ADVENT 53
The Place de la Concorde displayed two Messerschmitts that had
landed there. A notice was on the gate of the American Embassy,
Amerikanische Botschaft. German sentries stood at the gate. We went
in. Nona's mother was there with Jane, an Englishwoman who was
staying with her. Jane was the sort of woman you frequently met
on the Continent—with a husband somewhere in the background.
You didn't know whether she was divorced or a widow; you didn't
bother to find out. The sort of woman who, on an income of
about £3^0 a year, eats only once a day to save money for dresses
from Lucien Lelong, and loses at bridge two hundred francs, which
upsets her budget, so goes on losing again. Jane was on her way to
the room where British subjects were to register with the Consulate
which would henceforth look after British interests.
"Terrible," Jane was saying to me, "everything is lost. But we
English, we'll fight on. We'll go down fighting. We won't
surrender. You've seen them. They're unbeatable. Of course
we'll lose, but we'll die fighting." She was screaming a little in her
hoarse, intense voice.
"England won't lose," I said doggedly; "she won't."
Then Nona and I went to see one of the American vice-consuls
and asked whether he could marry us. We'd wanted to get married
for a considerable time. Often we tripped down to the Mairie of
the XVIIIe, but either there were too many people waiting or one
more paper was needed by the insatiable French red tape, so we
tripped out again and remained unmarried. But that day we both
felt that the storm that was blowing so hard could easily blow us
away from each other. The consul, however, said, which we knew
beforehand, that in France a consul couldn't perform the marriage
ceremony. So we went out and for the moment we felt safer; for at
any rate we had tried.
Towards the Madeleine were more flags. A military band was
marching to the Concorde. We had enough of Paris and went back
to the Butte.
At dinner I said to Nona that somewhere something was terribly
wrong. I'd fallen for most of the popular belief and now I'd have
to unlearn everything I knew and start afresh. The first thing, I said,
was that we were wrong about the Germans. All we were told
about them was utterly wrong. Those people weren't starving and
had no cardboard tanks. They surely weren't short of the tilings
you need to wage war successfully. They had steel and petrol.
That was a fact which not only the devastating events of the last
months had shown but were seen by my very eyes that long-drawn-
out day. The next point now was: how did I and the world in,