. She does not look young any more. How badly he would feel; he always loved his pretty little mother to look young. He loved it when people took her for his sister, and how delighted he was that time she went to see him when he was in barracks, and the captain was shocked. She is no more young and pretty and she does not care.
Her eyes looked as if they never could cry again. She told me that the last night she had listened outside his door, and when she was quite sure he was asleep, she crept in, and groped for a chair at the foot of his bed, and sat there, not seeing him, just knowing him near, all night long while he slept. She went quietly out of the room before he waked, when the light began to show the oblong of the windows--she did not want him to know that she had watched. She said he slept the whole night long, never stirring, and that she had known she must not cry, for fear of waking him. She thought something had happened in that night to her throat and to her eyes, so that she could never have tears any more.
It was a heavy grey day, very still. People were telling one another that all the news was good. The first German flag taken had been brought to Paris: one could go that day to the Ministry of War to see it. I wished I could have waited in Paris over a day to go to see it. I thought, it will be the first thing I do, to go to see it, when I come back next week.