"By all the virgins in France, No! A thousand times no!" growled the chauffeur, trying to keep us out.
"We meant triple fare," said Lester. I disappeared inside the cab.
"Where do _Messieurs-Dame_ want to go?" asked the chauffeur despairingly.
"Rue Lafayette, Boulevard Haussmann, Etoile, Avenue des Champs-Elysées, Invalides, and then we'll leave you at the Opéra," I suggested hopefully.
"What you want is an aeroplane," he remonstrated. But triple fare is triple fare. With a show of reluctance, he cranked and we rattled off. An hour later, after we had escaped being taken by assault a dozen times, resisted attempts to pull us out and put us out, promised to pay for a broken window and a stolen lamp, and used cigarettes and persuasive French on the man upon whose goodwill our happiness depended, we found ourselves on the Avenue de l'Opéra. By this time the chauffeur was resigned, so resigned that he tried to cross the Place de l'Opéra. We were tied up in a mass of other rashly-guided vehicles until the taxi's tires flattened out under the weight of a dozen Australians who had climbed on our roof. We were cheerful about it, and the chauffeur seemed to gather equanimity with misfortune. November 11, 1918, comes only once in a lifetime. We abandoned our taxi and our money, and tried it afoot again.
Fortune was with us. We arrived at the moment when Mademoiselle Chénal appeared on the balcony of the Opéra and sang the "Marseillaise." There was the stillness of death during the verse. But the prima donna's voice was heard only in the first word of the chorus. When the crowd took up the chorus, Paris lived one of the greatest moments of her history. Over and over again Mademoiselle Chénal waved her flag, and the chorus was repeated. Then she withdrew. Another verse would have been an anti-climax. We were carried along the Boulevard des Italiens as far as Appenrodt's. As Herbert and Lester were talking about the night, more than four years ago, when they watched the crowd break the windows of this and other German or supposedly German places, the arc lights along the middle of the boulevard flashed on. Paris of peace days reappeared.
In the midst of it all, my maternal instinct set me worrying. What if Alice, the _gouvernante_, had taken the children out into the crowd? I had gone off without thinking of my chicks. We tried to telephone. On the last day of the war that proved as impossible as on the first. My escorts were quite willing to return to the Rive Gauche. There was no reason why the celebration would not be just as interesting on the Boul' Miche. I left Herbert and Lester on the terrace of the Café Soufflet, and hurried back to the Boulevard du Montparnasse. When I reappeared half an hour later, Christine was with me. She had begged so hard to be taken to the Grands Boulevards. After all, why not? Christine had lived through all the war in France. It was her right to be in on the rejoicing. And I confess that I wanted to hear what she would say when she saw the lights. She was so young when the war started that she had forgotten what lighted streets were.