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charges and counter-charges going on most of the night. The Fascists hurled whatever they

could lay hands on. They pried up stones from the pavement, and tore off the scaffolding from

the American Embassy, which was under repair. The railings of the Tuileries gardens provided

them with an iron missile, shaped like a boomerang and impossible to see in the dark. When the

mounted gardes républicaines tried to drive them off the bridge, charging and striking with the

flat of their sabers, the mob countered with walking-sticks having razor-blades fastened to the

ends, to slash the bellies of the horses. In one attack after another they crippled so many of the

police and gardes that they came very near getting across the bridge and into the Chamber.

So at last shooting began. The street-lights were smashed, and the floodlights on the obelisk

were turned off, so you couldn't see much. An omnibus had been overturned and set afire near

the bridge, but that gave more smoke than light, and it soon burned out. The last sight that Lanny

saw was a troop of the Spahis, African cavalrymen in white desert robes looking like the Ku

Kluxers, galloping up the Champs Elysees and trampling the mob. There came screams directly

under where Irma and Lanny were standing; a chambermaid of the hotel had been shot and

killed on the balcony. So the guests scrambled in quickly, deciding that they had seen enough of

the class war in France.

"Do you think they will raid the hotel?" asked Irma; but Lanny assured her that this was a

respectable kind of mob, and was after the politicians only. So they went to bed.

X

"Bloody Tuesday," it was called, and the Fascist newspapers set out to make it into the

French "Beerhall Putsch." From that time on they would have only one name for Daladier:

"Assassin!" They clamored for his resignation, and before the end of the next day they got it;

there were whispers that he could no longer depend upon the police and the gardes. More

than two hundred of these were in the hospitals, and it looked like a revolution on the way.

There was wreckage all over Paris, and the Ministry of Marine partly burned. Charlot had got a

slash across the forehead, and for the rest of his life would wear a scar with pride. "La

Concorde" he would say, referring to the bridge; it would become a slogan, perhaps some day

a password to power.

On Wednesday night matters were worse, for the police were demoralized, and the hoodlums,

the apaches, went on the warpath. They smashed the windows of the shops in the Rue de

Rivoli and other fashionable streets and looted everything in sight. It wasn't a pleasant time for

visitors in Paris; Robbie was going to Amsterdam on business, so Irma and Lanny stepped into

their car and sped home.

But you couldn't get away from the class war in France. The various reactionary groups had

been organized all over the Midi, and they, too, had received their marching orders. They had

the sympathy of many in the various foreign colonies; anything to put down the Reds. Rick, after

hearing Lanny's story, said that la patrie was awaiting only one thing, a leader who would have

the shrewdness to win the "little man." So far, all the Fascist groups were avowedly reactionary,

and it would take a leftish program to win. Lanny expressed the opinion that the French man in

the street was much shrewder than the German; it wouldn't be so easy to hoodwink him.

Life was resumed at Bienvenu. Rick worked on his play and Lanny read the manuscript,

encouraged him, and supplied local color. In the privacy of their chamber Irma said: "Really,

you are a collaborator, and ought to be named." She wondered why Lanny never wrote a play of

his own. She decided that what he lacked was the impulse of self-assertion, the strong ego

which takes up the conviction that it has something necessary to the welfare of mankind.

Uncle Jesse had it, Kurt had it, Rick had it. Beauty had tried in vain to awaken it in her son,

and now Irma tried with no more success. "Rick can do it a lot better"—that was all she could

get.

Irma was becoming a little cross with this lame Englishman. She had got Lanny pretty well

cured of his Pinkness, but now Rick kept poking up the fires. There came a series of terrible

events in Austria—apparently Fascism was going to spread from country to country until it

had covered all Europe. Austria had got a Catholic Chancellor named Dollfuss, and a Catholic

army, the Heimwehr, composed mainly of peasant lads and led by a dissipated young prince.

This government was jailing or deporting Hitlerites, but with the help of Mussolini was getting

its own brand of Fascism, and now it set out to destroy the Socialist movement in the city of

Vienna. Those beautiful workers' homes, huge apartment blocks which Lanny had inspected

with such joy—the Heimwehr brought up its motorized artillery and blasted them to ruins,

killing about a thousand men, women, and children. Worse yet, they killed the workers'