V

Another work in which Madame Goujon is interested and which certainly is as picturesque is Le Bon Gite.  The gardens of the Tuilleries when regarded from the quay present an odd appearance these days.  One sees row after row of little huts, models of the huts the English Society of Friends have built in the devastated valley of the Marne.  Where hundreds of families were formerly living in damp cellars or in the ruins of large buildings, wherever they could find a sheltering wall, the children dying of exposure, there are now a great number of these portable huts where families may be dry and protected from the elements, albeit somewhat crowded.

The object of Le Bon Gite is to furnish these little temporary homes—­for real houses cannot be built until the men come back from the war—­and these models in the Tuilleries Gardens show to the visitor what they can do in the way of furnishing a home that will accommodate a woman and two children, for three hundred francs (sixty dollars).

It seems incredible, but I saw the equipment of several of these little shelters (which contain several rooms) and I saw the bills.  They contained a bed, two chairs, a table, a buffet, a stove, kitchen furnishings, blankets, linen, and crockery.  There were even window curtains.  The railway authorities had reduced freight rates for their benefit fifty per cent; and at that time (July, 1916) they had rescued the poor of four wrecked villages from reeking cellars and filthy straw and given some poor poilus a home to come to during their six days’ leave of absence from the Front.

The Marquise de Ganay and the Comtesse de Bryas, two of the most active members, are on duty in the offices of their neat little exhibition for several hours every day, and it was becoming one of the cheerful sights of Paris.

There is little left of the Tuilleries to-day to recall the ornate splendors of the Second Empire, when the Empress Eugenie held her court there, and gave garden parties under the oaks and the chestnuts.  There is a vast chasm between the pomp of courts and huts furnished for three hundred francs for the miserable victims of the war; but that chasm, to be sure, was bridged by the Commune and this war has shown those that have visited the Military Zone that a palace makes a no more picturesque ruin than a village.

VI

A more curious contrast was a concert given one afternoon in the Tuilleries Gardens for the purpose of raising money for one of the war relief organizations.  Madame Paul Dupuy asked me if I would help her take two blind soldiers to listen to it.  We drove first out to Reuilly to the Quinze Vingts, a large establishment where the Government has established hundreds of their war blind (who are being taught a score of new trades), and took the two young fellows who were passed out to us.  The youngest was twenty-one, a flat-faced peasant boy, whose eyes had been destroyed by the explosion of a pistol close to his face.  The older man, who may have been twenty-six, had a fine, thin, dark face and an expression of fixed melancholy.  He had lost his sight from shock.  Both used canes and when we left the car at the entrance to the Tuilleries we were obliged to guide them.