The shops were closed now.  Great establishments like the Galeries Lafayette had disbanded their armies of girls and even many of the factories in the outer suburbs, like Charenton and La Villette, had suspended work, because their mechanics and electricians and male factory hands had been mobilized at the outset of the war.  The women of Paris were plunged into dire poverty, and thousands of them into idleness, which makes poverty more awful.  Even now I can hardly guess how many of these women lived during the first months of the war.  There were many wives who had been utterly dependent for the upkeep of their little homes upon men who were now earning a sou a day as soldiers of France, with glory as a pourboire.  So many old mothers had been supported by the devotion of sons who had denied themselves marriage, children, and the little luxuries of life in order that out of their poor wages in Government offices they might keep the woman to whom they owed their being.  Always the greater part of the people of Paris lives precariously on the thin edge of a limited income, stinting and scraping, a sou here, a sou there, to balance the week’s accounts and eke out a little of that joie de vivre, which to every Parisian is an essential need.  Now by the edict of war all life’s economies had been annihilated.  There were no more wages out of which to reckon the cost of an extra meal, or out of which to squeeze the price of a seat at a Pathe cinema.  Mothers and wives and mistresses had been abandoned to the chill comfort of national charity, and oh, the coldness of it!

The French Government had promised to give an allowance of 1 franc 25 centimes a day to the women who were dependent on soldier husbands.  Perhaps it is possible to live on a shilling a day in Paris, though, by Heaven, I should hate to do it.  Nicely administered it might save a woman from rapid starvation and keep her thin for quite a time.  But even this measure of relief was difficult to get.  French officials are extraordinarily punctilious over the details of their work, and it takes them a long time to organize a system which is a masterpiece of safeguards and regulations and subordinate clauses.  So it was with them in the first weeks of the war, and it was a pitiable thing to watch the long queues of women waiting patiently outside the mairies, hour after hour and sometimes day after day, to get that one franc twenty-five which would buy their children’s bread.  Yet the patience of these women never failed, and with a resignation which had something divine in it, they excused the delays, the official deliberations, the infinite vexations which they were made to suffer, by that phrase which has excused everything in France:  “C’est la guerre!” Because it was war, they did not raise their voices in shrill protest, or wave their skinny arms at imperturbable men who said, “Attendez, s’il vous plait!” with damnable iteration, or break the windows of Government offices in which bewildering regulations were drawn up in miles of red tape.