They may be as clean to-day but I doubt if they are as stout and as placid of expression.  The winter was long and bitter and coal and food scarce, scarcer, and more scarce.

IV

The two classes of women with whom Madame Goujon and her friends have most difficulty are in the minority and merely serve as the shadows in the great canvas crowded with heroic figures of French women of all classes who are working to the limit of their strength for their country or their families.  They may be difficult to manage and they may insist upon working at what suits their taste, but they do work and work hard; which after all is the point.  Madame Goujon took me through several of the ouvroirs which her society had founded to teach the poor widows—­whose pension is far inferior to the often brief allocation—­a number of new occupations under competent teachers.

Certainly these young benefactors had exercised all their ingenuity.  Some of the women, of course, had been fit for nothing but manual labor, and these they had placed as scrub-women in hospitals or as servants in hotels or families.  But in the case of the more intelligent or deft of finger no pains were being spared to fit them to take a good position, or, as the French would say, “situation,” in the future life of the Republic.

In a series of rooms lent to the society by one of the great dressmakers, I saw keen-looking women of all ages learning to retouch photographs, to wind bobbins by electricity, to dress hair and fashion wigs, to engrave music scores, articulate artificial limbs, make artificial flowers, braces for wounded arms and legs, and artificial teeth!  Others are taught nursing, bookkeeping, stenography, dentistry.

One of Madame Goujon’s most picturesque revivals is the dressing of dolls.  Before the Franco-Prussian war this great industry belonged to France.  Germany took it away from France while she was prostrate, monopolizing the doll trade of the world, and the industry almost ceased at its ancient focus.  Madame Goujon was one of the first to see the opportunity for revival in France, and with Valentine Thompson and Madame Verone, to mention but two of her rivals, was soon employing hundreds of women.  A large room on the ground floor of M. Reinach’s hotel is given over as a storeroom for dolls, all irreproachably dressed and indisputably French.

It will take a year or two of practice and the co-operation of male talent after the war to bring the French doll up to the high standard attained by the Germans throughout forty years of plodding efficiency.  The prettiest dolls I saw were those arrayed in the different national costumes of Europe, particularly those that still retain the styles of musical comedy.  After those rank the Red Cross nurses, particularly those that wear the blue veil over the white.  And I never saw in real life such superb, such imperturbable brides.