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April 14, 1942

My wedding anniversary. Paris seems another world. It must have been in some other era that I lived in my gay little house on the banks of the Marne just outside Paris, dashing back and forth to town, bent on a million projects, more or less. The last time I saw Paris in 1939 war and distress were in the air. It wasn’t quite the old Paris of my youth, but it was still beautiful—Paris now in the hands of the Boches! I shut my eyes and see it again, the horse chestnut trees in bloom, the fountains playing, the little steamers tootling up and down the Seine, laying back their whistles as they dodge under the bridges; but my ears hear only the sound of Japanese bombers over Corregidor and, nearer, the shuffle of their feet—that dreadful sound which I shall never forget. And Hi has been ordered back to concentration camp. Life will be grim.