" Yet against all this background of mourning despair, Paris in the summer of 1939 seemed gilded by splendid receptions, dances, right-wing festivities. The prospect of war was an ever-present ghost at every party, but even so people refused to acknowldege the reality behind the fears. Each new crisis was like a splinter of glass that scratched, might even draw a drop of blood, but was not savage enough to wound badly.
The madness in the air was a last-gasp attempt to enjoy ourselves while we could, a collective national need for illusions, by a patient with an incurable disease who knows that death will come at any moment. "

― Noel Barber , A Farewell to France