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.