Madame Vérone, one of the leading lawyers and feminists of Paris, told

me that without the help of the women France could not have remained

in the field six months. This is no doubt true. Probably it has been

true of every war that France has ever waged. Nor has French history

ever been reluctant to admit its many debts to the sex it admires,

without idealization perhaps, but certainly in more ways than one. As

far back as the reign of Louis XI memoirs pay their tribute to the

value of the French woman both in peace and in war. This war has been

one of the greatest incentives to women in all the belligerent

countries that has so far occurred in the history of the world, and

the outcome is a problem that the men of France, at least, are already

revolving in their vigilant brains.

On the other hand the inept have just managed to exist. Madame Vérone

took me one day to a restaurant on Montmartre. It had been one of the

largest cabarets of that famous quarter, and at five or six tables

running its entire length I saw seven hundred men and women eating a

substantial déjeuner of veal swimming in spinach, dry purée of

potatoes, salad, apples, cheese, and coffee. For this they paid ten

cents (fifty centimes) each, the considerable deficit being made up by

the ladies who had founded the oeuvre and run it since the beginning

of the war.

[Illustration: WHERE THE ARTISTS DINE FOR FIFTY CENTIMES]

Nearly all of these people escaping charity by so narrow a margin had

been second-rate actors and scene shifters, or artists--of both

sexes--the men being either too old or otherwise ineligible for the

army. This was their only square meal during twenty-four hours. They

made at home such coffee as they could afford, and went without dinner

more often than not. The daughter of this very necessary charity, a

handsome strongly built girl, told me that she had waited on her table

without a day's rest for eighteen months.

I am frank to say that I could not eat the veal and spinach, and

confined myself to the potatoes and bread. But no doubt real hunger is

a radical cure for fastidiousness.

Later in the day Madame Vérone took me to the once famous Abbaye, now

a workroom for the dressers of dolls, a revived industry which has

given employment to hundreds of women. Some of the wildest revels of

Paris had taken place in the restaurant now incongruously lined with

rows of dolls dressed in every national costume of Allied Europe. They

sat sedately against the walls, Montenegrins, Serbians, Russians,

Italians, Sicilians, Roumanians, Poilus, Alsatians, Tommies,[C] a

strange medley, correctly but cheaply dressed. At little tables, mute

records of disreputable nights, sat women stitching, and outside the

streets of Montmartre were as silent as the grave.

[C] No doubt there are now little Uncle Sams.

II

A few days later I was introduced to a case of panurgy that would have

been almost extreme in any but a Frenchwoman.

Madame Camille Lyon took me to call on Madame Pertat, one of the most

successful doctors in Paris. I found both her history and her

personality highly interesting, and her experience no doubt will be a

severe shock to many Americans who flatter themselves that we alone of

all women possess the priceless gift of driving initiative.

Madame Pertat was born in a provincial town, of a good family, and

received the usual education with all the little accomplishments that

were thought necessary for a young girl of the comfortable

bourgeoisie. She confessed to me naively that she had coquetted a good

deal. As her brother was a doctor and brought his friends to the house

it was natural that she should marry into the same profession; and as

she continued to meet many doctors and was a young woman of much

mental curiosity and a keen intelligence it was also natural that she

should grow more and more deeply interested in the science of medicine

and take part in the learned discussions at her table.

One day her husband, after a warm argument with her on the new

treatment of an old disease, asked her why she did not study medicine.

She had ample leisure, no children, and, he added gallantly, a mind to

do it justice.

The suggestion horrified her, as it would have horrified her large

family connection and circle of friends in that provincial town where

standards are as slowly undermined as the cliffs of France by the

action of the sea.

Shortly afterward they moved to Paris, where her husband, being a man

of first-rate ability and many friends, soon built up a lucrative

practice.

Being childless, full of life, and fond of variety, they spent far

more money than was common to their class, saving practically nothing.

They had a handsome apartment with the usual number of servants;

Madame Pertat's life was made up of a round of dressmakers, bridge,

calls during the daytime, and companioning her husband at night to any

one of the more brilliant restaurants where there was dancing.

Sometimes they dined early and went to the opera or the play.

Suddenly the really serious mind of this woman revolted. She told me

that she said to her husband: "This is abominable. I cannot stand this

life. I shall study medicine, which, after all, is the only thing that

really interests me."

She immediately entered upon the ten years' course, which included

four years as an interne. France has now so far progressed that she

talks of including the degree of baccalaureate in the regular school

course of women, lest they should wish to study for a profession

later; but at that time Madame Pertat's course in medicine was long

drawn out, owing to the necessity of reading for this degree.

She was also obliged to interrupt her triumphal progress in order to

bring her first and only child into the world; but finally graduated

with the highest honors, being one of the few women of France who have

received the diploma to practice.

To practice, however, was the least of her intentions, now that she

had a child to occupy her mind and time. Then, abruptly, peace ended

and war came. Men disappeared from their usual haunts like mist. It

was as if the towns turned over and emptied their men on to the

ancient battlefields, where, generation after generation, war rages on

the same historic spots but re-naming its battles for the benefit of

chronicler and student.

M. le Docteur Pertat was mobilized with the rest. Madame's bank

account was very slim. Then once more she proved that she was a woman

of energy and decision. Without any formalities she stepped into her

husband's practice as a matter of course. On the second day of the war

she ordered out his runabout and called on every patient on his

immediate list, except those that would expect attention in his office

during the usual hours of consultation.

Her success was immediate. She lost none of her husband's patients and

gained many more, for every doctor of military age had been called

out. Of course her record in the hospitals was well known, not only to

the profession but to many of Dr. Pertat's patients. Her income, in

spite of the war, is larger than it ever was before.

She told me that when the war was over she should resign in her

husband's favor as far as her general practice was concerned, but

should have a private practice of her own, specializing in skin

diseases and facial blemishes. She could never be idle again, and if

it had not been for the brooding shadow of war and her constant

anxiety for her husband, she should look back upon those two years of

hard medical practice and usefulness as the most satisfactory of her

life.

She is still a young woman, with vivid yellow hair elaborately

dressed, and it was evident that she had none of the classic

professional woman's scorn of raiment. Her apartment is full of old

carved furniture and objets d'art, for she had always been a

collector. Her most conspicuous treasure is a rare and valuable

Russian censer of chased silver. This was on the Germans' list of

valuables when they were sure of entering Paris in September, 1914.

Through their spies they knew the location of every work of art in the

most artistic city in the world.

Madame Pertat is one of the twenty-five women doctors in Paris. All

are flourishing. When the doctors return for leave of absence

etiquette forbids them to visit their old patients while their

brothers are still at the Front; and the same rule applies to doctors

who are stationed in Paris but are in Government service. The women

are having a magnificent inning, and whether they will be as

magnanimous as Madame Pertat and take a back seat when the men return

remains to be seen. The point is, however, that they are but another

example of the advantage of technical training combined with courage

and energy.

III

On the other hand, I heard of many women who, thrown suddenly out of

work, or upon their own resources, developed their little

accomplishments and earned a bare living. One daughter of an avocat,

who had just managed to keep and educate his large family and was

promptly mobilized, left the Beaux Arts where she had studied for

several years, and after some floundering turned her knowledge of

designing to the practical art of dress. She goes from house to house

designing and cutting out gowns for women no longer able to afford

dressmakers but still anxious to please. She hopes in time to be

employed in one of the great dressmakers' establishments, having

renounced all thought of being an artist in a more grandiose sense.

Meanwhile she keeps the family from starving while her mother and

sisters do the housework. Her brothers are in the military colleges

and will be called out in due course if the war continues long enough

to absorb all the youth of France.

Mlle. E., the woman who told me her story, was suffering from the

effects of the war herself. I climbed five flights to talk to her, and

found her in a pleasant little apartment looking out over the roofs

and trees of Passy. Formerly she had taken a certain number of

American girls to board and finish off in the politest tongue in

Europe. The few American girls in Paris to-day (barring the

anachronisms that paint and plume for the Ritz Hotel) are working with

the American Ambulance, the American Fund for French Wounded, or Le

Bien-Être du Blessé, and she sits in her high flat alone.

But she too has adapted herself, and kept her little home. She

illuminates for a Bible house, and paints exquisite Christmas and

Easter cards. Of course she had saved something, for she was the

frugal type and restaurants and the cabaret could have no call for

her.

But alas! said she, there were the taxes, and ever more taxes. And who

could say how long the war would last? I cheerfully suggested that we

might have entered upon one of those war cycles so familiar in history

and that the world might not know peace again for thirty years.

Although the French are very optimistic about the duration of this war

(and, no doubt prompted by hope, I am myself) she agreed with me, and

reiterated that one must not relax effort for a moment.

Of course she has her filleul (godson) at the Front, a poor poilu who

has no family; and when he goes out the captain finds her another. She

knits him socks and vests, and sends him such little luxuries as he

asks for, always tobacco, and often chocolate.

The French bourgeoisie--or French women of any class for that

matter--do not take kindly to clubs. For this reason their

organizations limped somewhat in the earlier days and only their

natural financial genius, combined with the national practice of

economy, enabled them to develop that orderly team work so natural to

the Englishwoman. Mlle. E. told me with a wry face that she detested

the new clubs formed for knitting and sewing and rolling bandages. "It

is only old maids like myself," she added, "who go regularly. After

marriage French women hate to leave their homes. Of course they go

daily to the ouvroirs, where they have their imperative duties, but

they don't like it. I shall belong to no club when the war is over and

my American girls have returned to Paris."

VI

MADAME PIERRE GOUJON

I

Madame Pierre Goujon is another young Frenchwoman who led not only a

life of ease and careless happiness up to the Great War, but also, and

from childhood, an uncommonly interesting one, owing to the kind fate

that made her the daughter of the famous Joseph Reinach.

M. Reinach, it is hardly worth while to state even for the benefit of

American readers, is one of the foremost "Intellectuals" of France.

Born to great wealth, he determined in his early youth to live a life

of active usefulness, and began his career as private secretary to

Gambetta. His life of that remarkable Gascon is the standard work. He

was conspicuously instrumental in securing justice for Dreyfus,

championing him in a fashion that would have wrecked the public career

of a man less endowed with courage and personality: twin gifts that

have carried him through the stormy seas of public life in France.

His history of the Dreyfus case in seven volumes is accepted as an

authoritative however partisan report of one of the momentous crises

in the French Republic. He also has written on alcoholism and

election reforms, and he has been for many years a Member of the

Chamber of Deputies, standing for democracy and humanitarianism.

On a memorable night in Paris, in June, 1916, it was my good fortune

to sit next to Monsieur Reinach at a dinner given by Mr. Whitney

Warren to the American newspaper men in Paris, an equal number of

French journalists, and several "Intellectuals" more or less connected

with the press. The scene was the private banquet room of the Hotel de

Crillon, a fine old palace on the Place de la Concorde; and in that

ornate red and gold room where we dined so cheerfully, grim despots

had crowded not so many years before to watch from its long windows

the executions of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.

I was the only woman, a whim of Mr. Warren's, and possibly that is the

reason I found this dinner in the historic chamber above a dark and

quiet Paris the most interesting I ever attended! Perhaps it was

because I sat at the head of the room between Monsieur Reinach and

Monsieur Hanotaux; perhaps merely because of the evening's climax.

Of course we talked of nothing but the war (one is bored to death in

Paris if any other subject comes up). Only one speech was made, an

impassioned torrent of gratitude by Monsieur Hanotaux directed at our

distinguished host, an equally impassioned "Friend of France." I

forget just when it was that a rumor began to run around the room and

electrify the atmosphere that a great naval engagement had taken

place in the North Sea; but it was just after coffee was served that a

boy from the office of _Le Figaro_ entered with a proof-sheet for

Monsieur Reinach to correct--he contributes a daily column signed

"Polybe." Whether the messenger brought a note from the editor or

merely whispered his information, again I do not know, but it was

immediately after that Monsieur Reinach told us that news had come

through Switzerland of a great sea fight in which the Germans had lost

eight battleships.

"And as the news comes from Germany," he remarked dryly, "and as the

Germans admit having lost eight ships we may safely assume that they

have lost sixteen." And so it proved.

The following day in Paris was the gloomiest I have ever experienced

in any city, and was no doubt one of the gloomiest in history. Not a

word had come from England. Germany had claimed uncontradicted an

overwhelming victory, with the pride of Britain either at the bottom

of the North Sea or hiding like Churchill's rats in any hole that

would shelter them from further vengeance. People, both French and

American, who had so long been waiting for the Somme drive to commence

that they had almost relinquished hope went about shaking their heads

and muttering: "Won't the British even fight on the sea?"

I felt suicidal. Presupposing the continued omnipotence of the British

Navy, the Battle of the Marne had settled the fate of Germany, but if

that Navy had proved another illusion the bottom had fallen out of the

world. Not only would Europe be done for, but the United States of

America might as well prepare to black the boots of Germany.

When this war is over it is to be hoped that all the censors will be

taken out and hanged. In view of the magnificent account of itself

which Kitchener's Army has given since that miserable day, to say

nothing of the fashion in which the British Navy lived up to its best

traditions in that Battle of Jutland, it seems nothing short of

criminal that the English censor should have permitted the world to

hold Great Britain in contempt for twenty-four hours and sink poor

France in the slough of despond. However, he is used to abuse, and

presumably does not mind it.

On the following day he condescended to release the truth. We all

breathed again, and I kept one of my interesting engagements with

Madame Pierre Goujon.

II

This beautiful young woman's husband was killed during the first month

of the war. Her brother was reported missing at about the same time,

and although his wife has refused to go into mourning there is little

hope that he will ever be seen alive again or that his body will be

found. There was no room for doubt in the case of Pierre Goujon.

Perhaps if the young officer had died in the natural course of events

his widow would have been overwhelmed by her loss, although it is

difficult to imagine Madame Goujon a useless member of society at any

time. Her brilliant black eyes and her eager nervous little face

connote a mind as alert as Monsieur Reinach's. As it was, she closed

her own home--she has no children--returned to the great hôtel of her

father in the Parc Monceau, and plunged into work.

It is doubtful if at any period of the world's history men have failed

to accept (or demand) the services of women in time of war, and this

is particularly true of France, where women have always counted as

units more than in any European state. Whether men have heretofore

accepted these invaluable services with gratitude or as a

matter-of-course is by the way. Never before in the world's history

have fighting nations availed themselves of woman's co-operation in as

wholesale a fashion as now; and perhaps it is the women who feel the

gratitude.

Of course the first duty of every Frenchwoman in those distracted days

of August, 1914, was, as I have mentioned before, to feed the poor

women so suddenly thrown out of work or left penniless with large

families of children. Then came the refugees pouring down from Belgium

and the invaded districts of France; and these had to be clothed as

well as fed.

In common with other ladies of Paris, both French and American, Madame

Goujon established ouvroirs after the retreat of the Germans, in order

to give useful occupation to as many of the destitute women as

possible. But when these were in running order she joined the

Baroness Lejeune (born a Princess Murat and therefore of Napoleon's

blood) in forming an organization both permanent and on the grand

scale.

The Baroness Lejeune also had lost her husband early in the war. He

had been detached from his regiment and sent to the Belgian front to

act as bodyguard to the Prince of Wales. Receiving by a special

messenger a letter from his wife, to whom he had been married but a

few months, he separated himself from the group surrounding the

English Prince and walked off some distance alone to read it. Here a

bomb from a taube intended for the Prince hit and killed him

instantly.

Being widows themselves it was natural they should concentrate their

minds on some organization that would be of service to other widows,

poor women without the alleviations of wealth and social eminence,

many of them a prey to black despair. Calling in other young widows of

their own circle to help (the number was already appalling), they went

about their task in a business-like way, opening offices in the Rue

Vizelly, which were subsequently moved to 20 Rue Madrid.

When I saw these headquarters in May, 1916, the oeuvre was a year old

and in running order. In one room were the high chests of narrow

drawers one sees in offices and public libraries. These were for card

indexes and each drawer contained the dossiers of widows who had

applied for assistance or had been discovered suffering in lonely

pride by a member of the committee. Each dossier included a methodical

account of the age and condition of the applicant, of the number of

her children, and the proof that her husband was either dead or

"missing." Also, her own statement of the manner in which she might,

if assisted, support herself.

Branches of this great work--Association d'Aide aux Veuves Militaires

de la Grande Guerre--have been established in every department of

France; there is even one in Lille. The Central Committee takes care

of Paris and environs, the number of widows cared for by them at that

time being two thousand. No doubt the number has doubled since.

In each of the rooms I visited a young widow sat before a table, and I

wondered then, as I wondered many times, if all the young French

widows really were beautiful or only created the complete illusion in

that close black-hung toque with its band of white crêpe just above

the eyebrows and another from ear to ear beneath the chin. When the

eyes are dark, the eyebrows heavily marked, no hair visible, and the

profile regular, the effect is one of poignant almost sensational

beauty. Madame Goujon looks like a young abbess.

I do not wish to be cynical but it occurred to me that few of these

young widows failed to be consoled when they stood before their

mirrors arrayed for public view, however empty their hearts. Before I

had left Paris I had concluded that it was the mothers who were to be

pitied in this accursed war. Life is long and the future holds many

mysteries for handsome young widows. Nevertheless the higher happiness

is sometimes found in living with a sacred memory and I have an idea

that one or two of these young widows I met will be faithful to their

dead.

Smooth as this oeuvre appeared on the surface it had not been easy to

establish and every day brought its frictions and obstacles. The

French temperament is perhaps the most difficult in the world to deal

with, even by the French themselves. Our boasted individuality is

merely in the primal stage compared with the finished production in

France. Even the children are far more complex and intractable than

ours. They have definite opinions on the subject of life, character,

and the disposition of themselves at the age of six.

Madame Goujon told me that every widow in need of help, no matter how

tormented or however worthy, had to be approached with far more tact

than possible donors, and her idiosyncrasies studied and accepted

before anything could be done with her, much less for her.

Moreover there was the great problem of the women who would not work.

These were either of the industrial class, or of that petite

bourgeoisie whose husbands, called to the colors, had been small

clerks and had made just enough to keep their usually childless wives

in a certain smug comfort.

These women, whose economical parents had married them into their own

class, or possibly boosted them one step higher, with the aid of the

indispensable dot, never had done any work to speak of, and many of

them manifested the strongest possible aversion from working, even

under the spur of necessity. They had one-franc-twenty-five a day from

the Government and much casual help during the first year of the war,

when money was still abundant, from charitable members of the noblesse

or the haute bourgeoisie. As their dot had been carefully invested in

_rentes_ (bonds) if it continued to yield any income at all this was

promptly swallowed up by taxes.

As for the women of the industrial class, they not only received

one-franc-twenty-five a day but, if living in Paris, seventy-five

centimes for each child--fifty if living in the provinces; and

families in the lower classes of France are among the largest in the

world. Five, ten, fifteen children; I heard these figures mentioned

daily, and, on one or two occasions, nineteen. Mrs. Morton Mitchell of

San Francisco, who lives in Paris in the Avenue du Bois de Bologne,

discovered after the war broke out that the street-sweeper to whom she

had often given largesse left behind him when called to the Front

something like seventeen dependents. Indeed, they lost no time

acquainting her with the fact; they called on her in a body, and she

has maintained them ever since.

While it was by no means possible in the case of the more moderate

families to keep them in real comfort on the allocation, the women,

many of them, had a pronounced distaste for work outside of their

little homes, as they had their liberty for the first time in their

drab and overworked lives and proposed to enjoy it. No man to dole

them out just enough to keep a roof over their heads and for bread and

stew, while he spent the rest on tobacco, at the wine-shops, or for

dues to the Socialist or Syndicalist Club. Every centime that came in

now was theirs to administer as they pleased.

The Mayoress of a small town near Paris told me that she had heard

these women say more than once they didn't care how long the war

lasted; owing to the prevalence of the alcoholism octopus which has

fastened itself on France of late years the men often beat their wives

as brutally as the low-class Englishmen, and this vice added to the

miserliness of their race made their sojourn in the trenches a welcome

relief. Of course these were the exceptions, for the Frenchman in the

main is devoted to his family, but there were enough of them to emerge

into a sudden prominence after the outbreak of the war when charitable

women were leaving no stone unturned to relieve possible distress.

There is a story of one man with thirteen children who was called to

the colors on August second, and whose wife received allocation

amounting to more than her husband's former earnings. It was some time

after the war began that the rule was made exempting from service

every man with more than six children. When it did go into effect the

fathers of large flocks hastened home, anticipating a joyful reunion.

But the wife of this man, at least, received him with dismay and

ordered him to enlist--within the hour.

"Don't you realize," she demanded, "that we never were so well off

before? We can save for the first time in our lives and I can get a

good job that would not be given me if you were here. Go where you

belong. Every man's place is in the trenches."

There is not much romance about a marriage of that class, nor is there

much romance left in the harried brain of any mother of thirteen.

III

Exasperating as those women were who preferred to live with their

children on the insufficient allocation, it is impossible not to feel

a certain sympathy for them. In all their lives they had known nothing

but grinding work; liberty is the most precious thing in the world and

when tasted for the first time after years of sordid oppression it

goes to the head. Moreover, the Frenchwoman has the most extraordinary

faculty for "managing." The poorest in Paris would draw their skirts

away from the slatterns and their dirty offspring in our own tenement

districts.

One day I went with Madame Paul Dupuy over to what she assured me was

one of the poorest districts of Paris. Our visit had nothing to do

with the war. She belonged to a charitable organization which for

years had paid weekly visits to the different parishes of the capital

and weighed a certain number of babies. The mothers that brought their

howling offspring (who abominated the whole performance) were given

money according to their needs--vouched for by the priest of the

district--and if the babies showed a falling off in weight they were

sent to one of the doctors retained by the society.

The little stone house (situated, by the way, in an old garden of a

hunting-lodge which is said to have been the _rendezvous de chasse_ of

Madame du Barry), where Madame Dupuy worked, with an apron covering

her gown and her sleeves rolled up, was like an ice-box, and the naked

babies when laid on the scales shrieked like demons. One male child, I

remember, sat up perfectly straight and bellowed his protest with an

insistent fury and a snorting disdain at all attempts to placate him

that betokened the true son of France and a lusty long-distance

recruit for the army. All the children, in fact, although their

mothers were unmistakably poor, looked remarkably plump and healthy.

After a time, having no desire to contract peritonitis, I left the

little house and went out and sat in the car. There I watched for

nearly an hour the life of what we would call a slum. The hour was

about four in the afternoon, when even the poor have a little leisure.

The street was filled with women sauntering up and down, gossiping,

and followed by their young. These women and children may have had on

no underclothes: their secrets were not revealed to me; but their

outer garments were decent. The children had a scrubbed look and their

hair was confined in tight pigtails. The women looked stout and

comfortable.

They may be as clean to-day but I doubt if they are as stout and as

placid of expression. The winter was long and bitter and coal and food

scarce, scarcer, and more scarce.

IV

The two classes of women with whom Madame Goujon and her friends have

most difficulty are in the minority and merely serve as the shadows in

the great canvas crowded with heroic figures of French women of all

classes who are working to the limit of their strength for their

country or their families. They may be difficult to manage and they

may insist upon working at what suits their taste, but they do work

and work hard; which after all is the point. Madame Goujon took me

through several of the ouvroirs which her society had founded to teach

the poor widows--whose pension is far inferior to the often brief

allocation--a number of new occupations under competent teachers.

Certainly these young benefactors had exercised all their ingenuity.

Some of the women, of course, had been fit for nothing but manual

labor, and these they had placed as scrub-women in hospitals or as

servants in hôtels or families. But in the case of the more

intelligent or deft of finger no pains were being spared to fit them

to take a good position, or, as the French would say, "situation," in

the future life of the Republic.

In a series of rooms lent to the society by one of the great

dressmakers, I saw keen-looking women of all ages learning to retouch

photographs, to wind bobbins by electricity, to dress hair and fashion

wigs, to engrave music scores, articulate artificial limbs, make

artificial flowers, braces for wounded arms and legs, and artificial

teeth! Others are taught nursing, bookkeeping, stenography, dentistry.

One of Madame Goujon's most picturesque revivals is the dressing of

dolls. Before the Franco-Prussian war this great industry belonged to

France. Germany took it away from France while she was prostrate,

monopolizing the doll trade of the world, and the industry almost

ceased at its ancient focus. Madame Goujon was one of the first to see

the opportunity for revival in France, and with Valentine Thompson and

Madame Vérone, to mention but two of her rivals, was soon employing

hundreds of women. A large room on the ground floor of M. Reinach's

hotel is given over as a storeroom for dolls, all irreproachably

dressed and indisputably French.

It will take a year or two of practice and the co-operation of male

talent after the war to bring the French doll up to the high standard

attained by the Germans throughout forty years of plodding efficiency.

The prettiest dolls I saw were those arrayed in the different national

costumes of Europe, particularly those that still retain the styles of

musical comedy. After those rank the Red Cross nurses, particularly

those that wear the blue veil over the white. And I never saw in real

life such superb, such imperturbable brides.

V

Another work in which Madame Goujon is interested and which certainly

is as picturesque is Le Bon Gite. The gardens of the Tuilleries when

regarded from the quay present an odd appearance these days. One sees

row after row of little huts, models of the huts the English Society

of Friends have built in the devastated valley of the Marne. Where

hundreds of families were formerly living in damp cellars or in the

ruins of large buildings, wherever they could find a sheltering wall,

the children dying of exposure, there are now a great number of these

portable huts where families may be dry and protected from the

elements, albeit somewhat crowded.

The object of Le Bon Gite is to furnish these little temporary

homes--for real houses cannot be built until the men come back from

the war--and these models in the Tuilleries Gardens show to the

visitor what they can do in the way of furnishing a home that will

accommodate a woman and two children, for three hundred francs (sixty

dollars).

It seems incredible, but I saw the equipment of several of these

little shelters (which contain several rooms) and I saw the bills.

They contained a bed, two chairs, a table, a buffet, a stove, kitchen

furnishings, blankets, linen, and crockery. There were even window

curtains. The railway authorities had reduced freight rates for their

benefit fifty per cent; and at that time (July, 1916) they had rescued

the poor of four wrecked villages from reeking cellars and filthy

straw and given some poor poilus a home to come to during their six

days' leave of absence from the Front.

The Marquise de Ganay and the Comtesse de Bryas, two of the most

active members, are on duty in the offices of their neat little

exhibition for several hours every day, and it was becoming one of the

cheerful sights of Paris.

There is little left of the Tuilleries to-day to recall the ornate

splendors of the Second Empire, when the Empress Eugenie held her

court there, and gave garden parties under the oaks and the chestnuts.

There is a vast chasm between the pomp of courts and huts furnished

for three hundred francs for the miserable victims of the war; but

that chasm, to be sure, was bridged by the Commune and this war has

shown those that have visited the Military Zone that a palace makes a

no more picturesque ruin than a village.

VI

A more curious contrast was a concert given one afternoon in the

Tuilleries Gardens for the purpose of raising money for one of the war

relief organizations. Madame Paul Dupuy asked me if I would help her

take two blind soldiers to listen to it. We drove first out to Reuilly

to the Quinze Vingts, a large establishment where the Government has

established hundreds of their war blind (who are being taught a score

of new trades), and took the two young fellows who were passed out to

us. The youngest was twenty-one, a flat-faced peasant boy, whose eyes

had been destroyed by the explosion of a pistol close to his face. The

older man, who may have been twenty-six, had a fine, thin, dark face

and an expression of fixed melancholy. He had lost his sight from

shock. Both used canes and when we left the car at the entrance to the

Tuilleries we were obliged to guide them.

The garden was a strange assortment of fashionable women, many of them

bearing the highest titles in France, and poilus in their faded

uniforms, nearly all maimed--réformés, mutilés! The younger of our

charges laughed uproariously, with the other boys, at the comic song,

but my melancholy charge never smiled, and later when, under the

thawing influence of tea, he told us his story, I was not surprised.

He had been the proprietor before the war of a little business in the

North, prosperous and happy in his little family of a wife and two

children. His mother was dead but his father and sister lived close

by. War came and he left for the Front confident that his wife would

run the business. It was only a few months later that he heard his

wife had run away with another man, that the shop was abandoned, and

the children had taken refuge with his father.

Then came the next blow. His sister died of successive shocks and his

father was paralyzed. Then he lost his sight. His children were living

anyhow with neighbors in the half ruined village, and he was learning

to make brushes.

So much for the man's tragedy in war time. It is said that as time

goes on there are more of them. On the other hand, during the first

year, when the men were not allowed to go home, they formed abiding

connections with women in the rear of the army, and when the six days'

leave was granted preferred to take these ladies on a little jaunt

than return to the old drab existence at home.

These are what may be called the by-products of war, but they may

exercise a serious influence on a nation's future. When the hundreds

of children born in the North of France, who are half English, or half

Scotch, or half Irish, or half German, or half Indian, or half

Moroccan, grow up and begin to drift about and mingle with the general

life of the nation, the result may be that we shall have been the last

generation to see a race that however diversified was reasonably proud

of its purity.

VII

MADAME PIERRE GOUJON (Continued)

I

I had gone to Lyons to see the war relief work of that flourishing

city and Madame Goujon went South at the same time to visit her

husband's people. We agreed to meet in the little town of Bourg la

Bresse, known to the casual tourist for its church erected in the

sixteenth century by Margaret of Austria and famous for the carvings

on its tombs.

Otherwise it is a picturesque enlarged village with a meandering

stream that serves as an excuse for fine bridges; high-walled gardens,

ancient trees, and many quaint old buildings.

Not that I saw anything in detail. The Mayor, M. Loiseau, and Madame

Goujon met me at the station, and my ride to the various hospitals

must have resembled the triumphal progress of chariots in ancient

Rome. The population leaped right and left, the children even

scrambling up the walls as we flew through the narrow winding streets.

It was apparent that the limited population of Bourg did not in the

least mind being scattered by their Mayor, for the children shrieked

with delight, and although you see few smiles in the provinces of

France these days, and far more mourning than in Paris, at least we

encountered no frowns.

The heroine of Bourg is Madame Dugas. Once more to repeat history:

Before the war Madame Dugas, being a woman of fashion and large

wealth, lived the usual life of her class. She had a château near

Bourg for the autumn months: hunting and shooting before 1914 were as

much the fashion on the large estates of France as in England. She had

a villa on the Rivera, a hôtel in Paris, and a cottage at Dinard. But

as soon as war broke out all these establishments were either closed

or placed at the disposal of the Government. She cleaned out a large

hotel in Bourg and installed as many beds as it was possible to buy at

the moment. Then she sent word that she was ready to accommodate a

certain number of wounded and asked for nurses and surgeons.

The Government promptly took advantage of her generous offer, and her

hospital was so quickly filled with wounded men that she was obliged

to take over and furnish another large building. This soon overflowing

as well as the military hospitals of the district, she looked about in

vain for another house large enough to make extensive installations

worth while.

During all those terrible months of the war, when the wounded arrived

in Bourg by every train, and household after household put on its

crêpe, there was one great establishment behind its lofty walls that

took no more note of the war than if the newspapers that never passed

its iron gates were giving daily extracts from ancient history. This

was the Convent de la Visitation. Its pious nuns had taken the vow

never to look upon the face of man. If, as they paced under the great

oaks of their close, or the stately length of their cloisters telling

their beads, or meditating on the negation of earthly existence and

the perfect joys of the future, they heard an echo of the conflict

that was shaking Europe, it was only to utter a prayer that the souls

of those who had obeyed the call of their country and fallen

gloriously as Frenchmen should rest in peace. Not for a moment did the

idea cross their gentle minds that any mortal force short of invasion

by the enemy could bring them into contact with it.

But that force was already in possession of Bourg. Madame Dugas was a

woman of endless resource. Like many another woman in this war the

moment her executive faculties, long dormant, were stirred, that

moment they began to develop like the police microbes in fevered

veins.

She had visited that convent. She knew that its great walls sheltered

long rooms and many of them. It would make an ideal hospital and she

determined that a hospital it should be.

There was but one recourse. The Pope. Would she dare? People wondered.

She did. The Pope, who knew that wounded men cannot wait, granted the

holy nuns a temporary dispensation from their vows; and when I walked

through the beautiful Convent of the Visitation with Madame Dugas,

Madame Goujon, and M. Loiseau, there were soldiers under every tree

and nuns were reading to them.

Nuns were also nursing those still in the wards, for nurses are none

too plentiful in France even yet, and Madame Dugas had stipulated for

the nuns as well as for the convent.

It was a southern summer day. The grass was green. The ancient trees

were heavy with leaves. Younger and more graceful trees drooped from

the terrace above a high wall in the rear. The sky was blue. The

officers, the soldiers, looked happy, the nuns placid. It was an oasis

in the desert of war.

I leave obvious ruminations to the reader.

When I met Madame Dugas, once more I wondered if all Frenchwomen who

were serving or sorrowing were really beautiful or if it were but one

more instance of the triumph of clothes. Madame Dugas is an infirmière

major, and over her white linen veil flowed one of bright blue,

transparent and fine. She wore the usual white linen uniform with the

red cross on her breast, but back from her shoulders as she walked

through the streets with us streamed a long dark blue cloak. She is a

very tall, very slender woman, with a proud and lofty head, a profile

of that almost attenuated thinness that one sees only on a

Frenchwoman, and only then when the centuries have done the chiseling.

As we walked down those long, narrow, twisted streets of Bourg between

the high walls with the trees sweeping over the coping, she seemed to

me the most strikingly beautiful woman I had ever seen. But whether I

shall still think so if I see her one of these days in a Paris

ballroom I have not the least idea.

Madame Dugas runs three hospitals at her own expense and is her own

committee. Like the rest of the world she expected the war to last

three months, and like the rest of her countrywomen who immediately

offered their services to the state she has no intention of resigning

until what is left of the armies are in barracks once more. She lives

in a charming old house in Bourg, roomy and well furnished and with a

wild and classic garden below the terrace at the back. (Some day I

shall write a story about that house and garden.) Here she rests when

she may, and here she gave us tea.

One wonders if these devoted Frenchwomen will have anything left of

their fortunes if the war continues a few years longer. Madame Dugas

made no complaint, but as an example of the increase in her necessary

expenditures since 1914 she mentioned the steadily rising price of

chickens. They had cost two francs at the beginning of the war and

were now ten. I assumed that she gave her grands blessés chicken

broth, which is more than they get in most hospitals.

Many of the girls who had danced in her salons two years before, and

even their younger sisters, who had had no chance to "come out," are

helping Madame Dugas, both as nurses and in many practical ways;

washing and doing other work of menials as cheerfully as they ever

played tennis or rode in la chasse.

II

Curiously enough, the next woman whose work has made her notable, that

Madame Goujon took me to see, was very much like Madame Dugas in

appearance, certainly of the same type.

Val de Grace is the oldest military hospital in Paris. It covers

several acres and was begun by Louis XIII and finished by Napoleon.

Before the war it was run entirely by men, but one by one or group by

group these men, all reservists, were called out and it became a

serious problem how to keep it up to its standard. Of course women

were all very well as nurses, but it took strong men and many of them

to cook for thousands of wounded, and there was the problem of keeping

the immense establishment of many buildings well swept and generally

clean. But the men had to go, réformés were not strong enough for the

work, every bed was occupied--one entire building by tuberculars--and

they must both eat and suffer in sanitary conditions.

Once more they were obliged to have recourse to Woman.

Madame Olivier, like Madame Dugas a _dame du monde_ and an infirmière

major, went to one of the hospitals at the Front on the day war broke

out, nursed under fire, of course, but displayed so much original

executive ability as well as willingness to do anything to help, no

matter what, that she was soon put in charge of the wounded on trains.

After many trips, during which she showed her uncommon talent for

soothing the wounded, making them comfortable even when they were

packed like sardines on the floor, and bringing always some sort of

order out of the chaos of those first days, she was invited to take

hold of the problem of Val de Grace.

She had solved it when I paid my visit with Madame Goujon. She not

only had replaced all the men nurses and attendants with women but was

training others and sending them off to military hospitals suffering

from the same sudden depletions as Val de Grace. She also told me that

three women do the work of six men formerly employed, and that they

finished before ten in the morning, whereas the men never finished.

The hospital when she arrived had been in a condition such as men

might tolerate but certainly no woman. I walked through its weary

miles (barring the tuberculosis wards) and I never saw a hospital look

more sanitarily span.

But the kitchen was the show place of Val de Grace, little as the

women hard at work suspected it. Where Madame Olivier found those

giantesses I cannot imagine; certainly not in a day. She must have

sifted France for them. They looked like peasant women and no doubt

they were. Only the soil could produce such powerful cart-horse

females. And only such cart-horses could have cooked in the great

kitchen of Val de Grace. On a high range that ran the length of the

room were copper pots as large as vats, full of stew, and these the

Brobdinagians stirred with wooden implements that appeared to my

shattered senses as large as spades. No doubt they were of inferior

dimensions, but even so they were formidable. How those women stirred

and stirred those steaming messes! I never shall forget it. And they

could also move those huge pots about, those terrible females. I

thought of the French Revolution.

Madame Olivier, ruling all this force, giantesses included, with a rod

of iron, stood there in the entrance of the immaculate kitchen looking

dainty and out of place, with her thin proud profile, her clear dark

skin, beautifully tinted in the cheeks, her seductive infirmière

uniform. But she has accomplished one of the minor miracles of the

war.

I wonder if all these remarkable women of France will be decorated one

of these days? They have earned the highest _citations_, but perhaps

they have merely done their duty as Frenchwomen. C'est la guerre.

VIII

VALENTINE THOMPSON

I

Fortunate are those women who not only are able to take care of

themselves but of their dependents during this long period of

financial depression; still more fortunate are those who, either

wealthy or merely independent, are able both to stand between the

great mass of unfortunates and starvation and to serve their country

in old ways and new.

More fortunate still are the few who, having made for themselves by

their talents and energy a position of leadership before the war, were

immediately able to carry their patriotic plans into effect.

In March, 1914, Mlle. Valentine Thompson, already known as one of the

most active of the younger feminists, and distinctly the most

brilliant, established a weekly newspaper which she called _La Vie

Feminine_. The little journal had a twofold purpose: to offer every

sort of news and encouragement to the by-no-means-flourishing party

and to give advice, assistance, and situations to women out of work.

Mlle. Thompson's father at the moment was in the Cabinet, holding the

portfolio of Ministre du Commerce. Her forefathers on either side had

for generations been in public life. She and her grandmother had both

won a position with their pen and therefore moved not only in the best

political but the best literary society of Paris. Moreover Mlle.

Thompson had a special penchant for Americans and knew more or less

intimately all of any importance who lived in Paris or visited it

regularly. Mrs. Tuck, the wealthiest American living in France--it has

been her home for thirty years and she and her husband have spent a

fortune on charities--was one of her closest friends. All Americans

who went to Paris with any higher purpose than buying clothes or

entertaining duchesses at the Ritz, took letters to her. Moreover, she

is by common consent, and without the aid of widow's bonnet or Red

Cross uniform, one of the handsomest women in Paris. She is of the

Amazon type, with dark eyes and hair, a fine complexion, regular

features, any expression she chooses to put on, and she is always the

well-dressed Parisienne in detail as well as in effect. Her carriage

is haughty and dashing, her volubility racial, her enthusiasm, while

it lasts, bears down every obstacle, and her nature is imperious. She

must hold the center of the stage and the reins of power. I should say

that she was the most ambitious woman in France.

She is certainly one of its towering personalities and if she does not

stand out at the end of the war as Woman and Her Achievements

personified it will be because she has the defects of her genius. Her

restless ambition and her driving energy hurl her headlong into one

great relief work after another, until she has undertaken more than

any mere mortal can carry through in any given space of time. She is

therefore in danger of standing for no one monumental work (as will be

the happy destiny of Mlle. Javal, for instance), although no woman's

activities or sacrifices will have been greater.

It may be imagined that such a woman when she started a newspaper

would be in a position to induce half the prominent men and women in

France either to write for it or to give interviews, and this she did,

of course; she has a magnificent publicity sense. The early numbers of

_La Vie Feminine_ were almost choked with names known to "tout Paris."

It flourished in both branches, and splendid offices were opened on

the Avenue des Champs Elysées. Women came for advice and employment

and found both, for Mlle. Thompson is as sincere in her desire to help

the less fortunate of her sex as she is in her feminism.

II

Then came the War.

Mlle. Thompson's plans were formed in a day, her Committees almost as

quickly. _La Vie Feminine_ opened no less than seven ouvroirs, where

five hundred women were given work. When the refugees began pouring in

she was among the first to ladle out soup and deplete her wardrobe.

She even went to the hastily formed hospitals in Paris and offered her

services. As she was not a nurse she was obliged to do the most

menial work, which not infrequently consisted in washing the filthy

poilus wounded after weeks of fighting without a bath or change of

clothing. Sometimes the dirt-caked soldiers were natives of Algiers.

But she performed her task with her accustomed energy and

thoroughness, and no doubt the mere sight of her was a God-send to

those men who had for so long looked upon nothing but blood and death

and horrors.

Then came the sound of the German guns thirty kilometers from Paris.

The Government decided to go to Bordeaux. Mlle. Thompson's father

insisted that his daughter accompany himself and her mother. At first

she refused. What should she do with the five hundred women in her

ouvroirs, the refugees she fed daily? She appealed to Ambassador

Herrick. But our distinguished representative shook his head. He had

trouble enough on his hands. The more beautiful young women who

removed themselves from Paris before the Boche entered it the simpler

would be the task of the men forced to remain. It was serious enough

that her even more beautiful sister had elected to remain with her

husband, whose duties forbade him to flee. Go, Mademoiselle, and go

quickly.

Mlle. Thompson yielded but she made no precipitate flight. Collecting

the most influential and generous members of her Committees, she

raised the sum needed for a special train of forty cars. Into this she

piled the five hundred women of her ouvroirs and their children, a

large number of refugees, and an orphan asylum--one thousand in all.

When it had steamed out of Paris and was unmistakably on its way to

the South she followed. But not to sit fuming in Bordeaux waiting for

General Joffre to settle the fate of Paris. She spent the three or

four weeks of her exile in finding homes or situations for her

thousand helpless charges, in Blanquefort, Lourdes, Bayonne,

Marseilles, Bordeaux and other southern cities and small towns,

forming in each a Committee to look out for them.

III

Soon after her return to Paris she conceived and put into operation

the idea of an École Hôtelière.

Thousands of Germans and Austrians, employed as waiters or in other

capacities about the hotels, either had slunk out of Paris just before

war was declared or were interned. Even the Swiss had been recalled to

protect their frontiers. The great hotels supplied the vacancies with

men hastily invited from neutral countries, very green and very

exorbitant in their demands. Hundreds of the smaller hotels were

obliged to close, although the smallest were, as ever, run by the wife

of the proprietor, and her daughters when old enough.

But that was only half of the problem. After the war all these hotels

must open to accommodate the tourists who would flock to Europe. The

Swiss of course could be relied upon to take the first train to Paris

after peace was declared, but the Germans and Austrians had been as

thick in France as flies on a battlefield, and it will be a generation

before either will fatten on Latin credulity again. Even if the people

of the Central Powers revolt and set up a republic it will be long

before the French, who are anything but volatile in their essence,

will be able to look at a Boche without wanting to spit on him or to

kick him out of the way as one would a vicious cur.

To Mlle. Thompson, although men fall at her feet, the answer to every

problem is Woman.

She formed another powerful Committee, roused the enthusiasm of the

Touring Club de France, rented a dilapidated villa in Passy, and after

enlisting the practical sympathies of furnishers, decorators,

"magazins," and persons generally whose business it is to make a house

comfortable and beautiful, she advertised not only in the Paris but in

all the provincial newspapers for young women of good family whose

marriage prospects had been ruined by the war and who would wish to

fit themselves scientifically for the business of hotel keeping. Each

should be educated in every department from directrice to scullion.

The answers were so numerous that she was forced to deny many whose

lovers had been killed or whose parents no longer could hope to

provide them with the indispensable dot. The repairs and installations

of the villa having been rushed, it was in running order and its

dormitories were filled by some thirty young women in an incredibly

short time. Mlle. Jacquier, who had presided over a somewhat similar

school in Switzerland, was installed as directrice.

Each girl, in addition to irreproachable recommendations and the

written consent of her parents, must pay seventy francs a month, bring

a specified amount of underclothing, etc.; and, whatever her age or

education, must, come prepared to submit to the discipline of the

school. In return they were to be taught not only how to fill all

positions in a hotel, but the scientific principles of domestic

economy, properties of food combined with the proportions necessary to

health, bookkeeping, English, correspondence, geography,

arithmetic--"calcul rapide"--gymnastics, deportment, hygiene.

Moreover, when at the end of the three months' course they had taken

their diplomas, places would be found for them. If they failed to take

their diplomas and could not afford another course, still would

places, but of an inferior order, be provided. After the first

students arrived it became known that an ex-pupil without place and

without money could always find a temporary refuge there. Even if she

had "gone wrong" she might come and ask for advice and help.

IV

When I arrived in Paris I had two letters to Mlle. Thompson and after

I had been there about ten days I went with Mr. Jaccaci to call on her

at the offices of _La Vie Feminine_, and found them both sumptuous

and a hive of activities. In the course of the rapid give-and-take

conversation--if it can be called that when one sits tight with the

grim intention of pinning Mlle. Thompson to one subject long enough to

extract definite information from her--we discovered that she had

translated one of my books. Neither of us could remember which it was,

although I had a dim visualization of the correspondence, but it

formed an immediate bond. Moreover--another point I had quite

forgotten--when her friend, Madame Leverrière, had visited the United

States some time previously to put Mlle. Thompson's dolls on the

market, I had been asked to write something in favor of the work for

the New York _Times_. Madame Leverrière, who was present, informed me

enthusiastically that I had helped her _énormément,_ and there was

another bond.

The immediate consequence was that, although I could get little that

was coherent from Mlle. Thompson's torrent of classic French, I was

invited to be an inmate of the École Hôtelière at Passy. I had

mentioned that although I was comfortable at the luxurious Hôtel de

Crillon, still when I went upstairs and closed my door I was in the

atmosphere of two years ago. And I must have constant atmosphere, for

my time was limited. I abominated pensions, and from what I had heard

of French families who took in a "paying guest," or, in their tongue,

_dame pensionnaire_, I had concluded that the total renouncement of

atmosphere was the lesser evil.

Would I go out and see the École Feminine? I would. It sounded

interesting and a visit committed me to nothing. Mlle. Thompson put it

charmingly. I should be conferring a favor. There was a guest chamber

and no guest for the pupils to practice on. And it would be an honor,

etc.

We drove out to Passy and I found the École Feminine in the Boulevard

Beauséjour all and more than Mlle. Thompson had taken the time to

portray in detail. The entrance was at the side of the house and one

approached it through a large gateway which led to a cul-de-sac lined

with villas and filled with beautiful old trees that enchanted my eye.

I cursed those trees later but at the moment they almost decided me

before I entered the house.

The interior, having been done by enthusiastic admirers of Mlle.

Thompson, was not only fresh and modern but artistic and striking. The

salon was paneled, but the dining-room had been decorated by Poiret

with great sprays and flowers splashed on the walls, picturesque

vegetables that had parted with their humility between the garden and

the palette. Through a glass partition one saw the shining kitchen

with its large modern range, its rows and rows of the most expensive

utensils--all donations by the omnifarious army of Mlle. Thompson's

devotees.

Behind the salon was the schoolroom, with its blackboard, its four

long tables, its charts for food proportions. All the girls wore blue

linen aprons that covered them from head to foot.

I followed Mlle. Thompson up the winding stair and was shown the

dormitories, the walls decorated as gaily as if for a bride, but

otherwise of a severe if comfortable simplicity. Every cot was as neat

as a new hospital's in the second year of the war, and there was an

immense lavatory on each floor.

Then I was shown the quarters destined for me if I would so far

condescend, etc. There was quite a large bedroom, with a window

looking out over a mass of green, and the high terraces of houses

beyond; the garden of a neighbor was just below. There was a very

large wardrobe, with shelves that pulled out, and one of those

wash-stands where a minute tank is filled every morning (when not

forgotten) and the bowl is tipped into a noisy tin just below.

The room was in a little hallway of its own which terminated in a

large bathroom with two enormous tubs. Of course the water was heated

in a copper boiler situated between the tubs, for although the École

Feminine was modern it was not too modern. The point, however, was

that I should have my daily bath, and that the entire school would

delight in waiting on me.

It did not take me any time whatever to decide. I might not be

comfortable but I certainly should be interested. I moved in that day.

Mlle. Thompson's original invitation to be her guest (in return for

the small paragraph I had written about the dolls) was not to be

entertained for a moment. I wished to feel at liberty to stay as long

as I liked; and it was finally agreed that at the end of the week

Mlle. Thompson and Mlle. Jacquier should decide upon the price.

V

I remained something like three months. There were three trolley

lines, a train, a cab-stand, a good shopping street within a few

steps, the place itself was a haven of rest after my long days in

Paris meeting people by the dozen and taking notes of their work, and

the cooking was the most varied and the most delicate I have ever

eaten anywhere. A famous retired chef had offered his services three

times a week for nothing and each girl during her two weeks in the

kitchen learned how to prepare eggs in forty different ways, to say

nothing of sauces and delicacies that the Ritz itself could not

afford. I received the benefit of all the experiments. I could also

amuse myself looking through the glass partition at the little master

chef, whose services thousands could not command, rushing about the

kitchen, waving his arms, tearing his hair, shrieking against the

incredible stupidity of young females whom heaven had not endowed with

the genius for cooking; and who, no doubt, had never cooked anything

at all before they answered the advertisement of Mlle. Thompson. Few

that had not belonged to well-to-do families whose heavy work had been

done by servants.

A table was given me in a corner by myself and the other tables were

occupied by the girls who at the moment were not serving their

fortnight in the kitchen or as waitresses. These were treated as

ceremoniously (being practiced on) as I was, although their food,

substantial and plentiful, was not as choice as mine. I could have had

all my meals served in my rooms if I had cared to avail myself of the

privilege; but not I! If you take but one letter to Society in France

you may, if you stay long enough, and are not personally disagreeable,

meet princesses, duchesses, marquises, countesses, by the dozen; but

to meet the coldly aloof and suspicious bourgeoisie, who hate the

sight of a stranger, particularly the petite bourgeoisie, is more

difficult than for a German to explain the sudden lapse of his country

into barbarism. Here was a unique opportunity, and I held myself to be

very fortunate.

Was I comfortable? Judged by the American standard, certainly not. My

bed was soft enough, and my breakfast was brought to me at whatever

hour I rang for it. But, as was the case all over Paris, the central

heat had ceased abruptly on its specified date and I nearly froze.

During the late afternoon and evenings all through May and the greater

part of June I sat wrapped in my traveling cloak and went to bed as

soon as the evening ceremonies of my two fortnightly attendants were

over. I might as well have tried to interrupt the advance of a German

taube as to interfere with any of Mlle. Jacquier's orthodoxies.

Moreover four girls, with great chattering, invariably prepared my

bath--which circumstances decided me to take at night--and I had to

wait until all their confidences--exchanged as they sat in a row on

the edge of the two tubs--were over. Then something happened to the

boiler, and as all the plumbers were in the trenches, and ubiquitous

woman seemed to have stopped short in her new accomplishments at

mending pipes, I had to wait until a permissionnaire came home on his

six days' leave, and that was for five weeks. More than once I decided

to go back to the Crillon, where the bathrooms are the last cry in

luxury, for I detest the makeshift bath, but by this time I was too

fascinated by the École to tear myself away.

Naturally out of thirty girls there were some antagonistic

personalities, and two or three I took such an intense dislike to that

I finally prevailed upon Mlle. Jacquier to keep them out of my room

and away from my table. But the majority of the students were "regular

girls." At first I was as welcome in the dining-room as a Prussian

sentinel, and they exchanged desultory remarks in whispers; but after

a while they grew accustomed to me and chattered like magpies. I could

hear them again in their dormitories until about half-past ten at

night. Mlle. Jacquier asked me once with some anxiety if I minded, and

I assured her that I liked it. This was quite true, for these girls,

all so eager and natural, and even gay, despite the tragedy in the

background of many, seemed to me the brightest spot in Paris.

It is true that I remonstrated, and frequently, against the terrific

noise they made every morning at seven o'clock when they clamped

across the uncarpeted hall and down the stairs. But although they

would tiptoe for a day they would forget again, and I finally resigned

myself. I also did my share in training them to wait on a guest in her

room! Not one when I arrived had anything more than a theoretical idea

of what to do beyond making a bed, sweeping, and dusting. I soon

discovered that the more exacting I was--and there were times when I

was exceeding stormy--the better Mlle. Jacquier was pleased.

She had her hands full. Her discipline was superb and she addressed

each with invariable formality as "Mademoiselle----"; but they were

real girls, full of vitality, and always on the edge of rebellion. I

listened to some stinging rebukes delivered by Mlle. Jacquier when she

would arise in her wrath in the dining-room and address them

collectively. She knew how to get under their skin, for they would

blush, hang their heads, and writhe.

VI

But Mlle. Jacquier told me that what really kept them in order was the

influence of Mlle. Thompson. At first she came every week late in the

afternoon to give them a talk; then every fortnight; then--oh là! là!

I listened to one or two of these talks. The girls sat in a

semicircle, hardly breathing, their eyes filling with tears whenever

Mlle. Thompson, who sat at a table at the head of the room, played on

that particular key.

I never thought Valentine Thompson more remarkable than during this

hour dedicated to the tuning and exalting of the souls of these girls.

Several told me that she held their hearts in her hands when she

talked and that they would follow her straight to the battlefield.

She, herself, assumed her most serious and exalted expression. I have

never heard any one use more exquisite French. Not for a moment did

she talk down to those girls of a humbler sphere. She lifted them to

her own. Her voice took on deeper tones, but she always stopped short

of being dramatic. French people of all classes are too keen and

clear-sighted and intelligent to be taken in by theatrical tricks, and

Mlle. Thompson made no mistakes. Her only mistake was in neglecting

these girls later on for other new enterprises that claimed her ardent

imagination.

She talked, I remember, of patriotism, of morale, of their duty to

excel in their present studies that they might be of service not only

to their impoverished families but to their beloved France. It was not

so much what she said as the lovely way in which she said it, her

impressive manner and appearance, her almost overwhelming but, for the

occasion, wholly democratic personality.

Once a week Mlle. Thompson and the heads of the Touring Club de

France had a breakfast at the École and tables were laid even in the

salon. I was always somebody's guest upon these Tuesdays, unless I was

engaged elsewhere, and had, moreover, been for years a member of the

Touring Club. Some of the most distinguished men and women of Paris

came to the breakfasts: statesmen, journalists, authors, artists,

people of _le beau monde_, visiting English and Americans as well as

French people of note. Naturally the students became expert waitresses

and chasseurs as well as cooks.

Altogether I should have only the pleasantest memories of the École

Feminine had it not been for the mosquitoes. I do not believe that New

Jersey ever had a worse record than Paris that summer. Every leaf of

every one of those beautiful trees beyond my window, over whose tops I

used to gaze at the airplanes darting about on the lookout for taubes,

was an incubator. I exhausted the resources of two chemist shops in

Passy and one in Paris. I tried every invention, went to bed reeking

with turpentine, and burned evil-smelling pastiles. Mlle. Jacquier

came in every night and slew a dozen with a towel as scientifically as

she did everything else. All of no avail. At one time I was so spotted

that I had to wear a still more heavily spotted veil. I looked as if

afflicted with measles.

Oddly enough the prettiest of the students, whose first name was

Alice, was the only one of us all ignored by the mosquitoes. She had

red-gold hair and a pink and white skin of great delicacy, and she

might have been the twin of Elsie Ferguson. A few of the other girls

were passably good-looking but she was the only one with anything like

beauty--which, it would seem, is practically confined to the noblesse

and grande bourgeoisie in France. Next to her in looks came Mlle.

Jacquier, who if she had a dot would have been snapped up long since.

Alice had had two fiancés (selected by her mother) and both young

officers; one, an Englishman, had been killed in the first year of the

war. She was only eighteen. At one time the northern town she lived in

was threatened by the Germans, and Mrs. Vail of Boston (whose daughter

is so prominent at the American Fund for French Wounded headquarters

in Paris), being on the spot and knowing how much there would be left

of the wildrose innocence that bloomed visibly on Alice's plump

cheeks, whisked her off to London. There she remained until she heard

of Mlle. Thompson's School, when Mrs. Vail brought her to Paris. As

she was not only pretty and charming but intelligent, I exerted myself

to find her a place before I left, and I believe she is still with

Mrs. Thayer in the Hotel Cecilia.

VII

The École Féminine, I am told, is no more. Mlle. Thompson found it

impossible to raise the necessary money to keep it going. The truth

is, I fancy, that she approached generous donators for too many

different objects and too many times. Perhaps the École will be

reopened later on. If not it will always be a matter of regret not

only for France but for Valentine Thompson's own sake that she did not

concentrate on this useful enterprise; it would have been a definite

monument in the center of her shifting activities.

I have no space to give even a list of her manifold oeuvres, but one

at least bids fair to be associated permanently with her name. What is

now known in the United States as the French Heroes' Fund was started

by Mlle. Thompson under the auspices of _La Vie Féminine_ to help the

réformés rebuild their lives. The greater number could not work at

their old avocations, being minus an arm or a leg. But they learned to

make toys and many useful articles, and worked at home; in good

weather, sitting before their doors in the quiet village street. A

vast number of these Mlle. Thompson and various members of her

Committee located, tabulated, encouraged; and, once a fortnight,

collected their work. This was either sold in Paris or sent to

America.

In New York Mrs. William Astor Chanler and Mr. John Moffat organized

the work under its present title and raised the money to buy

Lafayette's birthplace. They got it at a great bargain, $20,000; for a

large number of acres were included in the purchase. Another $20,000,

also raised by Mr. Moffatt, repaired and furnished the château, which

not only is to be a sort of French Mt. Vernon, with rooms dedicated to

relics of Lafayette and the present war, as well as a memorial room

for the American heroes who have fallen for France, but an orphanage

is to be built in the grounds, and the repairs as well as all the

other work is to be done by the blind and the mutilated, who will thus

not be objects of charity but made to feel themselves men once more

and able to support their families. The land will be rented to the

réformés, the mutilés and the blind.

Mlle. Thompson and Mrs. Chanler, with the help of a powerful

Committee, are pushing this work forward as rapidly as possible in the

circumstances and no doubt it will be one of the first war meccas of

the American tourists so long separated from their beloved Europe.

VIII

The most insistent memory of my life in Passy at the Hôtel Féminine is

the Battle of the Somme. After it commenced in July I heard the great

guns day and night for a week. That deep, steady, portentous booming

had begun to exert a morbid fascination before the advance carried the

cannon out of my range, and I had an almost irresistible desire to

pack up and follow it. The ancestral response to the old god of war is

more persistent than any of us imagine, I fancy. I was close to the

lines some weeks later, when I went into the Zone des Armées, and it

is quite positive that not only does that dreary and dangerous region

exert a sinister fascination but that it seems to expel fear from

your composition. It is as if for the first time you were in the

normal condition of life, which during the centuries of the ancestors

to whom you owe your brain-cells, was war, not peace.

IX

MADAME WADDINGTON

I

One has learned to associate Madame Waddington so intimately with the

glittering surface life of Europe that although every one knows she

was born in New York of historic parentage, one recalls with something

of a shock now and then that she was not only educated in this country

but did not go to France to live until after the death of her father

in 1871.

This no doubt accounts for the fact that meeting her for the first

time one finds her unmistakably an American woman. Her language may be

French but she has a directness and simplicity that no more identifies

her with a European woman of any class than with the well-known

exigencies of diplomacy. Madame Waddington strikes one as quite

remarkably fearless and downright; she appears to be as outspoken as

she is vivacious; and as her husband had a highly successful career as

a diplomatist, and as his debt to his brilliant wife is freely

conceded, Madame Waddington is certainly a notable instance of the gay

persistence of an intelligent American woman's personality, combined

with the proper proportion of acuteness, quickness, and charm which

force a highly conventionalized and specialized society to take her on

her own terms. The greater number of diplomatic women as well as

ladies-in-waiting that I have run across during my European or

Washington episodes have about as much personality as a door-mat. Many

of our own women have been admirable helpmates to our ambassadors, but

I recall none that has played a great personal rôle in the world. Not

a few have contributed to the gaiety of nations.

Madame Waddington has had four separate careers quite aside from the

always outstanding career of girlhood. Her father was Charles King,

President of Columbia College and son of Rufus King, second United

States Minister to England. When she married M. Waddington, a

Frenchman of English descent, and educated at Rugby and Cambridge, he

was just entering public life. His château was in the Department of

the Aisne and he was sent from there to the National Assembly. Two

years later he was appointed Minister of Public Instruction, and in

January, 1876, he was elected Senator from the Aisne. In December of

the following year he once more entered the Cabinet as Minister of

Public Instruction, later accepting the portfolio for Foreign Affairs.

During this period, of course, Madame Waddington lived the brilliant

social and political life of the capital. M. Waddington began his

diplomatic career in 1878 as the first Plenipotentiary of France to

the Congress of Berlin. In 1883 he was sent as Ambassador

Extraordinary to represent France at the coronation of Alexander III;

and it was then that Madame Waddington began to send history through

the diplomatic pouch, and sow the seeds of that post-career which

comes to so few widows of public men.

Madame Waddington's letters from Russia, and later from England where

her husband was Ambassador from 1883 to 1893 are now so famous, being

probably in every private library of any pretensions, that it would be

a waste of space to give an extended notice of them in a book which

has nothing whatever to do with the achievements of its heroines in

art and letters in that vast almost-forgotten period, Before the War.

Suffice it to say that they are among the most delightful epistolary

contributions to modern literature, the more so perhaps as they were

written without a thought of future publication. But being a born

woman of letters, every line she writes has the elusive qualities of

style and charm; and she has besides the selective gift of putting

down on paper even to her own family only what is worth recording.

When these letters were published in _Scribner's Magazine_ in 1902,

eight years after M. Waddington's death, they gave her an instant

position in the world of letters, which must have consoled her for the

loss of that glittering diplomatic life she had enjoyed for so many

years.

Not that Madame Waddington had ever dropped out of society, except

during the inevitable period of mourning. In Paris up to the outbreak

of the war she was always in demand, particularly in diplomatic

circles, by far the most interesting and kaleidoscopic in the European

capitals. I was told that she never paid a visit to England without

finding an invitation from the King and Queen at her hotel, as well as

a peck of other invitations.

I do not think Madame Waddington has ever been wealthy in our sense of

the word. But, as I said before, her career is a striking example of

that most precious of all gifts, personality. And if she lives until

ninety she will always be in social demand, for she is what is known

as "good company." She listens to you but you would far rather listen

to her. Unlike many women of distinguished pasts she lives in hers

very little. It is difficult to induce the reminiscent mood. She lives

intensely in the present and her mind works insatiably upon everything

in current life that is worth while.

She has no vanity. Unlike many ladies of her age and degree in Paris

she does not wear a red-brown wig, but her own abundant hair, as soft

and white as cotton and not a "gray" hair in it. She is now too much

absorbed in the war to waste time at her dressmakers or even to care

whether her placket-hole is open or not. I doubt if she ever did care

much about dress or "keeping young," for those are instincts that

sleep only in the grave. War or no war they are as much a part of the

daily habit as the morning bath. I saw abundant evidence of this

immortal fact in Paris during the second summer of the war.

Nevertheless, the moment Madame Waddington enters a room she seems to

charge it with electricity. You see no one else and you are impatient

when others insist upon talking. Vitality, an immense intelligence

without arrogance or self-conceit, a courtesy which has no relation to

diplomatic caution, a kindly tact and an unmistakable integrity,

combine to make Madame Waddington one of the most popular women in

Europe.

II

This brings me to Madame Waddington's fourth career. The war which has

lifted so many people out of obscurity, rejuvenated a few dying

talents, and given thousands their first opportunity to be useful,

simply overwhelmed Madame Waddington with hard work and a multitude of

new duties. If she had indulged in dreams of spending the rest of her

days in the peaceful paths of literature when not dining out, they

were rudely dissipated on August 1st, 1914.

Madame Waddington opened the Ouvroir Holophane on the 15th of August,

her first object being to give employment and so countercheck the

double menace of starvation and haunted idleness for at least fifty

poor women: teachers, music-mistresses, seamstresses, lace makers,

women of all ages and conditions abruptly thrown out of work.

Madame Waddington, speaking of them, said: "We had such piteous cases

of perfectly well-dressed, well-educated, gently-bred women that we

hardly dared offer them the one-franc-fifty and 'gouter' (bowl of

café-au-lait with bread and butter), which was all we were able to

give for four hours' work in the afternoon."

However, those poor women were very thankful for the work and sewed

faithfully on sleeping-suits and underclothing for poilus in the

trenches and hospitals. Madame Waddington's friends in America

responded to her call for help and M. Mygatt gave her rooms on the

ground floor of his building in the Boulevard Haussmann.

When the Germans were rushing on Paris and invasion seemed as

inevitable as the horrors that were bound to follow, Mr. Herrick

insisted that Madame Waddington and her sister Miss King, who was

almost helpless from rheumatism, follow the Government to the South.

This Madame Waddington reluctantly did, but returned immediately after

the Battle of the Marne.

It was not long before the Ouvroir Holophane outgrew its original

proportions, and instead of the women coming there daily to sew, they

called only for materials to make up at home. For this ouvroir (if it

has managed to exist in these days of decreasing donations) sends to

the Front garments of all sorts for soldiers ill or well,

pillow-cases, sheets, sleeping-bags, slippers.

Moreover, as soon as the men began to come home on their six days'

leave they found their way to the generous ouvroir on the Boulevard

Haussmann, where Madame Waddington, or her friend Mrs. Greene (also an

American), or Madame Mygatt, always gave the poor men what they needed

to replace their tattered (or missing) undergarments, as well as

coffee and bread and butter.

The most difficult women to employ were those who had been accustomed

to make embroidery and lace, as well as many who had led pampered

lives in a small way and did not know how to sew at all. But

one-franc-fifty stood between them and starvation and they learned.

To-day nearly all of the younger women assisted by those first

ouvroirs are more profitably employed. France has adjusted itself to a

state of war and thousands of women are either in Government service

and munition factories, or in the reopened shops and restaurants.

III

The Waddingtons being the great people of their district were, of

course, looked upon by the peasant farmers and villagers as

aristocrats of illimitable wealth. Therefore when the full force of

the war struck these poor people--they were in the path of the Germans

during the advance on Paris, and ruthlessly treated--they looked to

Madame Waddington and her daughter, Madame Francis Waddington, to put

them on their feet again.

Francis Waddington, to whom the château descended, was in the

trenches, but his mother and wife did all they could, as soon as the

Germans had been driven back, to relieve the necessities of the dazed

and miserable creatures whose farms had been devastated and shops

rifled or razed. Some time, by the way, Madame Waddington may tell the

dramatic story of her daughter-in-law's escape. She was alone in the

château with her two little boys when the Mayor of the nearest village

dashed up with the warning that the Germans were six kilometers away,

and the last train was about to leave.

She had two automobiles, but her chauffeur had been mobilized and

there was no petrol. She was dressed for dinner, but there was no time

to change. She threw on a cloak and thinking of nothing but her

children went off with the Mayor in hot haste to catch the train. From

that moment on for five or six days, during which time she never took

off her high-heeled slippers with their diamond buckles, until she

reached her husband in the North, her experience was one of the side

dramas of the war.

I think it was early in 1915 that Madame Waddington wrote in

_Scribner's Magazine_ a description of her son's château as it was

after the Germans had evacuated it. But the half was not told. It

never can be, in print. Madame Huard, in her book, _My Home on the

Field of Honor_, is franker than most of the current historians have

dared to be, and the conditions which she too found when she returned

after the German retreat may be regarded as the prototype of the

disgraceful and disgusting state in which these lovely country homes

of the French were left; not by lawless German soldiers but by

officers of the first rank. Madame Francis Waddington did not even run

upstairs to snatch her jewel case, and of course she never saw it

again. Her dresses had been taken from the wardrobes and slashed from

top to hem by the swords of these incomprehensible barbarians. The

most valuable books in the library were gutted. But these outrages are

almost too mild to mention.

IV

The next task after the city ouvroir was in running order was to teach

the countrywomen how to sew for the soldiers and pay them for their

work. The region of the Aisne is agricultural where it is not heavily

wooded. Few of the women had any skill with the needle. The two Madame

Waddingtons concluded to show these poor women with their coarse red

hands how to knit until their fingers grew more supple. This they took

to very kindly, knitting jerseys and socks; and since those early days

both the Paris and country ouvroirs had sent (June, 1916) twenty

thousand packages to the soldiers. Each package contained a flannel

shirt, drawers, stomach band, waistcoat or jersey, two pairs of socks,

two handkerchiefs, a towel, a piece of soap. Any donations of tobacco

or rolled cigarettes were also included.

This burden in the country has been augmented heavily by refugees

from the invaded districts. Of course they come no more these days,

but while I was in Paris they were still pouring down, and as the

Waddington estate was often in their line of march they simply camped

in the park and in the garage. Of course they had to be clothed, fed,

and generally assisted.

As Madame Waddington's is not one of the picturesque ouvroirs she has

found it difficult to keep it going, and no doubt contributes all she

can spare of what the war has left of her own income. Moreover, she is

on practically every important war relief committee, sometimes as

honorary president, for her name carries great weight, often as

vice-president or as a member of the "conseil." After her ouvroirs the

most important organization of which she is president is the Comité

International de Pansements Chirurgicaux des Etats Unis--in other

words, surgical dressings--started by Mrs. Willard, and run actively

in Paris by Mrs. Austin, the vice-president. When I visited it they

were serving about seven hundred hospitals, and no doubt by this time

are supplying twice that number. Two floors of a new apartment house

had been put at their disposal near the Bois, and the activity and

shining whiteness were the last word in modern proficiency (I shall

never use that black-sheep among words, _efficiency_, again).

One of Madame Waddington's more personal oeuvres is the amusement she,

in company with her daughter-in-law, provides for the poilus in the

village near her son's estate. Regiments are quartered there, either

to hold themselves in readiness, or to cut down trees for the army.

They wandered about, desolate and bored, until the two Madame

Waddingtons furnished a reading-room, provided with letter paper and

post-cards, books and, I hope, by this time a gramophone. Here they

sit and smoke, read, or get up little plays. As the château is now

occupied by the staff the two patronesses are obliged to go back and

forth from Paris, and this they do once a week at least.

V

Madame Waddington, knowing that I was very anxious to see one of the

cantines at the railway stations about which so much was said, took me

late one afternoon to St. Lazare. Into this great station, as into all

the others, train after train hourly gives up its load of

permissionnaires--men home on their six days' leave--; men for the

éclopé stations; men from shattered regiments, to be held at Le

Bourget until the time comes to be sent to fill other gaps made by the

German guns; men who merely arrive by one train to take another out,

but who must frequently remain for several hours in the dépôt.

I have never entered one of these _gares_ to take a train that I have

not seen hundreds of soldiers entering, leaving, waiting; sometimes

lying asleep on the hard floor, always on the benches. It is for all

who choose to take advantage of them that these cantines are run, and

they are open day and night.

The one in St. Lazare had been organized in February, 1915, by the

Baronne de Berckheim (born Pourtales) and was still run by her in

person when I visited it in June, 1916. During that time she and her

staff had taken care of over two hundred thousand soldiers. From 8 to

11 A.M. café-au-lait, or café noir, or bouillon, paté de foie or

cheese is served. From 11 to 2 and from 6 to 9, bouillon, a plate of

meat and vegetables, salad, cheese, fruits or compote, coffee, a quart

of wine or beer, cigarettes. From 2 to 6 and after 9 P.M., bouillon,

coffee, tea, paté, cheese, milk, lemonade, cocoa.

The rooms in the station are a donation by the officials, of course.

The dining-room of the St. Lazare cantine was fitted up with several

long tables, before which, when we arrived, every square inch of the

benches was occupied by poilus enjoying an excellent meal of which

beef à la mode was the pièce de résistance. The Baroness Berckheim and

the young girls helping her wore the Red Cross uniform, and they

served the needs of the tired and hungry soldiers with a humble

devotion that nothing but war and its awful possibilities can inspire.

It was these nameless men who were saving not only France from the

most brutal enemy of modern times but the honor of thousands of such

beautiful and fastidious young women as these. No wonder they were

willing and grateful to stand until they dropped.

[Illustration: A RAILWAY DEPOT CANTINE]

It was evident, however, that their imagination carried them beyond

man's interiorities. The walls were charmingly decorated not only with

pictures of the heroes of the war but with the colored supplements of

the great weekly magazines which pursue their even and welcome way in

spite of the war. Above there were flags and banners, and the lights

were very bright. Altogether there was no restaurant in Paris more

cheerful--or more exquisitely neat in its kitchen. I went behind and

saw the great roasts in their shining pans, the splendid loaves of

bread, the piles of clean dishes. Not a spot of grease in those

crowded quarters. In a corner the President of the Chamber of Commerce

was cashier for the night.

Adjoining was a rest-room with six or eight beds, and a lavatory large

enough for several men simultaneously to wash off the dust of their

long journey.

These cantines are supported by collections taken up on trains. On any

train between Paris and any point in France outside of the War Zone

girls in the uniform of the Croix Rouge appear at every stop and shake

a box at you. They are wooden boxes, with a little slit at the top. As

I have myself seen people slipping in coppers and, no doubt, receiving

the credit from other passengers of donating francs, I suggested that

these young cadets of the Red Cross would add heavily to their day's

toll if they passed round open plates. Certainly no one would dare

contribute copper under the sharp eyes of his fellows. This, I was

told, was against the law, but that it might be found practicable to

use glass boxes.

In any case the gains are enough to run these cantines. The girls are

almost always good looking and well bred, and they look very serious

in their white uniform with the red cross on the sleeves; and the

psychotherapeutic influence is too strong for any one to resist.

Madame Waddington had brought a large box of chocolates and she passed

a piece over the shoulder of each soldier, who interrupted the more

serious business of the moment to be polite. Other people bring them

flowers, or cigarettes, and certainly there is no one in the world so

satisfactory to put one's self to any effort for as a poilu. On her

manners alone France should win her war.

X

THE COUNTESS D'HAUSSONVILLE[D]

I

Madame la Comtesse d'Haussonville, it is generally conceded, is not

only the greatest lady in France but stands at the very head of all

women working for the public welfare in her country. That is saying a

great deal, particularly at this moment.

[D] Naturally this should have been the first chapter, both on

account of the importance of the work and the position of Madame

d'Haussonville among the women of France, but unfortunately the

necessary details did not come until the book was almost ready

for press.

Madame d'Haussonville is President of the first, or noblesse, division

of the Red Cross, which, like the two others, has a title as distinct

as the social status of the ladies who command, with diminishing

degrees of pomp and power.

Société Française de Secours aux Blessés Militaires is the name of the

crack regiment.

The second division, presided over by Madame Carnot, leader of the

grande bourgeoisie, calls itself Association des Dames Françaises, and

embraces all the charitably disposed of that haughty and powerful

body.

The third, operated by Madame Perouse, and composed of able and useful

women whom fate has planted in a somewhat inferior social sphere--in

many social spheres, for that matter--has been named (note the

significance of the differentiating noun) Union des Femmes de France.

Between these three useful and admirable organizations there is no

love lost whatever. That is to say, in reasonably normal conditions.

No doubt in that terrible region just behind the lines they sink all

differences and pull together for the common purpose.

The Red Cross was too old and too taken-for-granted an organization,

and too like our own, for all I knew to the contrary, to tempt me to

give it any of the limited time at my disposal in France; so, as it

happened, of these three distinguished chiefs the only one I met was

Madame d'Haussonville.