UGLY DREAM

Wairarapa Times-Age, 22 August 1941, Page 8

UGLY DREAM

A DESCRIPTION OF PARIS. Here is a description of Paris under the benefits of Nazi occupation, described by Pierre Lalo in “Le Temps": “The momentary concourse of passengers arriving gives to the immediate vicinity of St. Lazarre station an appearance of life. But as soon as the rue Auber hard by is reached, especially beyond the Place de I’Opera, the scene changes. “It is three o’clock in the afternoon. The Avenue de I’Opera is a desert. On the wide open roadway, on the broad pavement, a silhouette here and there. In the middle of the Avenue, from the Boulevards down to the Palais Royal, one solitary motor car glides’along, to disappear almost immediately into a side- street. Nothing more in sight. “In this quarter, formerly teeming from morning till night with a live, laughing, chatting crowd, with vehicles passing, the contrast between present and past grips one. The tall grey houses for the most part shuttered, look uninhabited. Solitude and silence, like the solitude and silence of a planet without inhabitants. j

“After a time, longer or shorter, a dull sense of getting used to it all sinks into the soul. One begins no more to notice these changes, this aspect of desolation, this something of a great disaster by which one has been beaten down and overcome. One gets used to living as in an ugly dream, until such time as the shock of some fresh incident, a detail as yet unnoticed, awakens us suddenly and shows us that the ugly dream is reality.”