[E] All donations in money are sent to the bankers, Messers John
      Munroe & Co., Eighth Floor, 360 Madison Avenue, New York.

To Madame d’Andigne belongs all the credit of building up Le Bien-Etre du Blesse from almost nothing (for we were nearly two years behind the other great war-relief organizations in starting).  Although many give her temporary assistance no one will take charge of any one department and she runs every side and phase of the work.  Last winter she was cold, and hungry, and always anxious about her husband, but she was never absent from the office for a day except when she could not get coal to warm it; and then she conducted the business of the oeuvre in her own apartment, where one room was warmed with wood she had sawed herself.

To-day Le Bien-Etre du Blesse is not only one of the most famous of all the war-relief organizations of the fighting powers but it has been run with such systematic and increasing success that the War Office has installed Bien-Etre kitchens in the hospitals (before, the nurses had to cook our donations over their own spirit lamp) and delegated special cooks to relieve the hard-worked infirmieres of a very considerable tax on their energies.  This is a tremendous bit of radicalism on the part of the Military Department of France, and one that hardly can be appreciated by citizens of a land always in a state of flux.  There is even talk of making these Bien-Etre kitchens a part of the regular military system after the war is over, and if they do commit themselves to so revolutionary an act no doubt the name of the young American Marquise will go down to posterity—­as it deserves to do, in any case.

XII

MADAME CAMILLE LYON

Madame Lyon committed on my behalf what for her was a tremendous breach of the proprieties:  she called upon me without the formality of a letter of introduction.  No American can appreciate what such a violation of the formalities of all the ages must have meant to a pillar of the French Bourgeoisie.  But she set her teeth and did it.  Her excuse was that she had read all my books, and that she was a friend of Mlle. Thompson, at whose Ecole Hoteliere I was lodging.

I was so impressed at the unusualness of this proceeding that, being out when she first called, and unable to receive her explanations, I was filled with dark suspicion and sought an explanation of Mlle. Jacquier.  Madame Lyon?  Was she a newspaper woman?  A secret service agent?  Between the police round the corner and Mlle. Jacquier, under whose eagle eye I conformed to all the laws of France in war time, I felt in no further need of supervision.