The Story of Fifine by Bernard Capes — Read

It was not very much, after all: just this. Paris, it appeared, was suffering, had been suffering for some weeks, from one of those epidemics of panic which will occasionally seize on an entire populace -- especially if of the excitable and impressionable Latin race -- and we happened to have alighted on it at the psychologic moment. You will remember, perhaps, that brief plague of motor-dacoitage which for a time kept the whole city in a state of nervous ferment, until it came to culminate in a siege and massacre which were very much a replica of the London Sidney Street affair? Well, that was the occasion; and, according to Madame Crussol, a general condition of terror prevailed; good citizens walking furtively, with looks askance at every petrol-driven vehicle, and bad searching their consciences for past oppressions in any possible way provocative of reprisals. No one knew whose turn it would be next with these murderous miscreants, whom a persistent baffling of the police and long immunity from arrest had rendered absolutely reckless.

The story had left Fifine and me, I may say, virtually unconcerned. Fresh from the sun and the south, serenely ensconced in the impregnable citadel of our love, we felt no tremors but such as arose from the thought of the social reckoning we should have to pay at last, and the possible difficulties in the way of an accommodation. All the trepidations of the outside world were as nothing to us in the shadow of that problem; I do not think that, after we had entered my rooms and shut ourselves in, we once again referred to the subject of the panic, or to Madame Crussol's excited enlarging on it for our benefit.