They are intensely conservative and their mental suppleness is quite as remarkable.  Economy is one of the motive powers of their existence, the solid pillars upon which their wealth and power are built; and yet Paris has been not only the home and the patron of the arts for centuries, but the arbiter of fashion for women, a byword for extravagance, and a forcing-house for a thousand varieties of pleasure.  No race is so paradoxical, but then France is the genius among nations.  Antiquity, and many invasions of her soil have given her an inviolable solidity, and the temperamental gaiety and keen intelligence which pervades all classes have kept her eternally young.  She is as far from decadence as the crudest community in the United States of America.

To the student of French history and character nothing the French have done in this war is surprising; nevertheless it seemed to me that I had a fresh revelation every day during my sojourn in France in the summer of 1916.  Every woman of every class (with a few notable exceptions seen for the most part in the Ritz Hotel) was working at something or other:  either in self-support, to relieve distress, or to supplement the efforts and expenditures of the Government (two billion francs a month); and it seemed that I never should see the last of those relief organizations of infinite variety known as “oeuvres.”

Some of this work is positively creative, much is original, and all is practical and indispensable.  As the most interesting of it centers in and radiates from certain personalities whom I had the good fortune to meet and to know as well as their days and mine would permit, it has seemed to me that the surest way of vivifying any account of the work itself is to make its pivot the central figure of the story.  So I will begin with Madame Balli.

II

To be strictly accurate, Madame Balli was born in Smyrna, of Greek blood; but Paris can show no purer type of Parisian, and she has never willingly passed a day out of France.  During her childhood her brother (who must have been many years older than herself) was sent to Paris as Minister from Greece, filling the post for thirty years; and his mother followed with her family.  Madame Balli not only was brought up in France, but has spent only five hours of her life in Greece; after her marriage she expressed a wish to see the land of her ancestors, and her husband—­who was an Anglo-Greek—­amiably took her to a hotel while the steamer on which they were journeying to Constantinople was detained in the harbor of Athens.

Up to the outbreak of the war she was a woman of the world, a woman of fashion to her finger-tips, a reigning beauty always dressed with a costly and exquisite simplicity.  Some idea of the personal loveliness which, united to her intelligence and charm, made her one of the conspicuous figures of the capital, may be inferred from the fact that her British husband, an art connoisseur and notable collector, was currently reported deliberately to have picked out the most beautiful girl in Europe to adorn his various mansions.