V
THE WOMAN'S OPPORTUNITY
I
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.
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.
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.