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By Root 796 0

made us feel came simply from their forcing us to look at the sky, towards which normally we so seldom raise our eyes. In this Paris, whose beauty in 1914 I had seen awaiting almost defenceless the threat of the approaching enemy, there was certainly, as there had been then, the ancient unalterable splendour of a moon cruelly and mysteriously serene, which poured down its useless beauty upon the still untouched buildings of the capital; but as in 1914, and more now than in 1914, there was also something else, there were lights from a different source, intermittent beams which, whether they came from the aeroplanes or from the searchlights of the Eiffel Tower, one knew to be directed by an intelligent will, by a friendly vigilance which gave one the same kind of emotion, inspired the same sort of gratitude and calm that I had felt in Saint-Loup’s room at Doncières, in the cell of that military cloister where so many fervent and disciplined hearts were exercising themselves in readiness for the day when, without hesitation, in the midst of their youth, they would consummate their sacrifice.

After the raid of two days earlier, when it had been more full of movement than the earth, the sky had become calm again as the sea becomes calm after a storm. But like the sea after a storm, it had not yet recovered absolute tranquillity. Aeroplanes were still mounting like rockets to the level of the stars, and searchlights, as they quartered the sky, swept slowly across it what looked like a pale dust of stars, of errant milky ways. Meanwhile the aeroplanes took their places among the constellations and seeing these “new stars” one might well have supposed oneself to be in another hemisphere.

M. de Charlus spoke to me of his admiration for these airmen of ours, and went on, since he was no more capable of checking the flow of his pro-German feelings than of his other inclinations, even though at the same time he denied both the one and the other tendency: “I must add of course that I have just as much admiration for the Germans who go up in the Gothas. And when it comes to the Zeppelins, think of the courage that is needed! They are heroes, there is no other word for it. What difference can it make that they are attacking civilians, if guns are firing at them? Are you afraid of the Gothas and the bombardment?” I admitted that I was not, but perhaps I was wrong. No doubt, my idleness having given me the habit, when it was a question of my work, of putting it off from one day to another, I imagined that death too might be postponed in the same fashion. How should one be afraid of a bombardment when one is convinced that one will not be hit today? Anyhow, formed in isolation, the idea of bombs being dropped, the idea of the possibility of death, had added nothing tragic to the image which I had in my mind of the German flying machines, until from one of them, storm-tossed and partly hidden from my sight by the thick billowing mists of an agitated sky, from an aeroplane which, though I knew it to be murderous, I imagined only as stellar and celestial, I had one evening seen the gesture of a bomb dropped upon us. For the novel reality of a danger is perceived only through the medium of that new thing, not assimilable to anything that we already know, to which we give the name “an impression” and which is often, as in the present case, epitomised in a line, a line which defines an intention and possesses the latent potentiality of the action which has given it its particular form, like the invisible line described by this falling bomb or those other lines which I had seen at the same time from the Pont de la Concorde, on all sides of the threatening, hunted aeroplane, as though they had been reflexions in the clouds of the fountains of the Champs-Elysées and the Place de la Concorde and the Tuileries: the beams of the searchlights travelling through the sky like luminous jets of water, which also were lines full of intention, full of the provident and protective intentions of men of power and wisdom to whom, as on that night in the barracks