Madame Harriot’s ouvroir occupies the magnificent festal salon of the Hotel de Ville, with its massive chandeliers and its memories of a thousand dinners and balls of state from the days of Louis XIV down to the greatest of its mayors.  She supplies French prisoners in Germany with the now famous comfort packages.  Some of them she and her committee put up themselves; others are brought in by members of the family or the friends of the unfortunate men in Germany.  The piece de resistance had always been a round loaf of bread, but on the day I first visited the salon consternation was reigning.  Word had come from Germany that no more bread nor any sort of food stuff should be sent in the packages, and hundreds were being unpacked.  Crisp loaves of bread that would have brought comfort to many a poor soul were lying all over the place.

The secret of the order was that civilian Germans were begging bread of the French prisoners, and this, of course, was bad for the tenderly nursed German morale.

IV

MADEMOISELLE JAVAL AND THE ECLOPES

I

Mlle. Javal, unlike Madame Balli, was not a member of the fashionable society of Paris, a femme du monde, or a reigning beauty.  But in certain respects their cases were not dissimilar.  Born into one of the innumerable sets-within-sets of the upper bourgeoisie, living on inherited wealth, seeing as little as possible of the world beyond her immediate circle of relatives and friends, as curiously indifferent to it as only a haughty French bourgeoisie can be, growing up in a large and comfortable home—­according to French ideas of comfort—­governing it, when the duty descended to her shoulders, with all the native and practised economy of the French woman, but until her mother’s illness without a care, and even then without an extra contact, Mlle. Javal’s life slipped along for many years exactly as the lives of a million other girls in that entrenched secluded class slipped along before the tocsin, ringing throughout the land on August 2, 1914, announced that once more the men of France must fight to defend the liberty of all classes alike.

Between wars the great central mass of the population in France known as the bourgeoisie—­who may be roughly defined as those that belong neither to the noblesse at one end nor to the industrials and peasant proprietors at the other, but have capital, however minute, invested in rentes or business, and who, beginning with the grande bourgeoisie, the haughty possessors of great inherited fortunes, continuing through the financial and commercial magnates, down to the petite bourgeoisie who keep flourishing little shops, hotels, etc.—­live to get the most out of life in their narrow, traditional, curiously intensive way.  They detest travel, although at least once in their lives they visit Switzerland and Italy; possibly, but with no such alarming frequency as to suggest an invasion, England.