MADAME PAQUIN

Madame Paquin, better known to Americans, I fancy, than any of the great dressmakers of Europe, offered her beautiful home in Neuilly to the Government to be used as a hospital, and it had accommodated up to the summer of 1916 eight thousand, nine hundred soldiers.

She also kept all her girls at work from the first.  As no one ordered a gown for something like eighteen months they made garments for the soldiers, or badges for the numerous appeal days—­we all decorated ourselves, within ten minutes after leaving the house, like heroes and heroines on the field, about three times a week—­and upon one occasion this work involved a three months’ correspondence with all the Mayors of France.  It further involved the fastening of ribbons and pins (furnished by herself) upon fifteen million medallions.  Madame Paquin is also on many important committees, including “L’Orphelinat des Armees,” so well known to us.

MADAME PAUL DUPUY

Madame Dupuy was also an American girl, born in New York and now married to the owner of Le Petit Parisien and son of one of the wealthiest men in France.  She opened in the first days of the war an organization which she called “Oeuvre du Soldat Blesse ou Malade,” and from her offices in the Hotel de Crillon and her baraque out at the Depot des Dons (where we all have warehouses), she supplies surgeons at the Front with wheeling-chairs, surgical dressings, bed garments, rubber for operating tables, instruments, slippers, pillows, blankets, and a hundred and one other things that harassed surgeons at the Front are always demanding.  The oeuvre of the Marquise de Noailles, with which a daughter of Mrs. Henry Seligmen, Madame Henri van Heukelom, is closely associated, is run on similar lines.

I have alluded frequently in the course of these reminiscences to Madame Dupuy, who was of the greatest assistance to me, and more than kind and willing.  I wish I could have returned it by collecting money for her oeuvre when I returned to New York, but I found that Le Bien-Etre du Blesse was all I could manage.  Moreover, it is impossible to get money these days without a powerful committee behind you.  To go to one wealthy and generous person or another as during the first days of the war and ask for a donation for the president of an oeuvre unrepresented in this country is out of the question.  It is no longer done, as the English say.

XIV

ONE OF THE MOTHERLESS

Versailles frames in my memory the most tragic of the war-time pictures I collected during my visit to France.  That romantic and lovely city which has framed in turn the pomp and glory of France, the iconic simplicities of Marie Antoinette, the odious passions of a French mob, screeching for bread and blood, and the creation of a German Empire, will for long be associated in my mind with a sad and isolated little picture that will find no niche in history, but, as a symbol, is as diagnostic as the storming of the palace gates in 1789.