Paris Vistas

We went to the Ambassadeurs for tea. The terraces were full. We watched the crowds passing up and down the Champs-Elysées. All that was lacking was the orchestra to play the Marseillaise and the Star Spangled Banner. There had been no orchestras in Paris since the beginning of the war.

"WHAT class are yuh goin' to git?"

The voice came from a wee island of khaki in a solid mass of horizon blue. American soldiers! The first I had seen. The American army was to the French army as were these half dozen doughboys to the station full of shabby poilus. The Gare du Nord has many memories for me, happy and poignant, but this will always be the most precious. Shall I ever forget the ticket window around which our boys crowded? We had been saying "How long, O Lord, how long?" And now they were with us. I moved nearer to them.

"Why, there's classes—foist, second, and thoid—accordin' to what yuh pay—see?"

"Aw! What dya mean?"

"Buy fift' and we'll ride foist!"

I volunteered to help them count their change.

"She don't understand and neither do we," said one, hitching a thumb in the general direction of the girl behind the grating.

"Guess she's got mush in her brain."

"Or feathers!" laughed another.

For the first time since the beginning of the war Paris celebrated. The danger that still menaced the city and the bereavements of three years were forgotten in the frenzy of joy over what everyone believed was the entry of a decisive factor. Since April sixth insidious defeatist propaganda had permeated the mass of the people. Seizing upon the failure of the Champagne offensive in April, which had caused mutinies in the army that could not be hushed up, German agents—often through unconscious tools—spread their lies among a discouraged people. America had declared war, yes, but she intended to limit her intervention to money and materials. No American army would risk crossing the ocean. The Americans, like the British, were ready "to fight to the last Frenchman."

Seeing was believing. Here were the American uniforms. The arrival of the first American troops, we were assured, would be announced within the next few days. Perhaps they had already landed at some port in France? To baffle the submarines we understood that the censorship must be vigorous. At any rate, an American general and his staff would not be in Paris without the certainty of an army to follow.

The Americans set up their headquarters in two small hôtels at the end of the Rue de Constantine, opposite the Invalides. Immediately the boys of the headquarters detachment marked out a diamond on the Esplanade des Invalides, and passers-by had to learn to dodge base-balls. The police did not interfere. Nothing was too good for the Americans. All Paris flocked to see for themselves the khaki uniforms and to learn the mysteries of our national game. There was always a crowd around the door of General Pershing's home in the Rue de Varenne.

The events of the next few weeks will always seem like a dream to me. The scene of the drama that has influenced so profoundly the history of the world was shifted from Paris. I went to Saint-Nazaire to see our boys land and later to their first training-camp in the country of Jeanne d'Arc. Many of them did not see Paris. Their idea of France was a long journey of days and nights in freight-cars, with interminable stops, and ending in small villages where they met rain and mud. But a fortunate battalion of the First Division had the honor of being the vanguard of the A. E. F. in Paris.

Not until the spring offensive of the next year were the Americans able to come in large numbers. Then suddenly a single month brought as many as the nine preceding months. We had our half million, our million, our two millions.

Successive Cabinets realized well enough the prudence of anticipatory restrictions. In the autumn of 1916 the newspapers put forth a ballon d'essai. Every day they published a homily on the virtue of practicing economy. It had no effect on my servants, this constant warning of a shortage to come. No restaurants obeyed the voluntary rationing measures. The Government did not dare to introduce obligatory rationing. Public opinion rebels against restrictions of individual liberty. We had to feel the pinch before rationing measures were tolerated.

Sugar cards came first. They were "put over" on the public during the rejoicing over the intervention of the United States. Coal cards were instituted only after the bitter lesson of the late winter months of 1917 bid fair to repeat itself. Not until October, 1917, did I have to put my signature as chef de famille (my husband was so often away) on an application for bread cards handed me by the concierge. A fourth New Year of war came and went before we experienced what we had read about in other countries—real lack of necessities. The reserves of everything gave out suddenly. For the first time ability to spend money freely did not solve household problems.

I bought dark jersey dresses for the babies, and lived in dark things myself.

In the fourth year of the war, we began to feel the drain on the nation's manhood. The constant killing and crippling and calling to the colors of older men and boys made it almost impossible to get any work done. Bells or lights or plumbing out of order—you waited for months. Where in 1915 I had found half a dozen paper-hangers and painters eager to bid against each other for the job of renovating my studio, I had to beg and bribe men to come in 1918. It took me four months to get what I wanted done. Herbert became expert in carrying trunks and boxes: but that did him no harm. There is a bright side to everything.

Although it was an expensive proposition, I found it necessary, with my large family and constant guests, to buy groceries through an agent. A large English firm seemed to be able to furnish everything—if you paid their price. The order-man who came around every week was a rascal named Grimes. He had the genius of a book-agent, and worked you for an order by playing on your fears. Here is a monologue that I wrote out one day just to record how Grimes sold things.

"Of course, the porridge means milk. I know what you're going to say. But I've got hold of powdered milk made in Brittany. They say it's an American invention. Only one big tin to a person, but then you're six and we'll count the babies as grown ups. You can't tell how long they'll be able to keep transporting milk to the city. Order as much canned goods as I can give you. Canneries are running out of tin. Food we put up in paraffined paste-board doesn't keep very well, and there is mighty little paste-board.

"It's a good thing you don't depend upon cocktails to keep you going. I have a big auto-taxi ticking out there. The man who is going to pay for it would be glad to let it tick all night just so he got what is inside. One hundred bottles of gin. You know, the ordinary five-franc gin. I'm going to get thirty francs a bottle at the Hotel Meurice bar. But they'll be two bottles short. There they are—yours—right under my hat on the table.

"Now please let me read over the order. Not a luxury on it. Macaroni, beans, lentils, prunes, dried-apricots, salt, and yes, there must be some soap. Better let me put you down for a good hundred bars. The Marseilles people tell us they have got to stop making it soon."

"But, oh, Herbert, the children you know."

I tell this story because I believe it illustrates the thought that was uppermost in the minds of Paris women. We had faith in our armies. We stuck to our homes. We were willing to stand anything. But the constant talk of food shortage got on our nerves. We pictured our children without milk and fats and bread. It was not hard for the Grimeses to fill pages in their order-books. And you could not reason with us that laying in supplies was a sin against the community.

The rugs in my drawing-room needed cleaning. At the Bon Marché they offered to write my name down in their books. But they warned me that they could not call for the rugs for three weeks, and that I must understand that they could not be delivered before January. In the end I sent the rugs to three different cleaning places and waited from four to six weeks to get them back.

The curtains of my drawing-room windows were dark green velvet, too depressing a color for wartime. I wonder how I lived with them so long. The drawing-room faces north, and I wanted yellow silk curtains to invite the sunshine in. The curtains should be a frame for the best picture in the drawing-room—a view of Paris that is the reverse of the picture described in the first pages of Zola's Paris. The idea ran away with me, and the momentum of it carried me through the difficulties I found when I tried to get an upholsterer to make the curtains. We are all learning new trades. The curtains were made finally by an artist, who, in order to earn her living through the war years, learned to do retouching of photographs. She and I worked together at those curtains, and you would think that an upholsterer made them.

Quite naturally they explained that they must ask somebody at the shop what to do and promised to come back next day.

But they did not return. Luckily our dentist turned up on a forty-eight hour furlough. He and his wife knocked long and loud at our front-door. When the first surprise and delight of seeing him back, looking so bronzed and fit, had passed, I apologized for the bell, and told my sad story. The problem awakened the dentist's interest. He went walking about tracing the wires. French wires are all just hitched somewhere above the picture moulding line so you can see them.

"Aha!" came from the pantry. It was the dentist's voice. At the same moment there was a prolonged ringing. "That's what comes from earning your living by making your brains speak through your fingers. Quite simple, quite simple," said the dentist. "I only arranged this little affair on the indicator. It was the fourth screw from the back at the upper line of the plate."

"Sakes," I cried, "get down from there before you give me a toothache!"

We all go through the world lighting up its darkness with our own kind of lantern.

Throughout the war we have done with clothes as with our houses—making things do. That went very well at first. But in the fourth winter wear and tear had to be met. We learned a new scale of values for little things. A green glass lampshade cost fifteen francs, and you were lucky to get it. The plug to stick in the hole for an electric light you scoured the town to purchase at seven francs. The steel wire your frotteur uses to polish floors quadrupled in price. My frotteur went to war long ago. His substitute, a chauffeur in the postal service, gave us two afternoons in a month—his only free time. One day he defended his service gallantly while he balanced a wet brown cigarette and cake-walked the steel wire over my salon floor. The long black autos marked postes et dépêches, terror of pedestrians in Paris, do not really go faster than other autos. We think they do because they were the first autos to be used extensively in the city, and the fear of being knocked down by them has stuck in the minds of the public.

I used to have half a dozen "nice little dressmakers" on my list and as many milliners to whom I could send friends confidently. But as the war dragged on, one after the other they disappointed me. If it were not poor cut and shoddy materials, it was inability to make delivery anywhere near the time promised. Everyone must have been in my position, because when I turned to the department stores for ready-made things, I found long lines awaiting for a turn with the sales woman. It is not the fault of dressmakers. One of them opened her heart to me.

"It is very hard. Like everybody else, I keep hoping the war will end suddenly. My reputation was made by my premières ouvrières. I still keep on paying them good wages now although I eat into my savings to do it. I cannot risk having my best girls go over to competitors. We had our side in the strike of the midinettes. If it had not hit me hard, I should have been amused to see these pretty young things dressed in clothes cheap in material but chic go marching along the boulevards winning policemen over at every corner. I raised pay beyond my means, and have granted the semaine anglaise. But they would go to-morrow for the least thing.

"For twenty years I have had three classes of customers in Paris: bourgeoises of the solid type, who come to me for the reserved sort of clothes that sell on line, good material and long wear. They paid my rent. American women, who came in the summer, or hurried through Paris in February, headed for the Riviera, wanted an advance idea rapidly executed. That trade paid my running expenses. From actresses and mistresses I got fantastic prices for exclusive models I promised not to repeat. From them I made my profits.

"The first class are deft-fingered like all French women, and do their own dressmaking now. They get their mourning from the houses that make a specialty of that trade. The Americans do not come as they used to. My profitable trade does not have the money for fine clothes or the opportunity to show them off."

Curious it seems to me now, when I sit down to write a chapter about the darkest days of the war, that I find myself penning page after page of the story of petty household difficulties. But I want to be what the French call véridique. This is how we felt during the first winter of the American intervention, when the A. E. F. was coming to France with painful slowness and when we were aware that the Germans were preparing a final desperate coup before Pershing could marshal an army, effective in training and equipment and numbers. In January and February, 1918, we were under the reaction of the Russian collapse, of the awakening to the falsehoods concerning German military strength that had been spread consistently for three years, of the nervous dread that the submarines might after all prevent the coming of the Americans. The little things, strikes, petty annoyances of daily house keeping, steady increase in the cost of living made the deep impression.

Then came the new German onslaught, the daily long-distance bombardment and the aeroplane raids every night.

In the early days of the A. E. F., when I was speaking to American soldiers in the camps, I used to leave a little time for questions at the end of my talk. The boys always had something in their heads they wanted to talk about. The scope and variety of their questions were amazing. But some one was sure to ask:

"Have you ever been in an air raid?"

When I answered in the affirmative, he would say,

"How did you feel?"

For a long time I reasoned like the poilu, who said that if his number was on a German shell it would find him. Herbert and I worked it out mathematically that our chances of being hit in the enormous area of Paris were not as great as of being knocked down by one of the crazy Indians we had for chauffeurs. When any left-over of a man could get a license to run a taxi-cab in Paris after a course of two days at fifty francs, why worry about bombs dropped from an occasional Hun plane? If we had to go, we'd rather be in our beds. Better to be warm and cosy and run a slight risk, an infinitesimal risk, than the almost certain alternative of a bad cold by huddling in a drafty cellar. I told the boys that we took the raids as a matter of course—all in the day's happenings. I explained my philosophy, which was this.

I once knew a man so afraid of germs that he made his wife wash new stockings in disinfectant solution. He kept strict surveillance over his children's diet. No peanuts, pink lemonade, little-store-around-the-corner candy for them. They were taught to exercise minute precautions in the every-day round of living. And yet, for all the bother, they had as many ailments as other children. When one is leading a normal life and has only imaginary or petty things to contend with, molehills are magnified. When one is facing a great crisis, one realizes that health is often simply a matter of lack of physical selfconsciousness. Most of the things you think about and guard against do not happen. I remember once seeing a play, in which a Romeo and a Juliet held the center of the stage, oblivious to fighting in the distance. The man said: "That is only a battle; this is love." Some people see the honey in the pot; others cannot take their eyes off the fly.

I still hold to this way of taking things. It saves a lot of trouble and makes for peace of mind. But somehow it did not work out to the end in the air raids. The Germans were finally able to reach Paris when they wanted to and in appreciable number.

From the beginning of the war to the end of 1917, air raids did not mean much to Parisians. We read about the awful nights of terror when the full moon came around in London, and the heavy bombardment of cities just behind the front lines in France. Aeroplanes did come occasionally to Paris. But up to 1918 we experienced curiosity and excitement rather than fear. In 1915 we saw a Zeppelin over the Gare Saint-Lazare. I can recall nothing particularly startling about any of these raids. When aeroplanes came and we did not wake the babies, they scolded us the next day. They wanted to see the fun. Our balconies, looking over the city from the sixième étage of the Boulevard du Montparnasse, gave us a wonderful vantage point for seeing the raids.

One January night at the beginning of 1918, the fire engines rushed through the streets with their horns screaming the hysterical "pom-pom! pom-pom!" with more vigor than usual. As was our custom, we turned the lights carefully out and went on the balcony to watch the weird scene that never failed to fascinate, rockets and searchlights and the firefly effect of rising French planes. That always comforted us. We had little thought that an escadrille of German planes could reach Paris. They never had before. The raids had been only an occasional plane flying very high and dropping at random a few bombs which burst in different quarters. The next day you had to hunt hard to find the damage they did. Remembering our promise to Christine, we woke her up and took her out.

The sounds of the alarm died away. Often we had waited in vain for the fire from the forts around Paris to warn us that the raiders had actually arrived in the vicinity of Paris. Then there was another wait until the first bomb fell. Christine was a bit disgusted at being waked up for nothing. During the long silence she asked impatiently, "What is this? The entre'acte?"

But Christine was not disappointed. Over our heads we heard distinctly the harsh engine-sound that distinguished the new German Gotha from French planes. We heard it several times. When the bombs began to drop, it was not one or two, but dozens of explosions. We did not think of going inside. The thought of danger to ourselves did not enter our heads.

Although we knew the raid had been something different from any we had experienced up to this time, there was little in the papers about the events of the night. We thought that we must have been mistaken in the number of bombs that had fallen. It is not always easy to distinguish between the explosions of a shell from the tir de barrage and the explosion of a bomb. Before we got through the first month of 1918 we had the opportunity of becoming expert in this.

We happened to be lunching with Robert and Edmée Chauvelot. Robert said, "Did you go down to the cellar last night?"

"No, we never do."

"Why not?" cried Robert.

I explained our air raid philosophy.

"Nonsense!" exclaimed Madame Alphonse Daudet, Edmée's mother, "you must go down next time. It isn't fair to your children. Your idea sounds spunky and American—childish you understand. When we have epidemics, the authorities study remedies. The Huns have decided to concentrate their energies on Paris now. You must have read the warnings in the newspapers. The police have collected statistics. We know now that most of the people killed by German planes were standing at windows or front doors, or were on the streets, or remained in their top-floor apartments. What you have been telling your soldier boys in the camps is all wrong. No precaution ought to be neglected. It is a question of commonsense, not fear."

"I know how to convince you," said Robert. After lunch he took us to the Avenue de la Grande Armée not far from the Arc de Triomphe.

"There!" He pointed to a house whose top floors had been blown away. "That might just as well have been you."

The house was a new one like ours and as solidly built of stone. The apartment on the sixième étage was pulverized, the one below it was smashed, and the fourth floor damaged some. But the third floor was intact. This convinced us. If air raids were now to be frequent, had we the right to risk the kiddies? We could take the chance for ourselves. But for them?

All Paris reasoned in the same way. The Gothas began to come every night during the full moon periods and other times when it was clear. In the late afternoon we grew accustomed to watch the sky and calculate the chances of cloudy weather. If the stars came out we were sure that there would be no undisturbed night's rest. The Government intensified the batteries of A.D.C. cannon around the city. Patrols of aeroplanes were multiplied. The tir de barrage became formidable. None could boast any longer of being able to sleep through air raids. Sirens were put on all the public buildings to replace the alerte of the fire-trucks. When the sirens began to wail, not a soul in Paris could complain of not being warned. Frequently nothing happened after the sirens, because the alerte was given each time German planes were signalled crossing our lines in the direction of Paris. Then we would simply wait for the berloque, the bugle signal "all's over," which was sounded by the firemen riding through the streets on their hook and ladder trucks.

When the Gothas demonstrated their ability to come in numbers, as the Zeppelins had been doing in London, the municipality, upon orders from the Ministère de la Guerre, ordered every light out and the instant stopping of tramway and underground services the moment the alerte was sounded. Engineers went around the city examining cellars and Métro stations. Houses with solid cellars were compelled to keep their front doors open until the number of persons they could hold had taken refuge inside. In front of the house placards were posted with ABRI in large letters and the number of persons allotted for shelter underneath. The underground railways had to shut all stations except those deemed safe. If you were on the street or in an underground train or tramway when the alerte sounded, you had the choice of walking home or of taking refuge in the nearest abri. At first the theatres and moving-picture houses protested against being closed down. But one January night a bomb destroyed completely a house a hundred yards from the crowded Folies-Bergère. This was enough. After that, if the alerte sounded before opening time, there was no show. If it sounded during a performance, theatres and cinémas were evacuated immediately by the police.

One can readily see the inconvenience of all this. If you planned to go out for dinner or to a show, you risked a long walk home or being caught for hours—and then the walk! For it was practically impossible to get into the underground after the berloque sounded.

On account of the children, from January to April, we went far from home only on a cloudy or rainy night. If there were engagements we had to keep on a clear night, there was only one thing to do—bribe a chauffeur to stand by you with his taxi-cab all evening.

As the alertes were often false alarms, we waited until the tir de barrage began. Then with servants carrying children wrapped in blankets, we had to stumble down dark stairs. My husband was often away. Sometimes I had to go on lecture trips. But we never left Paris at the same time. Whenever I was out of town, I looked on clear weather as a calamity and dreaded the full moon. The next morning I would eagerly scan the paper for news of what happened in Paris. It was no fun.

Cellars of modern apartment houses may be solid, but they are not spacious. Each locataire has two caves, one for storage and coal and one for wine. The only refuge space is around the furnace and in the long corridors that lead to the caves. We were allotted space for three hundred. Such a crowd would gather from the streets! I could not take my children there. At first we went to the concierge's loge. As explosion succeeded explosion, I telephoned the Herald office and learned the location of the bomb a few minutes after it fell. This was a way of knowing whether they were in our quarter or across the river. But this soon ended. For telephone service during the raid was interrupted, and the concierge's loge was deemed by the police unsafe. Bombs falling in the street or court were wrecking ground floors. A solidarity manifested itself among the locataires. Those on the first two or three floors took in the tenants from the upper floors. I was lucky in having the use of a first-floor apartment alone for my family. The locataires of this apartment would leave the door open for me. They went to the cellar! Everything is relative in this life.

At first, the children objected to going down stairs. The younger ones did not like to be wakened from their sleep. The older ones wanted to see the raid from the balcony. We sympathized with them. We were missing so much! After a while, as nothing ever happened to our house, I began to regret having started to follow the advice of my friends. After all, was the cellar safe? It was fifty-fifty. I wonder how my children will feel about Germany as they grow up. They were old enough to have impressed indelibly upon their minds the memory of these months. They will never forget the sirens, the sudden waking from sleep, the tir de barrage, and the explosions that sometimes shook our house. Mimi asked once, "Do the Gothas make that siren noise with their heads or with their tails?" Fancy the image in the child's mind: the German birds swooping over Paris shrieking a song of hate and dropping bombs that meant destruction and death. And when the berloque sounded and we went up stairs, we could see from our balcony fires here and there over the city. For the Germans used incendiary bombs.

But we were to have worse than air raids.

The other day I put on the victrola a selection from "Die Walkyrie." Wotan was singing. The orchestra thundered three motifs. The spring of the instrument ran down before I could get to wind it up, there was a rasping shriek. Mimi started.

"That's like an air raid!" cried Lloyd.

But they say the most potent way "to summon up remembrance of things past" is the sense of smell. Burned toast means to me Big Bertha.

One Saturday morning I was reading the depressing news of the rout of the Fifth British army. After nearly four years of immobility in the trenches, the Germans had once more started the march on Paris. The two older children were out walking with Alice, their gouvernante. I was at home with the babies. It was a jewel of a day, picked from an October setting and smiling upon Paris in March. The feel of spring was in the air. For months we had welcomed bad weather as an antidote for Gothas. But I was glad the morning was so fine. At least there was nothing to fear until evening. At the end of winter it is a blessing to have the windows open once more. Suddenly the sirens started. We went out on the balcony. The streets were filling with people, crowding into the Vavin Métro station opposite and looking for the houses that were abris. Still the crowds in the Boulevard du Montparnasse got larger. I was sorry that Easter vacation was starting so early. Were the children in school, they would be in the cellar. At the Ecole Alsacienne the children were drilled for air raids as American school children are for fire. Would Alice take the children to her own home or come back here? If she went to her house, could she get there in time to telephone me before the communications were cut off? It was impossible to go out and look for Christine and Lloyd: for I must stay with the others. Often the best thing is to sit tight. The children came in.

"It isn't the Gothas—it's balloons. The Germans have sent a lot of them over us. Everybody says so."

In the unclouded sky there was no sign of aeroplanes. Could they be so high as to be out of sight? And yet there were explosions near us every few minutes. They lasted until late in the afternoon. The rumor of a big gun spread. The noon newspapers and the earlier afternoon ones spoke of a long distance bombardment to explain the explosions. Shells were certainly falling. Bits of them, different from bombs, had been picked up. But the opinion of interviewed experts scouted the theory of a gun that would carry over a hundred kilometers. Was a new German advance being hidden from us? Had they reached the gates of the city?

The Paris subway system is the best in the world. We make this boast without fear of contradiction. In London the various lines do not connect, and require a life study to arrive at the quickest combination. Even then, old Londoners are in doubt. They say to you, "Piccadilly Circus? Ah let me see—" Then your guide contradicts himself two or three times before giving you directions of which he is reasonably sure. In New York, you have to be certain you are on the uptown or downtown side, and that you have not mistaken the Broadway line, where you drop the money in the box, for the Seventh Avenue line, where you buy tickets. Experience with the Forty-second Street shuttle teaches you that it is quicker to walk than to ride: you have to walk most of the way anyhow. New York subways are filthy and stuffy. In Boston you have a bewildering variety of trolley-cars, stopping at different parts of the platform and going every which way.

But Paris underground is clean, well-ventilated, orderly. You can go from any part of the city to any other part quickly and without confusion. The resident knows his way instinctively. The stranger has only to follow the abundant and clearly-marked signs. In every station the signs bear the name of every other station, and if you are in doubt, there is a map before you. On the doors of cars the stations are marked, with junction-stops in red, and all the stations of the line you are taking are indicated on a map which you cannot fail to see.

The subway system of Paris is superb because it has to compete with excellent surface transportation. It has also to compete with the beauty of Paris. Unless you are in a hurry or it is a very rainy day, riding underground is folly. One never tires of going through the streets of Paris. The joy is constant. I am proud of the "Métro" and "Nord-Sud," as the two subway systems are called. But I use them as little as possible. An open fiacre is a temptation never to be resisted. And, until the last year of the war, it was a temptation thrust under your nose. Best of all, I love to walk. Our way to the Rive Droite is down the Boulevard Raspail. At the foot of the boulevard, you have three choices. You can go straight ahead through the Rue du Bac and over the Pont Royal, by the Boulevard Saint-Germain and across the Pont de Solférino, or to the end of the Boulevard Saint-Germain and across the Pont de la Concorde. Each route is equally inspiring. By the Pont Solférino you have before you a perfect vista of the Vendôme Column and Sacré-Coeur in the background. By the Pont de la Concorde you have the Obélisque and the Madeleine in the background. But I used to prefer the Rue du Bac and the Pont Royal because of Monsieur Pol. Alas that I have to say "used to"!

After crossing the Seine by the Pont Royal, you enter the Tuileries Garden at the end of the Louvre. On the left-hand side, before you reached the Rue de Rivoli, ever since I can remember a little group was gathered around a man feeding birds. I had to be in a great hurry on the day I did not join that group.

There is an old saying that every man drifts into his means of livelihood. That is the reason so few people are doing what they planned to do, and why there are so many queer ways of earning one's living. Certainly the first time Monsieur Pol threw bread crumbs to the sparrows in Tuileries he did not think of doing it for a living. Nor did he dream that he would become as familiar a Paris landmark as Paul Deroulède in marble and Jeanne d'Arc in gilt near by. A generation of Parisians may have forgotten the features of former presidents of the Republic. But who would not recognize Monsieur Pol? In fact, I have seen Emile Loubet standing unrecognized in the crowd around the bird charmer.

One day a one-legged soldier limped his way through the crowd to a good place. In the lines of his face you could read suffering, but the expression was of a happy child absorbed in the wonder of the moment. On the sand around the old man's chair a hundred sparrows faced his way, heads uplifted.

"Get out of this, you rascals! I have had enough of you," cried Monsieur Pol, stamping his foot and shaking a fist at his battalion. Do you think they budged? The bird charmer shook his head, and remarked with a gentle sigh, turning to the crowd, "You see, they have known me a good while. Mind how you behave," he shouted, addressing the birds again, "here is a soldier looking at you. Think how he will laugh if you do not stand up straight. Look how well he's standing himself—with one leg gone."

The birds heard a speech praising their defender, which turned into a glorification of our poilus in general. How those birds had to listen to lessons in politics, shrewd comments on the news of the day, the latest Cabinet crisis, talked-about play, scandal in high life! Since the war it has been the Germans in Belgium, the Turks in Armenia, Kerensky and the Bolshevists, and the last three o'clock communiqué. The birds gave their attention to the end. They seemed to know when the speech was done, when the lesson of faith in France and optimism had been driven home. They began to fly about the charmer, billing around his neck and perching on his wide-brimmed hat in search of bread-crumbs.

Feeding the sparrows was "un métier comme un autre." He had names for all his pets. With "the Englishman" he talked about Edward the Seventh, Sir Thomas Barclay and the Entente Cordiale, and pressed him on the subject of the tunnel under the Channel. He complimented "the Englishman" on the bravery of the Tommies and told him what the French thought of Sir Douglas Haig. "The Deputy" received frank comments on the doings at the Palais Bourbon. "The Drunk" was twitted for having to go without absinthe, scolded for his excesses, and at the end of the afternoon invited to accompany Monsieur Pol for a drink, the price of which invariably came from someone in the crowd. Monsieur Pol and his sparrows would have earned a fortune at any vaudeville house. He was as witty as a cowboy rope-juggler I saw once in New York, and his lectures to the birds, if taken down in shorthand, would have made a valuable contemporary commentary on Paris during the Third Republic. Monsieur Pol depended upon occasional gifts and the sale of postcards.

During the war he grew gradually more feeble, but could not be persuaded to accept the care of loving hands stretched out to him on all sides in spite of the preoccupation of the struggle. When the bread restrictions came in, he never lacked a sufficient supply for his little friends. I have seen people give him strips of their own bread tickets. Monsieur Pol kept coming to the Tuileries until he died in action as truly as any soldier at the front. His best epitaph is a little verse on the postcards he sold: