“Don’t you realize,” she demanded, “that we never were so well off before?  We can save for the first time in our lives and I can get a good job that would not be given me if you were here.  Go where you belong.  Every man’s place is in the trenches.”

There is not much romance about a marriage of that class, nor is there much romance left in the harried brain of any mother of thirteen.

III

Exasperating as those women were who preferred to live with their children on the insufficient allocation, it is impossible not to feel a certain sympathy for them.  In all their lives they had known nothing but grinding work; liberty is the most precious thing in the world and when tasted for the first time after years of sordid oppression it goes to the head.  Moreover, the Frenchwoman has the most extraordinary faculty for “managing.”  The poorest in Paris would draw their skirts away from the slatterns and their dirty offspring in our own tenement districts.

One day I went with Madame Paul Dupuy over to what she assured me was one of the poorest districts of Paris.  Our visit had nothing to do with the war.  She belonged to a charitable organization which for years had paid weekly visits to the different parishes of the capital and weighed a certain number of babies.  The mothers that brought their howling offspring (who abominated the whole performance) were given money according to their needs—­vouched for by the priest of the district—­and if the babies showed a falling off in weight they were sent to one of the doctors retained by the society.

The little stone house (situated, by the way, in an old garden of a hunting-lodge which is said to have been the rendezvous de chasse of Madame du Barry), where Madame Dupuy worked, with an apron covering her gown and her sleeves rolled up, was like an ice-box, and the naked babies when laid on the scales shrieked like demons.  One male child, I remember, sat up perfectly straight and bellowed his protest with an insistent fury and a snorting disdain at all attempts to placate him that betokened the true son of France and a lusty long-distance recruit for the army.  All the children, in fact, although their mothers were unmistakably poor, looked remarkably plump and healthy.

After a time, having no desire to contract peritonitis, I left the little house and went out and sat in the car.  There I watched for nearly an hour the life of what we would call a slum.  The hour was about four in the afternoon, when even the poor have a little leisure.  The street was filled with women sauntering up and down, gossiping, and followed by their young.  These women and children may have had on no underclothes:  their secrets were not revealed to me; but their outer garments were decent.  The children had a scrubbed look and their hair was confined in tight pigtails.  The women looked stout and comfortable.