War was declared.  This woman’s husband and all male employees were mobilized.  Her horses were commandeered.  So were her trucks.  Many of her wealthier patrons were already in the country and remained there, both for economy’s sake and to encourage and help the poor of their villages and farms.  The less fortunate made shift to do their washing at home.  Nevertheless there were patrons who still needed her services at least once a fortnight.

This good woman may have had her moments of despair.  If so, the world never knew it.  She began at once to adjust herself to the new conditions and examine her resources.  She importuned the Government until, to be rid of her, they returned two of her horses.  She rented a cart and employed girls suddenly thrown out of work, to take the place of the vanished men.  The business limped on but it never ceased for a moment; and as the months passed it assumed a firmer gait.  People returned from the country, finding that they could be more useful in Paris as members of one or other of a thousand oeuvres; and they were of the class that must have clean linen if the skies fall.  Also, many Americans who had fled ignominiously to England returned and plunged into work.  And Americans, with their characteristic extravagance in lingerie, are held in high esteem by les blanchisseuses.

Further assaults upon the amiable Government resulted in the return of more horses and one or two trucks.  To-day, while the business by no means swaggers, this woman, thanks to her indomitable courage and energy, combined with the economical habit and the financial genius of the French, has ridden safely over the rocks into as snug a little harbor as may be found in any country at war.

III

THE MUNITION MAKERS

I

Aside from the industrial class the women who suffered most at the outbreak of the war were those that worked in the shops.  Paris is a city of little shops.  The average American tourist knows them not, for her hectic experiences in the old days were confined to the Galeries Lafayette, the Louvre, the Bon Marche, and the Trois Quartiers.  But during the greater part of 1915 street after street exhibited the dreary picture of shuttered windows, where once every sort of delicate, solid, ingenious, costly, or catch-penny ware was displayed.  Some of these were closed because the owner had no wife, many because the factories that supplied them were closed, or the workmen no longer could be paid.  To-day one sees few of these wide iron shutters except at night, but the immediate consequence of the sudden change of the nation’s life was that thousands of girls and women were thrown out of work:  clerks, cashiers, dressmakers’ assistants, artificial flower makers, florists, confectioners, workers in the fancy shops, makers of fine lingerie, extra servants and waitresses in the unfashionable but numerous restaurants.  And then there were the women of the opera chorus, and those connected with the theater; and not only the actresses’ and the actors’ families, but the wives of scene shifters sent off to the trenches, and of all the other humble folk employed about theaters, great and small.