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 hotel 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.