The last time I had been there was on a Sunday, when it was crowded with Parisian bourgeois, and they were eating, drinking, dancing, and making merry.
The houses had not been destroyed, but there was not a living soul in the place.

On the promenade by the river the leaves were falling from the trees under which were the benches as of old.

The gay signs still hung above the restaurants, and here and there was an advertisement informing the world that M.Pitou offered his hosts beer at so much the glass, or that the more ambitious Monsieur Some One Else was prepared to serve an excellent dinner of eels for 2fr., but I might as well have expected to get beer or eels in Palmyra as in this village where a few short weeks ago fish, flesh, and fowl, wine and beer were as plentiful as at Greenwich and Richmond during the season.

Goldsmith's "Deserted Village," I said to myself, and I should have repeated some lines from this admirable poem had I remembered any; as I did not, I walked on in the direction of Colombes, vaguely ruminating upon Pompeii, Palmyra, fish dinners at Greenwich, and the mutability of human things.

I had hardly left Asnieres, however, and was plodding along a path, when I was recalled to the realities of life by half-a-dozen Mobiles springing up from behind a low wall, and calling upon me to stop, while they enforced their order by pointing their muskets at my head.