Page:Storm Over Paris.pdf/9

city; when all railroad stations are piled high with expensive luggage, with chests of Lebanon wood and chamois portfolios; when diplomats, adventurers, aristocrats and spies, women with dyed hair and crayoned eyelashes, young people from the villages, fortune seekers, opium addicts, voluptuaries, art dealers and collectors from the four corners of the world-all take the roads which lead to Paris. They come from Belgium and Holland, over the stormy Lamanche Canal; or by train from Sweden, Norway, Germany and Poland-running the gamut of climates, countries and people, boundaries and languages. The express trains race swiftly along, and the thoughts of the passengers race even faster. For some a seat at the Sorbonne, for others a plank bed in a prison cell. Some driven by a thirst for learning; others by the stark drive of hunger. For some, heaven, for others-hell.

All of Anna's hopes lay in the soiled slip of paper she guarded so carefully. On it was written an address: Madame Berger, rue Julien Lacroix, Paris, XXE.

But compared with the magnificent salons she had dreamed about, the dim and squalid room of her cousin appeared to her like a dismal tomb. And to make matters worse, Morris happened to be out of work when she arrived. Though she knew what a loving and open-hearted pair they were, how could she add to the burdens of four souls living on the unemployed dole; how share the bed of a man and wife!

Anna lost no time in looking for work. But she was up against a hard and unyielding wall. Not only was work difficult to find; as an alien, she had no right to take employment. The French Consul in Poland had granted her only a visitor's visa; the woman in the Employment Bureau had underscored this fact. One piece of good fortune she had; the officer in the Prefecture permitted her to extend her