HOW WE KEPT WARM
In Paris the child of the people is a born artist. He has the instinct
from his ancestors. His taste is formed and cultivated by what he sees
around him--of the present as well as of the past--from the time he
first begins to observe things. Inheritance and atmosphere influence
him. One June day in 1917, our dear friend Thiébault-Sisson, art critic
of the _Temps_, was lunching with us. He drew from his pocket a lot of
photographs. They illustrated the best and most striking of the drawings
by children in the primary schools of the city. M. Thiébault-Sisson had
organized an exposition of children's drawings, done in their ordinary
class work. The photographs were a surprise and a revelation. Having
lived in Paris since the beginning of the war, I could appreciate the
comments of a Parisian, proud of this eloquent showing of precocious
talent. I accepted with alacrity his invitation to see the originals.
The outline, almost always enhanced by bright frank color, where the
three notes of the flag played a perpetual leit-motif, was a feast for
the eyes. In work of this character one expects to see the freshness
and freedom of childhood. What I found that was unusual was the maturity
born of suffering and intense emotion. In the drawings life in wartime
was reflected with a _naïveté_ that excluded neither precision nor vigor
of touch. With compositions of the simplest and most studied character
there was taste and a pretty feeling for color.
The most popular form of drawing was the poster. In one school the
children were given the subject of calling upon the people to economize
gas. One little girl made a few bold strokes outlining a gas-jet and
wrote underneath, "Parisians--Economize Gas!" Asked to admonish the
public to eat less bread, a boy of ten used a potato as a face. The eyes
were almost human in their appeal. "Eat me please!" was written under
the drawing. A further caption stated that it was the duty of patriots
to save the bread for the soldiers. Sugar shortage inspired the idea of
a sugar cone and the same cone cut in half. Under the former was "In
1914" and under the latter "--and now!" The best of these posters were
reproduced by the thousand and put in tram-cars and railway stations.
They did more to call us to order than all the grave _affiches_ of the
Government.
A dominating note, perhaps the strongest after that of the man on
furlough or the poignant expression of emotions experienced when the
news came that father would never return again, was the hunt for coal.
Little observers, inventing nothing of this (for it was seen over and
over again), pictured a coal wagon upon which two or three youngsters
had scrambled and were helping themselves. Generously they were firing
bits of the precious commodity to their little comrades. This was a
drawing made from memory of things seen.
Winter in Paris is often mild: but early in 1917 came a protracted spell
of zero weather that would have taxed the facilities of Paris in
ordinary times. The coal shortage hit us at the worst possible moment.
Transportation was tied up. The mines were not producing. Stocks became
exhausted in a few days. The hunt for coal was cruel because it was
mostly fruitless and because it imposed upon the children weary waits,
hours at a time, in the street in snow and wind, with the thermometer
down to zero.
Whoever saw the crowds massed in a long line in front of the coal
depots, old men, women, children stamping their feet painfully, jostled,
weeping or seized with mute despair at the curt announcement that there
was nothing to do but return to-morrow, will never forget the worst
calamity that fell upon Paris during the war. Children were hit by it
more than all the rest, and in a certain sense more than by the loss of
a father. For they suffered from it in their own flesh, in little hands
chapped till they opened into deep cracks, in little fingers stiffened
and swollen by monstrous chilblains, in frost-bitten feet. For six weeks
the quest for coal was the ruling passion. It inspired the children to
compositions all quite like each other in sentiment and all dominated by
the conviction of an implacable fatality.
In common with most Parisians who lived in modern apartment-houses, we
never had to think of heat. Like hot water, you just turned it on. To
make an effort to have it no more entered into our scheme of things than
to help with the stoking when we were on ship-board. How naturally one
accepts the comforts and conveniences resulting from the work of others
and the smooth moving of modern city life! At first we felt the coal
shortage mildly. It meant piling on extra clothes and having our noses
turn red and then blue, like the dolls with barometrical petticoats. The
apartment was chilly, but we got up as late as we could. For once we
blessed the school system in France which works the children so many
hours that you wonder why the babies do not strike for an eight-hour
day. As long as the municipality could supply them, schools were
especially favored. After school hours and _devoirs_ (we had a wood fire
in one room), bed time soon came for the kids. We set the victrola
going, and everybody danced until they forgot the thermometer.
[Illustration: A passage through the Louvre]
Then we began to discover that coal means more than heat and light. We
found out how many trades were obliged to say "no coal, no work." In a
big city coal is certainly king, and not a limited monarch at that.
Transportation depends on coal, and everything else depends upon
transportation. One day there was a mass meeting of Paris laundresses.
The Government had promised them coal upon payment in advance of a large
part of the price. The order had been placed for weeks: no coal came. It
meant livelihood to the laundresses and cleanliness to the rest of us.
They had the Board of Health with them and the learned doctors of the
Académie de Médecine. Think of the menace of weeks of accumulated soiled
linen! It was all right for the papers to joke about abolishing starched
shirts and cuffs and collars. That was a small part of the problem,
affecting only men. The germs involved in not being able to wash were no
joke.
Elderly people living alone and adult families calculated that it was
cheaper to go to a _pension_ than to keep house. In some cases it was
the only feasible thing. People who had the means started to go south
when conditions in Paris became intolerable. But with little children it
was dangerous to attempt a journey in freezing cold trains.
Just when we had exhausted the little supply of wood we had laid in
originally for the luxury of a wood fire we did not need, our
_propriétaire_ notified us that he could get no more coal for heating or
hot water. And the same day an inspector called to place a maximum of
gas (our only means of cooking) at less than half the amount we
ordinarily consumed.
The law of substitution came into force. We had long been ridiculing the
Germans for their _ersatz_ ingenuity. Were we now to have to seek
substitutes? Cooking is the most vital thing in life next to foodstuffs.
Paris blossomed out with what I thought was an American invention, the
fireless cooker. But they were called _marmites norvégiennes_. I suppose
if we keep on digging at Pompeii we shall find them there. Everyone who
could afford a _marmite_ bought one. You could get them at all prices
and sizes, and the newspapers published daily directions for using them.
If you could not afford a fireless cooker or if you were unable to buy
one (they soon gave out, of course), you took your hatbox from the
Galeries Lafayette and stuffed it with newspapers and sawdust with just
room in the middle for your soup-kettle.
But fireless cookers would not wash clothes. They would not give the
necessary supply of hot water. The law of substitution has a limit. And
what was to be the _ersatz_ for fuel in heating? Gas? Your supply was
already cut down. Electricity? Ditto. Both of these depended upon coal.
Petroleum? The army had commandeered all the supplies for motor
transport and airplanes. Wood alcohol? There was none to be had.
Then began the coal hunt for us. We had been pitying the poor. Now was
our turn. Money was of no value. Other _propriétaires_ had served the
same notice. People with larger purses than ours were in the market for
coal and wood. Our children began to suffer also in their own flesh.
My husband and his secretary gave up work and joined the coal hunters.
They scoured the city in taxi-cabs. Herbert found a man who knew where
there was a ton of anthracite for eighty dollars. He tracked it down and
found that he was the tenth person applying for it that same afternoon.
Then the kiddies came down with measles. Keeping them warm in the way
the doctor ordered was utterly impossible. All we could do was to give
them more blankets. When the baby got congestion of the lungs and heat
and hot baths meant the difference between life and death, I cast my eye
over the apartment appraising the furniture. I no longer thought of how
pretty my Brittany _armoire_ was or how I loved my Empire desk. The
cubic feet of wood was the sole criterion. Dining-room chairs went first
into the fire in Hope's bedroom. The dining-room table, sawed into
little blocks, heated the water for baths. Cupboard doors were taken off
their hinges and converted into fuel. Herbert got a hand-cart and stood
in line for his turn at a place where old lumber from torn-down houses
was being sold. There was a crowd besieging it as if it were a
gold-mine. It was, to the owners. The junk that had been there for years
disappeared at fabulous prices in a few days, doors, clapboards,
window-sashes, shutters, beams, flooring, even lathes.
When our fight for Hope's life became known, friends appeared bringing
treasures. A prominent American manufacturer was at the door one
morning. He had climbed six flights of stairs with a huge bag of bits of
wood gleaned in his factory.
"We calculate pretty close," he said apologetically. "We do not have
much waste in making roll-top desks."
"Don't ask me where I got this sack of coal," said another respectable
Samaritan. I felt his guilt, confirmed when he told me the story
afterwards of how he had stolen it from the back of a wagon. But I was
not asking questions then!
Two burly policemen, unmindful of dignity and uniforms, deposited sacks
of wood on my salon floor. They had come from the Commissariat in the
Fifth Arrondissement. Monsieur le Commissaire, they explained, had said
that the woman who was looking after so many Paris babies in her
_œuvre_ must not be allowed to see her own baby die. They had agreed.
This was the wood from their own office. Why not? For the first time I
cried. Go through my experience, and you will understand how one can
have a passionate love for the French. I am relating here just one
little incident of help unsolicited that came in a crisis. I had never
seen that Commissaire. How he knew my baby was ill was a mystery. But I
have often experienced in my Paris life the impulsive generosity,
carried out at inconvenience and sacrifice, of which this is an example.
There were others who needed that wood as much as I did. But I was a
foreigner who had been working for babies in the Commissaire's district.
A point of honor was involved. Never will you find a Frenchman lacking
when he feels a sense of obligation.
François Coppée wrote a beautiful story about a young French aristocrat
whose life in the army had taught him that half of the world goes
through life struggling constantly to obtain what the other half has
without effort. Perhaps you have read "La Croûte de Pain." After the war
of Soixante-Dix the aristocrat could not bear to see bread wasted. One
day he picked up a crust on the street, brushed off the mud with his
handkerchief and set it on the side-walk where one who needed it would
find it. And then he told his inquiring companion why. I shall always be
like that with coal. For I can never forget how we kept warm in
February, 1917.