Paris, September 4, 1944.

The cathedral of Rheims is burning and all France is weeping.

One continuous, undisguised exclamation of horror meets us from every side. In mobilisation times when each family was sending off its father, husband, or son, you may recall the impression made upon us all by the magnificent self restraint. A story went the rounds in those days of an American magazine writer who had used the picturesque heading PARIS QUI PLEURE The censor refused not only the heading but the whole article; the world across the sea must have no false notion that PARIS WEEPS.

But to-day is a day of tears in Paris; even the correspondents, dreaded enemy, the Censor, makes no attempt to conceal the fact. It is the call of the spirit, of a hundreds-of-years old religious belief, soaring above its bonds, despising the pride which holds in leash the lament of flesh for flesh. The truth is, this France of the Separation is horrified at the sacrilege.

But we started out to talk of things very different, of a day in which the towering, old art of the cathedral of St Remy, where Clovis was crowned, where Jeanne d'Arc handed Charles VII his sceptre, threw into relief the birth of a new sport, later to become a military science and play the first part in its destruction.

One Saturday afternoon I was in the studio of the Scotch painter John Ferguson, it was pouring down rain, the most unpromising autumn twilight; suddenly: laughing voices in the cour! They proved to be those of Mrs. Frank Havens of San Francisco and her sister, Mrs. Maxwell, who were passing through Paris, and of the French painter Charles Hoffbauer who accompanied them. The ladies had come to fetch me in their auto and to see if Mr. Ferguson and myself would not join their party to the International Aeroplane Meeting at Rheims the next day.

Painters and newspaper writers could fully appreciate such an invitation.

What an interesting, French Sunday that was! Our prayers for the abating of the storm that followed us alt the way to Rheims were turned into thanksgiving when, we saw that it had only added to the day's character by making the crowd which braved it a most unique one.,, composed mainly of scientists and sportsmen come from all parts of the world for the first meeting of aeroplanes upon the course of Rheims.

When the clouds broke away we would promenade with Dr. Bayard Hale and be introduced to all the celebrities, if we were not receiving lunch or goûter parties at our own table on the famous Grand Stand, arranged in tiers, in the Greek manner.

Just at sunset the winners of the day's intermittent events circled around the Cathedral of Rheims, whose high towers threw their shadowy black lines against the multicolored horizon.

I remember hearing Mr. Lloyd George, England's Lord Chancellor, who was one of the most interested spectators, exclaim to Dr. Bayard Hale :

« The men who built that Cathedral! What must they think as they look upon this scene! »

These words were the inspiration of a painting by Charles Hoffbauer which afterwards appeared in Scribner's Magazine. It was vividly recalled a few evenings since : again at sunset, when the wind is low, I looked out of the windows of Miss Hansen's bandaging class at two Taubes dropping bombs upon Paris while French aeronauts and the gunners of the Eiffel Tower gave them chase. Vanishing puffs of smoke were the only visible difference between this battle in the clouds and the First International Aeroplane Meeting at Rheims.

As all the world knows the Germans are marking that which they wish to destroy by means of a code of aeroplane signals. The dreaded Taube, like a bird of prey, sights its victim, then it lets fall a bomb which in its descent emits a cloud-like smoke visible at a great distance. By its smoky cloud a German aeroplane spoke to the German batteries twelve miles away

« This is the Cathedral of Rheims! This is a sacred thing! Destroy it! »

While correcting these proofs I have received one of those welcome letters without a date that are stamped « Trésor et Postes » and I beg to be pardoned for quoting the following from it:

« Do you remember the time that we went to see the aeroplanes with Mrs. Havens? Coming back in the automobile we crossed a canal near a wide, long road, bordered by big trees? Well the trench where I am stationed, is just there, between the trees and the route. As I write I can to-day see the aerodrome as well as the towers of the Cathedral, our poor Cathedral! »

C. HOFFBAUER (1).

(1) On the first of August the writer stopped his decorating of the Confederate Memorial Hall, Richmond, Va., to join his regiment.

E. D.

Rouen, October 6, 1914.

« Je ne déteste pas les Godons » (---I do not detest the Godons --- Godon being the Atkins of the wars of Charles VII), is one of the rare, recorded phrases that came out of the lips of Blessed Jeanne d'Arc.

And even in the times when he was a « Godon », Mr. Atkins never detested Jeanne la Lorraine --- he will tell you in Rouen to-day---, for Rouen where Jeanne d'Arc was tried and executed has been selected by capricious Fate, or perhaps by divine Fate, as the home in France of Tommy Atkins --- Tommy Atkins, to-day the faithful, the beloved ally of France, his enemy of the Hundred Years War which was ended by the inspiration of Jeanne, the Exaltée, the Pucelle, the Sorcière the Saint and Martyr.

Martyr, gentle reader, listen to this: not by any design or intervention of the English but solely by that of the French clergy who had come to fear so great a Sorcière, now that her work for France was about accomplished; who for that reason ruthlessly wrested her from the English army, which had wished to protect her life, in order that they might end it upon the Bûcher of the Market Place of Rouen.

This statement tenaciously, doggedly held, is thrust upon one who happens in Rouen at the present moment by every frank, young English soldier that he comes upon. Nothing could have been more impressive than the reiteration of the doctrine as I heard it to-day in the grim vaulted chamber where Jeanne d'Arc received her sentence and passed her last night on earth.

Ah, it has been very impressive, every minute of this day with the English soldiers in Old Rouen!

Arriving just at the hour of Mass, my footsteps naturally took the path to the Cathedral which is the pivot of Vieux Rouen. Do you know those old streets that lead up to it, some of them no more than ten feet wide? These are the streets of the Vieux, Vieux Rouen, lined by rows of quaint houses with over-hanging, exposed, wooden rafters, often dating from the XIIIth century, such as one sees in the rue St. Maclou and the rue St. Romain --- the latter preserved by the ardor of the eminent archeologist Monsieur Georges Ruel.

One does not even pause before the coquettish architectures of the Renaissance, of Henri II, of Louis XIII, those parvenus of Vieux Rouen. But the Rue Eau-de-Robec, with its tall houses and their sunlit loggias away up on the top, while the sun never reaches the first floor, or the little bridge porticos that span the canal before it, 'tis there one lingers! A « sale petite Venise » you may remember Gustave Flaubert christened this, his favorite street of his native town.

Be assured the loggia and the Canal were no details of summer pleasure in the Rue Eau-de-Robec in the days when Rouen was the important commercial city of Normandie, when such perfection was reached in the gay colored cotton « indienne » produced by the dyers of the Rue Eau-de-Robec, owing to the particular quality of the water of its little canal and of the sunlight of its loggias, that by Royal Decree, the Manufactures were closed, in the fear of their menace to the Soieries of Lyon, so well did their output please the coquette of the dukedoms of La Belle France.

Commercial rivalry and protection do not after all seem to have sprung into existence with our own Tariff Bill.

Now in the shady Rue Eau-de-Robec, no visiting merchant is seen. The people lean idly from their windows in true Venitian style to stare at a stray passer by; no auto tourist breaks the Sunday calm with his irreverent comment on the heavy waters of the canal --- as to Tommy Atkins, who has taken this Rouen of Jeanne d'Arc to his loyal English heart, all of its odors are sweet to him, whether he marches by in goodly platoons or whether he limps lazily along on his cane, stopping to drop a caressing pebble into the shadowy waters of the canal and to admire the beautiful old wrought-iron grill work of the bridges; in neither case does be in the least excite the window gazers, they have accepted him as a part of Old Rouen itself.,

When at last the heavy, leathern door of the Cathedral swings back upon its hinges, showing a gathering of the faithful that fills the three naves, we realize that the renaissance of the spiritual, which we have noticed in Paris, is not confined to the Capital; while the tall khaki-clad figures, scattered in groups and singly through the crowd, seem to form its by no means least touching note.

Ah ! what if this Cathedral should have met the fate of Rheims? of Rheims and of Louvain? A glimpse at its restored spires and stones before entering showed me what M. Whitney Warren means when be says of the calcined, crumbling walls of Rheims: « You might as well talk about restoring the Venus of Milo! »

With the « Ite, Missa est » I follow Tommy Atkins in his advance towards the altar, doubtless with much the same feeling as that of the gamin in Paris who trots along with a passing regiment. The tomb of Richard Cœur-de-Lion proves to be our goal, we kneel before it: a little Anglo-Saxon pilgrimage. The iron casket which held the Lion Heart, willed to Rouen, is our next station. One does not often see an English soldier weep, but I can only say that a great many heads in the Trésor of the Cathedral were turned suspiciously far away.

Nothing would do but that I should continue with the group into the Archepiscopal Palace. This joins the Cathedral by a passage which has been closed since the separation of Church and State, causing a detour by the Rue St. Romain which took us past the plaque on the exterior of the Chapel informing one that behind those walls, in the year 1431, Jeanne d'Arc received the sentence of death and passed her last night on earth. As if by military commands every head was uncovered. In the great rooms of the Archevêché, a few English soldiers still remained quartered.

Curiously enough --- if anything will ever be curious again --- it was a Belgian refugee, a yellow haired girl of sixteen, who carried the keys for our subterranean visit. An English soldier familiar with the building did the honors of guide. He told us that in the rez-de-chaussée of the old wing, under the same roof as the Chapel of Joan of Arc's judgement, ninety-eight English soldiers had been quartered. In the newer part, built by the Cardinal Georges d'Amboise about 1500, there were four hundred of them. Here, there is soon to be arranged a hospital for the British wounded at present being cared for in the camp at the Race Course.

Our little vestal virgin now lights her lamp, opens a mysterious, low door, and down we go following the narrow, winding, stone steps in single file.

The rough-hewn walls of the Chapel of the « Judgement » do not even bear a plaque. Perhaps it is as well that nothing should be there to conflict with the simply-spoken English version to which we now listen, of the end of her who consecrated this spot.

In the Place du Vieux Marché we come upon a couple of English officers standing caps in hand before the little altar covered with flowers which marks the stone now conceded to be that of Joan of Arc's funeral pyre.

Paris, October 15, 1914.

Alec Carter! Alec Carter! What a train of memories your characteristic, cleancut little name recalls!

Memories of green, sunshiny fields of Auteuil thronging with fair women and rich men, in thousands come from the wide world over to acclaim you first at the post ; memories of brown, dripping scenes of Autumn with the jealous amateur of the obstacle in scanty numbers hurrying from betting booth to track across the spongy lawn to see his favorite mount; memories of last Grand Steeples's stormy victory with Lord Loris, memories of brilliant Drag Day's three consecutive victories, the winning of the « hat trick » and a nice purse for those who had learned to count on Carter.

« Cartair! Cartair! Bravo Cartair! »

How many recalled that thundering cheer, which closed the season at Auteuil (for how long a time?) when in mobilisation days we read that Carter mounting Lord Loris had departed for the nameless fields of the « front ».

We pictured you in your French dragon's uniform sitting with that same erect grace, the same English unconcern, which never left you, never altered from the moment of mounting to that of dismounting, excepting for the slight flush of the victory that was yours.

Yes, your name was characteristic and it was symbolic too, you in your English blood and French birth, in your short victorious career, were a sort of personified prediction of the things for which, you were destined.

To-day, October the 15th after ten weeks of war, we read the news from St-Pol, in the North, that the wounds which you received upon the Champ d'Honneur have proved fatal.

Hoping that there might be some mistake, I hurried to the Hotel Chatham, where all knew you so well, only to hear it verified that Carter was indeed the first among the names I know to be written in the Livre d'Or.

First at the post once again, was the inevitable reflection.

Just a year ago, before the closing of Auteuil, one of those cold rainy Sundays when the elect insists upon disregarding everything but his hobby and the news, habitué knowing this cannot afford to « miss it », I made the acquaintance of Alec Carter.

As the last race was announced, the rain poured down in torrents, torrents of warning to those whose escape depended on the occasional taxi-cab of the winter season. En route to the gate, in precautionary haste, the unmanageable elements drove me, as good fortune would have it, into the little weighing pavilion beside the Jockeys' Quarters where one other had taken refuge: such a handsome boy with pure English features, the erect body and clear skin of the athlete ; he was of good height, as a steeple chaser may possibly be and he wore the Hennessy colors, nile green and orange, which were coming into great prominence, thanks to Carter, I should have recalled but did not.

A word about the discomforts of such a day lead to another, of its taxi-cab complications, which were immediately solved by the thoughtful offer of sending out a scouting chasseur from the jockeys' head quarters.

Not being familiar with the history of Carter, I was very much intrigued with the charming manners of the young man, young gentleman ---a title which I have since learned this French son of a successful English trainer very much cherished.

Then it flashed upon me that I was talking with the winner of the preceeding race without congratulating him! To the question « Did you not win the last race My companion replied, so simply and boyishly, in perfect English:

« Yes, but what's more important, I must win the next one! »

He did. I was there and saw him, the rain having held up just long enough.

That was my first analytic following of the Carter method of controlling a horse : waiting, in calm English fashion until the last obstacle for the final brilliant finish --- few riders have timed a horse with such nicety.

The historic « Rush de Cartair »!

All through the Spring Auteuil season I never failed to place a loyal bet on my jockey friend and I think the records will back me in the assertion that he was never « out of the money ».

The last time I saw little Carter to speak with was during the Grande Semaine when we happened to meet face to face at the kiosque before the Grand Café, it pleased me to have this opportunity to wish him success for the great Epreuves.

He was a unique figure at any time, always so well dressed and correct, whether in his perfectly cut blouse of the piste or the blue serge veston of the Boulevard, his ready smile reflecting something of the satisfaction of his young success, while the seriousness of the penetrating glance from beneath the straight eye-lids bespoke the intellect behind it.

This tribute to my young friend of many brilliant racing scenes recalls to me the fact that when this little volume was first proposed in another, in a happier form, there was to be included a chapter on the races --- and this is our chapter on the races.

One clear day not long ago, I passed by the Weighing Stand and the Jockeys' Quarters, they were empty. And, instead of the gay, red umbrellas of the little marchands which used to line the pelouse, there was a row of comfortable animal stalls; instead of the throbbing mass of humanity pressing forward towards the rail, there were ten thousands sturdy beeves contentedly chewing their quid from sun rise till sun down, when they lazily huddle into the shelters at Suresnes.

Four thousand woolly sheep were grazing in the pesage and in the Tribune where King George and Queen Mary sat in the month of May, guarded by lines of exquisite Jockey Club members chatted groups of smock-frocked, virgilian shepherds. Not many weeks since an affiche was posted on the walls of Paris asking for bergers (shepherds) and tireurs (milkers) for the flocks at the racecourse, nobly standing between us and possible starvation.

The day that we heard of the prospective transplanting of the Belgian Government to Hâvre, I decided to wend my way thither. What a change from sleeping Paris to the new Belgian Capital ! The prosaic sea port was en fête, soldiers to right of one, soldiers to left of one, French, English and Belgians, flags and bunting waving, all bustle and hustle, no signs of grief, no time for the subjective ; the adopted diplomats had the hardest job to face and, in consequence, as they stepped upon the soil of their new land, in a beautiful October sunset, they wore an expression that was a degree more confident even than that of their French hosts.

But the King and Queen did not come. Rumor had it that, they would arrive incognito the following evening---that did not sound like them, but I decided to wait. A Belgian lady who breakfasted next to me at Tortoni's said she was sure the King would remain with his troops, and advised the substantiation of this by the Consul or one of the diplomatic secretaries.

The quest meant starting forth in a dripping autumn rain, meeting at every turn philosophical Belgians asking to be directed to the Hotel de Ville, and the Consul, whom I first sought, advised my going there too; he knew that several more boat loads of his country people would arrive that evening, but for political and military plans in the present lightning-change state of affairs his word was not to be depended upon. And he protested vehemently when I hesitated about infringing upon the still more precious time of a higher official.

With all my antipathy for cats I have a trait in common with them, I hate to be out in the rain. It cut me to the heart to see those Belgian officers, officials, clerks, tramping with courageous mind, through the puddles of a steady downpour, in and out of the Hotel de Ville, from whence they were directed to their various Ministries and offices in the shops and villas of Sainte Adresse, away up on the cliffs.

Finding that there was no possibility of boats from Ostend before evening, the thing indicated was a trip in the same direction. Only two weeks ago, chance had taken me over the same route, the place, bereft of its summer residents was then a deserted village: to-day it was the observed of the world's capitals.

Magnificent is the view upon the Atlantic from Ste.. Adresse but a direct antithesis seems to have been aimed at in the play-toy town of heterogeneous, summer cottages recently built by the instalment merchant, Dufayel. I found however that, to the refugees from old Antwerp and learned Louvain, the minutest modern conveniences, hot and cold water and bath rooms, were things to be appreciated considerably more than the view, extra marine at the moment.

Cabs were nil at Ste-Adresse; so I made myself useful by sharing the one I had found with the ladies and children carrying packages and household effects from villa to villa. I assure you, it was many times a case of what's Hecuba to me, so hard was it to live up to their superb attitude, doubtless for the main reason that I did not share their faith that they would pass the New Year by their own firesides. Their naive conviction of what the English and French would do for them, was like the dependance of a child upon a parent. May it never have cause to falter!

A Belgian Eclaireur was one of my convoy back to Havre, he said, « I saw our King in Ostend yesterday, I was with some officers when he bade them good-bye, he told us he would stay on Belgian soil as long as there remains enough of it for his two feet to stand on. »

My all night trip back to Paris was made with the arrivals from La France, who got in during the afternoon a dozen new nurses for the Pasteur Ambulance, brought over by Mrs. Duer, and several French mobilisés from the regions of the Pacific, including a Dominican monk wearing the brown cowl of his order --- the happiest of the lot. In one hand he carried all that there was of his baggage, a newspaper parcel, in the other he extended his livret militaire. What a palpable sign of the times he was!

Paris, October 3, 1914.

The Café Viennois is, if you remember, situated at the corner of the Boulevard Montmartre and the Rue Drouot, in plein, full, center of Paris, to express it in the most Parisian term. Well, what would you think if I should, tell you that on the three-stone-step entrance that forms the angle before the now closed doors of this establishment redolent of 1900's Viennese fad, almost on the side-walk :of what was once the busiest point of the city's thorough-fare there is a woman sitting on a camp stool giving knitting lessons. Her terms are gratuitous (we all have our own way of « helping ») so, need it be said that even in these thinly populated days, she manages to get a class around her.

Nothing that I have seen has struck me as so perfectly expressing the phase of life through which we are passing. If those Americans who are accustomed to referring to the City of Light as « Gay Paree » could only peep in on us!

The curious part of it is that nobody ever thinks of a première or a Grand Prix, at this usual moment too of the gay season's opening in the most exotic of pleasure grounds; there is so much to do.

« Get thee to thy knitting », said Dr. Edmond Gros, to a would-be infirmière the other day, « sickness, not wounds is what we must face now. »

Every woman in Paris in knitting to the call of la Patrie; our Parisian is proving by her trial of knitting that her patriotism is of no mean order, the glamour of a roll of white bandage is not easily reflected in a ball of brown wool.

To the American mind this hand-knitting manner of warming an army seems almost a scandal, but French fighting men doubtless remembered the ransom of Bernard Du Guesclin, senechal of Normandy. Do you know the story?

At the Battle of Auray, about 1350, Du Gueselin, the greatest of all French soldiers of fortune, was taken prisoner and he was allowed to name his own ransom:

« Toutes les femmes de France (Every woman in France) --- he proudly swore --- will spin to pay it ».

Our tricoteuse of to-day has an advantage over his fourteenth century fileuse: she can bring her work along. From the boulevards to the hospital, to the couturiere, to the modiste, to the café, in trams, in metros, somebody is sure to be knitting away, oblivious of the passing throng.

And those who aren't knitting, or teaching knitting, are selling knitting, like Mrs. Edith Wharton. A week ago, Mrs. Wharton got back from England to find a state of dissolution in the ouvroir which she had organised before leaving. This brilliant author's persistence in preparing her literary career has always enthralled me, acquaintance with it will help you to understand how she went about reorganising her ouvroir: for years she worked and worked, submitting her efforts to the best writers, never to a publisher; finally one day she showed a novel to Henry James, if I mistake not. « Send it to Scribner's » said James. That is how she made her record of never a work refused.

Eight days after her return to Paris, Mrs. Wharton in a becoming checked suit, with a sable scarf thrown around her shoulders was taking orders from the case of knit goods prepared by the women of her ouvroir, comparing her passe-montagnes and cache-nez and gilets with the production of an unnamed ouvroir of great repute, much to the detriment of the unnamed one, need it to be said.

No, patient reader, knitting is not our only excitement, every evening, from three-thirty on, there is the promenade to the Avenue de l'Opéra, to the Herald or Echo de Paris, for the Communiqué. You could see it almost as promptly in the Presse, or Intransigeant but then you would not be exchanging sympathetic opinions with the little army drawn up before the big blackboards, passing on from the left hand window to the right hand one to continue to the end of the Russian paragraph.

You, in America, have known for some hours that today the story was of the steady if slow advance to which we seem to be becoming quite accustomed (tap wood). To a crowd on the pavement at 19 Avenue de l'Opéra it meant a grunt of satisfaction and the adjournment to the Café de la Paix, to finish the story « told by an English Officer, a friend of my friend »... English officers, let me inform you, are in high feather. In fact, they have made possible to Parisians that tabooed, tourist's Mecca, the Café de la Paix, for the English officer is the only tourist in Paris these days, have you thought of that, the English officer and the Highland laddie.

At a given moment, almost a given interval, there is a general craning of necks, something is coming! No, it is not the long expected German prisoner who never does appear:

The Campbells are coming, yo-ho, yo-ho!
The Campbells are coming tae bonnie Loch Leven!

If His Majesty's officer is our paragon, the Royal Scot is our pet.

« Have you ever tried to imagine what would happen if King Edward could pass down the Boulevards in his Scottish uniform ? » I suggested the other day to an English friend. After a moment, of loyal, British reflection, he found this diplomatic parry:

« Or a whole regiment of Royal Scots! »

Most original, indeed! It is so long since we beheld a regiment in Paris that we've almost lost the meaning of the word.

Certainly these Scotch boys are a treat to see, even to the jaded eyes of a journalist. I took the pleasure of telling them so when I found myself opposite to a pair in the Metro the other day and I learned that they always go in pairs, like French policemen, for the simple reason that they are at present

« Joost doing a sorrut of pulice duty ».

On the occasion referred to, women in the Metro stood up to gaze at them and children crowded around them, in most undisguised admiration.

« It was so embar-r-rassing at furrust, » said they.

Fortunately for the rest of us, they are so embarrassed that by no chance do they ever walk on the sidewalk when they can swagger down the middle of the street, with their thirty yards of kilt a'swinging, and their hips a'springing out below their tightly buckled belts. And their bamboo canes! And their boat-shaped caps! And their bare, shining knees!

Well may newspaper men say

« There is something going on everywhere but in Paris, yet while there is Paris, where else would we be? »

Let us rest the question on the knees of the gods, the Gods of Caledonia.

What would all this bread and butter war news have been without its tid-bit, the canard, canard of the trooper, canard of the farcer, canard of the juggler, canard of the scribbler ?

Surtout, above all, canard à la Hubin, spécialité of the Restaurant Hubin, served every day at twelve and some, evenings at eight, to war correspondents in Paris, the grosses têtes --- which does not mean big heads, but big names of the Anglo-American Journalists: Messrs. Frank Grundy, President, New York Sun ; William Guard; Evening Sun; Bertelli, American; Williams, Times; Summerville Story, Daily Mail ; Gordon-Smith; McAlpin; Simms; Albert Mayer; Hedin --- all the other big names, as well as an occasional little name, as the intermittent attendance of the present scribe will indicate.

The opening of the canard season, its St. Hubert's Day of 1914, fell on that in which the great Russian canard, was landed for the delectation of the French palate upon the Norman coast near Granville.

Just when things were blackest we heard that Lord Kitchener had a surprise up his sleeve; how it leaked out is hard to tell, remembering Kitchener's antipathy to all that touches publicity. The rumour, wherever it may have started, was most, efficacious.

A few days since, Mr. Hedin, meeting a bunch of Canadian soldiers who had come by way of Scotland, heard, as we do from all new comers, an important piece of news. Their story was the picturesque one of several thousand Russians, eight or eighteen or eighty and many more to follow, who had been hastened around by the White Sea to Archangel and by mysterious means spirited by way of Great Britain into the North Coast of France, near Granville --- the Canadians of course might not indicate just where, because thousands and thousands more of Russians were on the way to land mysteriously in the night at exactly the same point.

'Ah! Ah !' said Mr. Hedin, that is Kitchener's surprise !

Everybody that day had his own particular, secret source of information about the Russians; for two or three days following, nothing else was talked of but the: Russians who had turned the tide. And this was not merely the talk among idle gossipers. For instance, I asked one of the editors of the Figaro, with many excuses for my, indiscretion, what definite news he could tell me on the, subject, unofficially of course.

This gentleman assured me that the Russians were stationed as near to us as Nogent; that they had lauded on the Coast of Brittany. There were forty-eight thousands of them. Eighty thousands, I corrected, according to my last informant. No, there were only forty-eight thousands.

A few days after, the papers printed an official denial, of any Russians in France, under the heading: « Pas un Seul Soldat Russe en France ». Everything printed passes the Censor and that was our only newspaper reference concerning Les Russes.

In that same week, Wednesday if we mistake not, when. all was seen and heard en grand, or not at all chez Hub; Mr. Gordon-Smith introduced his confrères to a « canard à l'éléphant ». Those Indian soldiers were slow arriving, he admitted, very slow, because of the bulkiness of their cargoes, nothing other than elephants and elephants, to be used by their cavalry regiments; a line of these impenetrable animals would go as a sort of portable screen before each French cavalry onslaught!

Until the same story was brought up by my faithful retainer from a neighbouring concierge's loge later in the day, embellished with armored pagodas for the riders, I had thought that Mr. Gordon-Smith was treating us to a dish of his own keen, Scottish wit.

Mr. Parslow, of the Daily Mail, matched him with a canard a la sport, a newly invented metallic arrow. He had been in the vicinity of a battle field and he had gathered up several of these tiny weapons which the country people claimed to have been delivered by bows from a troupe of Austrian archers hidden away in the German Army corps. My word! Poor Parslow and his Austrian archers ! He got it back on us the other day. « Attention » said he, and he read from the Herald:

« New Aeroplane Weapon. »

« Among the surprises of the war is a new projectile brought into use through the aeroplane. This is a steel dart which experiments have now perfected. »

Enters Mr. Grundy, pale and abstracted, one evening in early October and he reads:

« The Beautiful Spy in the Big Grey Auto.»

« At Châlons, at Meaux, at Soissons, at Liège, as far away as Charleroi, she has been seen for a day and then etc... etc... »

« Woe is me and all my clan, » tragically continued the Sun representative, « that we should allow ourselves to be outwitted by this miserable, inventive French journalist and his female spy who understands so well how to cover her tracks! What war was ever without its 'beautiful spy' canard? »

A « canard à la mode du Journal », an innocent enough little canneton, struck out one day from the American Ambulance where François De Tesson, Director of the Petit Journal, author of The Far West and several other mighty good books on America, is being treated for a shoulder wound, fortunately, neither grave enough to prevent a little fun at the expense of the young sous-lieutenant, nor, what is almost more important, to rob him of his title of the handsomest sous-officier in the French Army. Mr. MacAlpin when visiting Neuilly one morning found his French confrere fatigued but uncomplaining; soon after the welcome of the Scotchman at the bedside of his friend their conversation was interrupted by the advent of a pretty Auxiliary bearing a basin and lots of nice towels, she approached and proceeded to sponge tenderly the face of our invalid. Scarcely had ten minutes passed when again, an Auxiliary, even prettier than the first, with a bigger basin and still more towels:

« Is it really necessary Mademoiselle » pleaded the beau lieutenant, « considering that my face has just been washed for the tenth time this morning? »

It was a long way from the Halles Centrales, was that tea-party where I first met Marie-Jeanne ; one of those apologetic, war-time tea-parties that turn themselves into a serio-comic Conseil de Guerre and end in obviously, forced gaiety, as this one had every excuse for doing --- Was it not the final, Palmer tea-party? --- and the Palmers were quite exceptional young people, very intelligent young people, as the raison d'être of their tea-party itself argues: it was a birthday fête by the outgoing Vice-Consuls for the incoming Vice-Consul, De Witt Poole, not in any way a farewell to their friends, or to the pretty apartment up by the Bois de Boulogne!

When I went into the Palmers that day, a white-haired lady at the end of the table was reciting a lot of jingling words about Tipperary; no type can imitate her tripping, Irish r's any more that it can the roguish look of those big, blue eyes.

A little slip of a dark girl who wore an infinitesimal, Tommy Atkins scull cap surmounted by a great paradise feather, above a tiny face, all forehead, with quite as fine an air as Marie-Antoinette herself might have assumed the trying coiffure that came to us with the war, took up the refrain of the white-haired lady and with r's in French-English-Irish threatened the success of the other's pure, Celtic brogue.

« Who is that pretty Russian girl? », whispered Mr. Charles Loeb, at my left, « I thought at first she was Anna Pavlova. »

« Marie-Jeanne », said our hostess, to whom I telephoned the question, « Marie-Jeanne, people are inquiring who is the Russian girl with such a perfect Irish accent? »

No Frenchwoman objects to being called Russian any more than she does Irish nowadays, so my first move in Marie-Jeanne’s direction was one of unintentional diplomacy.

« Zis Russian girl is vary French, Madame, --- said Marie-Jeanne, bowing the high forehead with courtly grace in my direction --- Zis Russian girl is the mozer of tree future soldiers of La Patrie ».

My credulity refused to accept the latter assertion until a half hour later, when we went to make our farewells, to Mr. George Elliott Palmer Jr. and Marie-Jeanne lifted him from his crib of pink clouds with that reckless indifference to a five months old back which nothing but motherhood can explain.

And George Elliott in the arms of Marie-Jeanne grasped for the November moon, shining above the old Château of La Muette, where Marie-Antoinette passed the night before she entered that indecisive Paris of her wedding day --- La Muette, lying dark and forsaken in the shadows of the Bois as if atoning for its innocent part in the tragic end of the poor, little « Autrichienne. »

Yesterday afternoon, Marie-Jeanne took me in her chic auto, painted grey to match the familiar one of General Galliéni, and she also took several big baskets of fruit, to an old, military hospital away down by the Bastille, where there are no pretty, white-veiled infirmières, none but prosaic men nurses and the soldiers are not spoiled as they are in the Croix-Rouge hospitals of he Champs-Elysées, so Marie-Jeanne informed me she had discovered, in the mysterious manner in which I have discovered that all knowledge appears to find its way to her ever-active, mental regions.

It was the most mysterious of all the mysterious Marie-Jeannes, that called me back as the auto was turning away.

« Ma chère », she said, in unfathomable importance, « can you pussiblee come out at seven o'clock to-morrow morneeng? If you can do zat I will show you an intelligent ting for zeze war times .

So it was arranged that Marie-Jeanne and I should meet this morning, at seven o'clock, before the down town office of the father of Marie-Jeanne's, three little soldiers --who turns out, by the way, to be one of those kind, broad-minded Frenchmen who have married rather late (from our standpoint) and enjoy seeing their young wives amuse themselves, provided they are not tormented into joining in.

Marie-Jeanne was already peering out of the stationary, grey auto's low window when I arrived at the rendez-vous, she was hatless and she had on old, old clothes, which I suspicioned had been acquired from the femme de chambre; I must take off my hat too, it appeared, and a fur collar which was very comfortable at seven o'clock a frosty November morning; as to gloves, there could be no question about them; furthermore, I was made to empty my coins into a handkerchief from a silk hand bag that had, alas, seen all-summer usage --- no matter, it was condemned as too fine, and must stop in the auto along with hat and gloves; fortunately, my seven-franc-ninety war jacket was found just right, and was permitted to stay by me.

Then, each provided with a filet, one of those brown, meshed cord marketing bags which the French cook dotes on and which my guide had taken the precaution to stow beneath the cushions of the grey auto, we started off on foot, leaving the machine in a side street, to learn the mysterious economies of marketing at the Halles Centrales in war times.

The sun was now struggling its way across chimney pots in the Rue Réaumur, bringing out glints of red in the black head beside me.

« Let us go first to the fruits » said Marie-Jeanne, waving her filet with a rhythmic motion, as if indicating the Garden of the Hesperides.

Her little body capered and danced in and out between the wheels that encumbered the route: wheels of ambulance supply wagons, painted as grey as their dusty canvas tops; of commissariat wagons from casernes in addition to those of the picturesque impedimenta of les Halles, those tall, two-wheeled carts which we know so well from revolutionary pictures and of pushcarts --- of fishmongers and flower merchants and fruiters and green-grocers and restaurateurs---in and out between the wheels she danced, escaping the jostle of big, blue-aproned men whose tasseled caps reminded one of a friendly Sans-culotte left over from 1789, her « Prenez garde, monsieur » never failing to arouse an answering smile from the most crusty of them --- like the men in the big bureaux of the rue du Sentier, those of Les Halles are nearly all old men now-adays. This familiarity of attitude towards them, she explained, was as necessary as dressing the part, if one was to have the benefit of dealers' prices.

By dint of patting a stout fruitière on the shoulder, while addressing her as «ma petite », we got for our wounded soldiers, who were the excuse for this adventure, at the price of three sous each a wonderful grass tray of pears that would have cost a franc a piece at the Café de Paris. All whispered price comparisons were made on these antipodal lines, I noticed, also, that even whispering must be in French, a word of English would sound our Waterloo, as well as the signal for a band of menacing followers who would give the alarm at every stall that we approached.

The pears were left to be called for later at a cash booth where we had to pay at once, to prove our seriousness and where I heard the pseudonyme, « Madame Marie-Jeanne », boldly announced for the first time, as our address to be marked in big, blue letters beside the word « réservé  » of the tag.

Then between banks of silvery fish we skated over slippery pavements, accosted at each glide by ruddy-faced women, the keen expression of them making one understand the power which has enabled the dealers of Les Halles Centrales to fit up that beautiful convalescing hospital which now occupies the Grand Palais, as well as the serious import of a visit by les Dames des Halles to such an unsteady Court as that of Louis XVI at Versailles and even the possibility of a place « at Court » for a comely one, with a sonnet to her eyebrow by the lauriate, like lovely Nelly Gwynn.

My mouth was hermetically sealed in the Marché des Poissons (a proverbial pitfall of the uninitiated) while the eyes of little, unoffending soles were turned in their sockets, and the fins of big, defenceless truites were pryed open by the tell-tale, polished finger nails of Marie-Jeanne; this incriminating point having been brought by a glance from me, alas, to her attention cost me a scouting expedition among the crowds before neighbouring stalIs to hear the prices there named to the unmanicured.

Sixty centimes a sole being the invariable price quoted, our transaction was settled without further delay and our feet pointed towards the Marché des Poulets.

«  Une belle poule! Une belle dinde! 'sieurs et m'dames! Que voulez-vous! »

Marie-Jeanne made an immediate hit by addressing this old cryer as « Patron » ; result: our acquisition of three fat chickens at the absurd cost of three francs a piece; beautiful rosy fowls too. Let the price of beef soar as it will we've no need to become vegetarians yet.

As we plodded back to the grey auto's inconspicuous station, the manipulation of our filets complicated by the pears picked up en route, Marie-Jeanne divulged a scheme that had long been waiting in her mind for the sympathetic partner whom it appears I have had the misfortune to prove myself to be. Her eyes fastened themselves upon a push cart freshly laden with fruit and flowers, as she announced the fact.

« We will take one of zoze carts » she concluded with, « and we will go all over Paris selling somezing; zat way we will make much money pour les pauvres --- how you call it? --- for ze poor. »

The sun which had touched her hair with garnet now turned her high, Marie-Antoinette forehead to gold. Oh, Queen of France who played at milkmaid, republican millionaire who plays at marketgirl, you are forgiven much for your humanity's sake!

You who know the solemn ceremony of a grand enterrement in Paris, --- my own first impression, of Sardou's obseques, I shall never forget --- or the almost equal magnificence of the French cocher who arrests an invective to raise his hat as a funeral passes, can imagine something of this All Souls Day of 1914. For those who have not seen these things let me, first of all, translate Maurice Donnay, the French Academician's, article from the Figaro of November the third.

« COMMUNION »

« Chrysanthemums have bloomed most generously this autumn, as if they had forseen its hecatombe and that because of it they would be transported by a more numerous embrace than ever towards the cemeteries of cities and villages, as well as those lone tombs of the campaign away off in the fields, those hastily made graves that are signalled by a rough, wooden cross and a cap.

« Yes, they have bloomed generously for our heroes, soldiers, officers, generals, little chrysanthemums in the modest kitchen gardens of peasants, finer chrysanthemums with longer petals in the luxurious gardens of the rich, even those monstrous chrysanthemums that flower only in great conservatories, those of which the varieties of another Autumn are sure to be called: the General Joffre, General Galliéni, (who already has a rose), or General Pau, or General Castelnau and so many others! Which will astonish nobody in the republic of chrysanthemums.

« It was not a 'vrai temps de Toussaint ' as our parents were wont to call an execrable day; it was not a Toussaint sad and gray in which that unbroken line of good people wended its way to the cemeteries of France during the past two days; on the contrary the sky was clear and blue, lighted by a sun that smiled upon the earth a warm golden smile. The indifference of Nature? No, so much sweetness and beauty could not be without purpose. Nature seemed to say to the living: ' Weep, but do not despair! Let your piety be as great as the glory of these dear ones, as great as your grief. Look, I have not veiled this day in a black veil, the sun warms the newly turned earth, which the trees cover, leaf by leaf, with a royal mantle of purple and gold; and if my sky is blue it is to signify that those who have fallen for La Patrie have entered, like the Chevalier of the legend, into the azure of ' La Mort'.

« Weep, but do not be inconsolable! They, our dying soldiers themselves, have given us this supreme recommendation. How many have written from their hospital beds: ' Do not grieve, I die for La Patrie! ' Ah, no ! it is not a phrase. When we see the gate of Eternity open before us we no longer dream of making phrases.

« And the crowd, silent and reflective, wended its way towards the cemeteries. Those who believe prayed, the others thought.

« Yesterday those who did not pray had grave and cherished thoughts. They knew that those who slept beneath the sod had died for justice's sake, for life and liberty and that these words had not been for them mere words, but grand ideas.

« They understood that there is an ideal for which one dies, for which one may live. This ideal was everywhere, it arose from the earth and permeated the soft air we breathed, it enveloped us. Ideal confounded itself with Patriotism. And all these men and all these women praying and thinking, equals in fraternity, communicated in one grand religion! »

MAURICE DONNAY,
de I'Académie française.

Who but a Frenchman could put it so? Yet the last thought had come to me as it doubtless did to many people who stood there in the cemetery of Bagneux on Sunday afternoon and that is why the words of Maurice Donnay appeal to. me more directly than those of any other great author who wrote about the Toussaint of 1914.

Sandy in its newness, was the square of ground at Bagneux, where the soldiers lay with « one grand thought » then hovering above it and it was bordered by sentinel. like lines of trees which, despite some fallen leaves were still of a rich yellow color that contrasted well with the ribbons of tri-couleur binding shining garlands of holly from one to another, thus forming an enclosure.

Soldiers who have died in the hospitals of Paris lay in long, close rows of graves each marked by a little black cross with white lettering; all were heaped with chrysanthemums.: in great bunches, loosely scattered, upon the French, English and Belgians lying side by side.

Across a broad road half as many graves again passed unnoticed, upon nearer approach they proved to be the tombs of wounded German prisoners who had been brought to the Paris hospitals. After all, I was not sorry to find that a few stray chrysanthemums had fallen upon each (somebody had been just a little bit bigger than the rest of us) upon each of these poor Carls and Wilhelms who ---we now know --- were in many cases deceived into fighting, whose ages upon crosses similar to the others ranged from seventeen to twenty-four!

It was not necessary to have asked for the resting place of the youngest French soldier, before reaching the spot it indicated itself by a group of boys who stood « képis »in hand, very proud and just a little conscious of their new uniforms; these, the most living defenders of the cause, bending so reverently over their companion, their childish features expressing a new-born understanding, would be the next to go, they were of the « Class of 1914 ».

All eyes, including my own, rested tenderly upon them and while I was trying to place something familiar in the features of a tall artillery-man, the generous features of a small face: a wide mouth with up-turned corners repeated, in the slanting, eyes whose conspicuous lashes changed a glance of mischief into something almost angelic, he, the tall artillery-man, moved in my direction. It could not be! Yes --- it was Emile! Emile Vacher, the son of my old concierge in the Rue d'Assas.

With what ease he came forward! But for the lines of red on his trousers and short jacket of navy blue, he might have been an Annapolis mid-shipman. Perhaps it is, in part at least, his military training that gives the Frenchman of every class a certain savoir-faire. When Emile had introduced his companions, it was decided that I should accompany him to see his parents whom he had permission to visit before returning to his caserne at Vincennes.

The Vachers, it appeared, were now the guardians of a very important property in the Boulevard Raspail close by the Lion de Belfort. That was not far from the Porte d'Orleans, whither we must wend our way on foot, in any case, for the ever-increasing crowds prevented all thought of transportation.

How nice it was to see pretty, little Madame Vacher again! Not changed a bit, not even to a hair of her careful coiffure, the same best black skirt and neat gray waist, the same gay worsted pelerine thrown about her shoulders; apologizing, as usual, for her untidy appearance while she glanced surreptitiously at her hands, her well kept hands, with their long, almond nails, which the manicure of the sixth floor back in the Rue d'Assas used to assure her were an indication of royal blood ---of which she would deprecatingly explain, there was, indeed, a tradition in her family.

This subject I remembered had always accompanied the Sunday toilet and an imperceptible toss of the head, while Monsieur Vacher, feigning not to hear would drum upon the window pane, his stocky back turned towards us. I think Monsieur might have established his own claims to royalty through his magnificent moustache with ends rivaling that of Guillaume himself; in his absence, Madame would sometimes hint that he was really noted for it among the care takers of the city's fountains. Monsieur Vacher was, as you see, of the Gouvernement.

His well brushed alpaca jacket and waistcoat, with the sleeves of the former a good inch too short, his gray cap and trousers had not changed any more than the dainty habit of his thrifty, little wife and their welcome in chorus was the old, familiar one which used to greet me, whether upon my return from a day in the country or my annual visit to America:

« Tiens, c'est Mademoiselle !  » In a tone that the Grande Mademoiselle de Bourbon herself might have envied.

Only the presence of Emile made us realize that three years and not three days had passed since our last meeting, Emile and his friend Georges who used to come down from the Rue Denfert-Rochereau and who now emerged from the shadows. Georges was just as tall as Emile but he looked fragile. He wore civilians clothes and I seized upon the fact that some mystery enshrouded him by the manner in which any reference to his present, past, or future was immediately suppressed in the ensuing conversation.

While he and Emile discussed affairs of State in the corner and Madame Vacher busied herself about tea, Monsieur entertained me with the intervening chapters which had occurred in the biography of the young militaire during these three busy years.

Shortly after the demolishing of the old house in the Rue d'Assas, Emile had left the service of the Poste, a place, which, I might remember, to have been obtained for him by much wire pulling on the part of his ambitious, republican parent, was lost by a very little wire pulling, so to speak, on the part of a difficult son --- Emile had always been difficile, as well as mechanical. His departure from the Poste had eventually been caused by a too careful investigation of the wires, literally, of the system pneumatique, which had caused the putting out of service of one of the machines at the Bureau where he served and of the over-mechanical Emile by the same token.

Considering that Emile had always had a taste for the finer mechanics (well did I remember his demands upon the family bien for the purchase of mysterious portions of telephones, the successful completion of which always depended on just one more part) this taste for finer mechanics had at last been gratified in his apprenticeship to a grand horloger (clockmaker) near the Bon Marché, where Emile has rapidly risen to the rank of master workman when his « class was called ». The natural thing had, therefore, but transpired in Emile's becoming an artilleur and having already had notice from his captain.

How decent and fine it all was! Had I not a right to reflect Monsieur's approving smile? Had not my own efforts to get Emile a place in an aeroplane factory been crushed beneath the foot of an over-practical republican parent?

Hearing the word aeroplane, Emile and Georges now joined us, Georges, the meanwhile, explaining that Emile had been on the point of entering this highest of all callings at the very moment of mobilization. While we took our tea, Emile and I let the rest of them into the secret of certain truant confidences, when the grinding life of a public servant, even of the coveted Poste, was the unique theme which inevitably concluded with a mischievous side long glance and the philosophically, prophetic phrase « Ca s'arrangera » !

And here was that same Emile with the mark of the « 32 » artillery regiment on his collar, gracefully bending forward to indicate certain rough sketches by the left hand (did I tell you that the right one had been wounded in the machinery of a canon?) which intelligently illustrated to us the mysteries of our « soixante-quinze ». The « soixante-quinze » , the most effective French piece is by no means the largest ; « 155 » is the great mortar but the German « 150 », its companion piece, is more awful.

The parents exchanged sympathetic glances over this enthusiasm for so deadly a subject. Madame Vacher recalled to her son that he and I had met at the grave of one of his young companions of the class of 1913. We all agreed upon one point and that was that this war for « Right and Liberty » had robbed death of its terror.

When the door of the hospitable, little loge had closed behind Emile and myself, en route for our diverging « Metro » lines, the old habit of confidences returned; the mystery of Georges would doubtless now be solved, I predicted to myself.

« There is no use to contrary Maman , said Emile respectfully, « she has deprived herself of so much for me. But all the same it is not for the comrades lying in Bagneux that we have pity, we others at the caserne, it is for the fellows like poor, old Georges who on account of a stupid appendix are put back in the service for a whole year. Ça, c'est tragique! »

That very Parisian figure of whom it was once said: « When she enters a room it is a moral certainty that the spirit of Molière moves beside her », Mademoiselle Cécile Sorel, of the Comédie-Française --- need it be added--- has crossed my path several times of late.

A few days since we found ourselves, by a lucky chance for me, the only women at the Ecole Militaire where, in the Cour d'Honneur, the Boy Scouts (Boi Scoots, nobody calls them « Eclaireurs » any more), the future defenders of La Patrie, paraded before General Galliéni, Military Governor of Paris. As we watched the touching scene from the window of the concierge's loge, little by little, I discovered the real Sorel in my sympathetic, lively companion. --- Was she possibly the woman of more formal meetings around Paris during the last five or six years ?

First of all this new Sorel was marvelously well informed, she knew everybody and the reason for everything, she knew how many patients were at the American Ambulance and she knew that it was Capitain Hirshauer who hovered with protecting care in the sky above the little soldiers; she was humorous too, we had a lot of fun about the earnestness of the future army and about General Galliéni's inimitable self control---his tall, wiry figure was rigid with. it, only once did he turn away this erect-set, fleshless head while he gnawed the drooping corners of his white moustache and closed his eye-lids behind their sheltering glasses.

But imagine what must have been the state of an old soldier's risibilities at the sight of those bulging haversacks, from chinks of which one even caught glimpses of shining cooking pots, that weighted down their bearers whose camarades pushed hand carts in which to remove the wounded, or led dogs to search out the suffering ; while some on bicycles circled round, and round the immobile figure of the chief the rest leant upon their long staffs, which replaced muskets, looking with grim, set faces into the future and the present, taking the responsibility of it all upon their tender shoulders, they were far more tragic than the inscrutable Galliéni himself.

Ah, to be a Boy Scout in the year 1914! And yet what cruel play for children, that of these twentieth century pages of the Moyen-Age!

Sorel's eyes brimmed over as she recounted her anxiety for her young, Reutlinger, soldier-nephew, who has not been heard of for three months; the fêted comédienne of the Français has du cœur, a heart, I can assure you as well as the good taste that is ever the first thought when her name is mentioned. Heart and good taste were very much in tune on the day in question, by the way, the most quoted élégante in Paris wore the very simplest costume that her last year's outfit had afforded : a severe suit of blue serge and a little marquis hat of black satin, a dark fox fur thrown around her shoulders and a white blouse chemisier with one of those turn-over collars that we have borrowed from Molière himself; yet it seemed to me that the « allure » which has given Sorel precisely the place that she holds in the feminine world was never so en évidence.

Sorel's fine taste! Yes, it is a precious thing. I saw more of it when, as the outcome of all this, 1 went to have coffee to-day, at two, in her apartment on the Quai Voltaire, the first floor of an old Louis XIV hotel : the walls of its high rooms hung with toned brocade of the period, its marble floors warmed by just the right number of tiger skins thrown in just the right places.

What a Parisian scene it was that I walked in on! Nothing less than a meeting, a delightful informal meeting, to decide the question of re-opening the Comédie-Française. There were, besides the hostess : Marie Leconte and Berthe Bady, the wife of Henry Bataille the dramatist, and there was a young officer of the Automobile Corps in uniform, also two important looking gentlemen who spoke but little and whose names I missed, and finally there was Monsieur Arthur Meyer, Editor of the Gaulois (the Royalist mouth piece), the dernier Parisien , as he is called, the grand Parisian of September 1914 as he was of September 1870, who, full of good sense, charm and life, presided as chief adviser of the meeting.

Ah, if I might only tell you all that I heard in that one short hour ! Oh, the miserable, miserable Censor ! State secrets that must remain buried in dusty archives for years to come, perhaps for ever, were those stories of the armies of Joffre and Galliéni, of the real reason that this town was lost, that that fort was gained, of the saving of a great city by its taxicabs, (which do you think?) of how two mighty generals had within the last forty-eight hours been reconciled after a life-long feud, from which we may expect good news in the next forty-eight hours ; the latest potins (gossip) about the marooned Gouvernement and its anticipated return and a great secret --- quoted from Maurice Barrès---pertaining to the Roi des Belges, Albert Ier King of Jerusalem, as the Gaulois recently called him.

King of Jerusalem, Albert the First.

« Le Roi des Belges! »

At his name every head went higher and throats filled up.

« Ah, see you, see you all, you women, at the mention of his name! » exclaims the Gaulois' Editor, who as every one knows surpasses any woman in worshipping the

grand hero, « If only he could see you! It's worth the price he's paid ! »

Here the rich contralto voice of Berthe Bady takes up the theme:

« Eh bien, oui, see us! Thank God that we should have lived to find in this twentieth century one man, one, who would give up all for the ideal ! We, we French could do nothing but what we have done, but for him it would have been so easy, so easy, to have made one little error and the world need never have known the truth. It is the wife of the idealist Henri Bataille, the Berthe Bady of her husband's play « La Femme Nue », who speaks.

« For instance , says the young officer, « he might have sent three thousand men to the frontier, or even five thousand, to meet the Kaiser's hordes, they might have really been demolished too ; then, there could easily have been an unavoidable delay in the arrival of more troops --- very, very plausible --- and Louvain and Antwerp would be standing to-day, but not Paris »!

« Son of thy grand-mother thou speakest well », chirps in the flute-like voice of Marie Leconte, --- that tone of raillery which dissimulates deeper emotion is evidently a characteristic of Mademoiselle Leconte in real life as well as upon the stage---«  Thou speakest worthily of thy great mother... Monsieur Arthur Mayer, what are we all going to do to help our saviors the Belgians? »

« Do the simple thing », is the unhesitating reply of the little chief, « to help the Belgians, we are going to begin by saying that at least the Thursday matinées of the House of Molière will be resumed with the coming month. After that, he continues, we are going to see if in your matinées, as in your admirable Sunday Auditions in the Ambulances, you are not going to best help everybody, by avoiding above all the exaggerated efforts of some well meaning members of your sex during the past few months ».

« Tout de même, the women have done a lot of good, my friend » asserts our hostess, « not exactly, perhaps, as the religieuses might have done it, but they have been earnest. Take Géniat for one, nobody would believe her to be our Géniat of the Français, she is a revelation, she has worked from eight till eight in that ambulance; her hair has turned white and she is as thin as a rail. When I look at her it seems to me I have done nothing --- nothing! »

« And, perhaps, » replies our mentor, « perhaps Géniat is saying : 'Look at the beautiful work Cécile has done in organising the Français Ambulance Corps ! ' The pleasure that you give to the poor fellows whose convalescent days hang heavily, the moral uplifting, is a magnificent work! My motto is, chacun fait le sien, the thing that is nearest: stay in Paris, give the Gaulois the chance to do its part for its friends, was my conclusion in the dark days --- I don't believe others have regretted the decision any more than l have.

« I receive letters and letters, stacks of them everyday, always from women: How can I get into the Service of the Gares? The service is already overflowing, I reply to that one. How can I get into Belgium? writes another. There is not enough to eat in Belgium for the people who are trying to get out of it, is my reply to her.

« And yet », chirps la petite Leconte---it's hard to tell if she is serious or not --- there's the English Duchesse who not only got into Belgium but wrote a book about it and got married. »

« Monsieur Arthur Mayer », announces mademoiselle la Femme de Chambre, at the door, « it is three o'clock, the Gaulois is ringing up to read you the Communiqué. »

« Three o'clock! I fly! I am due at the Ministry of War at three ten ! » gasps the diminishing voice of the young automobile officer.

« He has one blue eye and one brown one », somebody observes as his graceful form disappears.

« One blue eye and one brown eye, ah, that was a curious story », the dernier Parisien's own eyes follow, through the window, an ambulance boat that gently plys the Seine, he smiles in reminiscence as he muses : that was a curious story, the story of his brown-eyed singer ---mother --- the great Judie --- and her blue-eyed composer --- lover : she --- Oui, oui, Mademoiselle la Femme de Chambre, the Communiqué --- I'm coming! »

November 20, 1914.

One, two, three snow-flakes fall into the Seine ; four, five, six, a phantom curtain flurries before the Louvre. Or was it a day dream? « Most assuredly not! Ten-thousand invisible, icy needles prickle in jealous, wind-borne response upon my unoffending nose, as my eyes seek aloft their fickle more lovely companions and words unsummoned escape my lips, keeping time to my footsteps now mounting the old Pont des Arts; words as obvious as the gothic ground I tread on and as sweet as the snow-flakes they sing of:

Mais, où sont les neiges d'antan?
--- But, where have gone the snows of then !---
Où sont-ils, Vièrge Souveraine?

Midday, call the bells of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, that never did sound the St-Bartholemew, as the common herd has always accused them of doing, Monsieur Hoffbauer père, will tell you, should it ever be your good fortune to page with him certain rough sketches of gothic Paris instead of studying their finished form at the Musée Carnavalet --- François Villon's gothic Paris!

By same avow where is the Queen
Who did command that Buridan
Be tossed in a sack in Seine?
But where have gone the snows of then?

The eminent reconstructor of old Paris can, doubtless, tell you too the present whereabouts of Marguerite de Bourgogne, the wicked daughter-in-law of Philippe-le-Bel, who commanded that, like the rest of the gentlemen who resisted her invitation to the Tour de Nesle (which once stood just there at the approach of the Pont des Arts), that like the rest of them poor Buridan

The winds have blown them all away! (As Mr. Sothern used to put it),

Where are the snows of yesterday?

The winds have blown them all on a mission, good Maistre Villon, to carry our thoughts to Flanders, whether our feet be wandering to-day in the Forest of Arden, like Mr. Sothern's, or upon the Pont des Arts, like yours and mine, our thoughts have gone on a snowflake to the first snow storm in Flanders.

Offer a thanksgiving to the snow flakes as we cross the Pont des Arts (snow like sunshine makes some of us expansive), without them it is very possible that we should not now be wending our way to see Mademoiselle Marie taking her déjeuner with the flowers.

The Pont des Arts, the only bridge remaining to the true aristocrat of Parisia, the pedestrian, is approached on either side by several broad, stone steps. As you descend those before the Louvre, or rather as we now descend them together, we come upon the loveliest of all pictures of midday Paris; Paillard's, (to which I see Polaire has just returned), Voisin's (where I yesterday ran into the peerless Cavallieri) offer nothing to compare with it: a two wheeled charette, table on wheels, piled with flowers of every hue is spread like a carpet of brilliancy beneath the heavy grey skies and our own descending gaze. During those sad days of August when no flowers came to Paris it seemed as if the Pont des Arts had lost its main support for, with the exception of that inconsequent lapse, this particular charette has stood in this particular spot every time that I have ever crossed the Pont des Arts.

Its two wheels are made stationary by the aid of a crutch-like leg, which also holds in place a hinged, suspension table, reminding one, with its spotless white cloth, its feast of bread and wine before it sloping, flowery back ground, of some reverently-spread, rural altar.

« In my worst moments », its presiding genius once said to me « however little the feast, my table has always been flowered (fleurie). What matter if one uses two cloths a week, when one's own hands can wash them, if they go better with the freshness of the flowers. »

She meant better than the working people's red and white block (damier) table cloths that we all know in the Opera of Louise. Since I have never seen anything but a jug of hot water, a glass of red wine and half a loaf of bread upon this boasted, white board, I have often speculated as to the menu of the hard times hinted at.

« Mademoiselle Marie, did you see the snow falling a minute ago? »

Thus accosted by me the quaintest of figures arises from a camp stool placed before the table and adossé (a much more comfortable word than backed up) against the signs of an ever-convenient newspaper kiosque. Her pompadour, of tightly-frizzed, black-dyed hair is coquettishly covered with a spanish lace mantilla, the arrangement of which permits of a glimpse of two big, gold hoop ear-rings. A bob, of this coiffure accentuates each word of her reply.

« Did I see the snow fall just now? As I saw the bombs fall on Notre-Dame, as I saw the snow fall a week ago! We always have the first snow on the Seine, long before you get it in the center of Paris. N'est-ce pas, Madame Carle ».

Madame Carle's white head is here thrust from the kiosque referred to, to confirm the questionable climatic advantages of river banks.

« Yet knowing that, look at you », says the second speaker, the approval of her disapproving words illy concealed in her voice, « Look at her, Madame, in that lace,, mantilla a day like this. Toujours la coquetterie! Tomorrow, ma petite, I hope you will put on your woolen hood. »

In true, French method, disregarding entirely the plump, little body, covered all over by its carefully-pleated, blue gingham apron. After eight years acquaintance I am still in the dark as to the garments of the good wives of my butcher and baker and candlestick-maker beneath those exquisitely laundered tabliers whose professional etiquette of form is equalled only by the subtle differentiating of the street venders' calls.

« Take some violets, Madame, with a spray of mimosa, that makes an advantageous investment to-day », says my little marchande as if a transaction of international importance on the Bourse were in progress. She touches her fragrant wares in a caressing way, that recalls Sarah Bernhardt's handling of flowers.

Madame Carle now emerges with difficulty from the dog-kennel door of her kiosque, anxiety written in her every, decrepit movement. She clasps her hands in a prayerful gesture as she addresses herself to me:

« Madame, as an old client, I beg you to remonstrate with our friend. All strangers that now approach her charette must answer her questions about their nationality before she will consent to serve them. The other day she actually demanded to see a gentleman's papers ! She is endangering a commerce which it has taken her years to establish. Do you believe that the Government will recognise that fact when she is plunged in la misère ? She is so wayward! »

« Ah, my poor friend », bobs the lace coiffure (Oh, for Anne Goldthwaite's etching needle!) « you cannot understand, it is nature, it is temperament, it is stronger that myself --- c'est plus fort que moi --- I know, I know what you would say, they can shoot me if they wish, I suppose that German spies often come and ask for my flowers just to see if I will serve them. Yes, I suppose they will end by assassinating me. But I will serve no one until I am sure that they are English or French, I love my flowers too much to put them in the hands of the sales Allemands. As to your newspapers, mon amie, they are entirely another profession---ugly, soiled paper » (?). « If you wish to sell them to every passerby, it is your prerogative ». Turning to me, « She is practical, Madame, she is above all commercial. If the difference of opinion costs us our old friendship, tant pis, so much the worse ; her knuckles dig deeper into her plump hips, the gold ear-rings swing to the time of L'Amour est enfant de Bohême: « So much the worse for her then! I am patriote I Marie Mannez, the marchande de fleurs, is patriote in 1914 as she was in 1870! »

Ambulance. --- Sunday.

« Oh, Sister of Charity sublime, a device for you ? Parbleu, it is: be what you are! » Jean Richepin has written as a dedication to our coveted, Red Cross uniform.

To be what we are, while we walk in our white uniforms down narrow aisles between narrow beds filled with wounded men, is perhaps somewhat worth while because, I think, that most of us have for that moment lost sight of an other self of ours to whom a Red Cross doctor said : « When you come into this ambulance leave your lip-sticks at home. »

« The lip-stick, the rod which the woman of to-day insists upon raising against herself, the same celebrated don has since added to the mot which will most likely label to time the Red Cross Sister of 1914, for when he got to know her better he found that the woman to whom he spoke was often more tractable, more gentle, than the professional nurse who scorned her as a sort of Thaïs of her kind beneath her chic white uniform.

Oh, Dame de La Croix Rouge, Richepin's Sister of Charity sublime, what will be the place in this war attributed to you by time and history? Will the grande among you like Sœur Julie, or like Madame Macherez, be taken as your type, or will you be remembered only by your lesser selves in the chronicle handed down by man to future generations?

Be what you are, whatever you are, says our loyal friend Richepin. The same Richepin who a year ago had every critic upon his lionine head for maintaining that a man must see the reddening of his sword 'ere he be capable of meeting the question of life.

Do we agree with him there? No! Since he has so kindly given his tangibly subtle device to our nice white robes --- are we to doff it with them, did he say, or carry it on as a moral vow beneath another dress, like her whom we replace at the soldier's side, the religieuse shorn of her habit but not of her convictions.

Perhaps the ardent Richepin had an idea that we might by chance forget to quit our not unbecoming mode, as Jean-Jacques Rousseau did his prematurely-adopted and ever-convenient shroud, for likely our Immortal patron recognized at once that we mundane nuns have no little in common with the Jean-Jacques who harkened to the call of the simple life.

Here we are, trying like him to tell the truth (not quite so morbidly as in his Confessions!) while, like him too, we cast away our watches, grown useless in this very manual present with its strange new way of marking time, this present bowing down to war's decree of lend a hand.

Visa, visa, visa,
Your passport, if you please sir,

rhymes Tracy Lay, our philosophical Vice Consul in Paris, who has passed since hostilities from the settling of international commercial questions to the very mechanical duty of stamping passports by the thousands, to tracing up trunks, to forwarding letters ; and here are men of letters, he says, acting as office boys to the Government while millionnaire automobile magnates are serving as ungraded chauffeurs for officers and their wives, who directed a staff of a dozen domestiques, are tending the babies of working women in the creshes when they aren't carrying trays and washing dishes in the ambulances.

Madame Poincaré, wife of the President of France, is doing the humble work of the rank and file auxiliary nurse in a minor hospital at Bordeaux. Madame Macherez, the Mayor of Soissons, was seen by my friend Mr. Wythe Williams in her native city a short time ago and what do you suppose this greatest of Red Cross women was busying herself about? The burying of horses! Our Jeanne D'Arc of to-day is doing the duty that lies nearest her like all the rest of us.

Ambulance. --- Tuesday.

Three months and more have passed since our first impressions of women and the war began to shape themselves, many events have been crowded into these weeks but none have in any way altered the place which we women then chose, or was it not rather allotted to us, the place where we walk softly as women the most womanly that history has ever known?

The Sunday that the Germans aeronauts bombarded Notre-Dame de Paris I happened, with Mrs. Van Allen Shields, to be in the vicinity and we were among the first to gaze upon the sacrilege. In the heat of anger against civilized man I sent a cable to a New York paper begging the women of America to get to work and try to, stop these things. I suppose the men at the paper had a good laugh over that fifty franc telegram! Suffragette and Feministe was mine altogether a ridiculous act?

To return to our newest new woman, Richepin's « Sœur de Charité Sublime » and our first ambulance visit, it was like opening an old missal. The young girls of the Université des Annales Hospital were seated around big tables in the vaulted hall, their veiled heads bowed over their bandage work; when Madame Brisson, the Infirmiêre Majore, at last arrived in her long blue cape, I did not recognize her, her heelless shoes had made a nun of her.

Sarcey's daughter had been conducting a « malade, » with a contagion, to the Municipal Hospital. All wounded were officially called malades in those days in order not to alarm the populous with the word blessés.

And it took so little to make a story then! Mine of a pallid youth discovered in a dark ante-room at the Beaux, Arts that morning with his arm in, what proved on nearer approach, to be a black, silk sling, furnished all of the necessary elements of a sensation: he was a blessé.

The only men that one sees now in Paris go painfully through the streets on canes or crutches, responding with mock formality to the school boy whose privilege it is to salute them. And the ambulances seek us, we no longer have to seek them.

Sitting up here in my nun's cell, looking over the tilleul trees, to the worn, Red Cross flag flying on the big entrance gate of the Chateau, fancy plays at comparison with that widow of the Moyen Age whose graceful, semi-religious garb we have copied. Doubtless she who first wore it looked many a time as I do through the little window pierced in the thick walls and over the tilleul trees, as she rested from her care of wounded men filling the great rooms downstairs. Did she have her condemning lip-stick and perhaps her perfumes from Arabia ? Or did she surreptitiously dip her finger in the taper lamp to oil her narrow eye-brows, did she steal away the drop from the blessed candle to polish her almond nails, like the poetic nun in D'Annunzio's play of a year ago? We often recall that lovely --- if illogical --- figure, for Ida Rubenstein the Russian who interpreted the part is now directing her own hospital in the old apartments of King Edward at the Hotel Bristol; it ranks extremely well.

« She looks and acts like a jolly, good angel, » said an English convalescent recently « she has forgot entirely her role of the grande tragédienne and ---well, I like her better. »

Will our most beautiful Sœur de Charité forgive me that if I add that none of the little stories that we sometimes hear ever come from Ida Rubenstein's hospital.

Ambulance. --- Wednesday.

« How we women of fortune have frivoled our lives away! » an American woman writes from a Biarritz ambulance to-day, « I have never known the meaning of the words courage and bigness and, I am almost tempted to add, decency, until these hours spent in the midst of all that can be of poverty, suffering and grandeur. »

She goes on to say, this butterfly of fortune, that she will never again expend upon her personal wants any more than she has this winter: she now employs three servants instead of her former eight; she has paid two hundred francs for her one winter gown instead of a thousand a piece for several.

Of course she is not expected to keep up to this exactly because no solemn vow before the altar binds her, as it would have in the Moyen Age, but her words may mean none the less in a freethinking day when if every woman her own high priestess, (Signor Ferrero permitting the paraphrase) she is also learning a wonderful lesson from another side of her civilisation.

I find that I too enjoy talking things over with the wounded soldiers, men of every sort, as they are, but the conventionally educated one.

Just now we read the story of the Huguenot, Thomas Cossard and his faithful épouse, Jeanne de Bauquemare and their little changeling daughter and Jeanne's mysterious brother, the monk of the Trou d'Enfer , whom her Huguenot husband imprisoned in the dungeons below this château when they all lived here a few centuries ago.

At its termination our « Beau Belge » exclaimed:

« Dieu merci that we are not fighting a religious war! A war of principle may be a broader form of religious war but after all, in bitterness, it is very different ».

A wounded Belgian could say thank God for something!

Our « Beau Belge », as we call him, fully merits his title; he resembles the Roi Albert as an English soldier resembles Lord Kitchener: in the way he puts on his cap and cuts his moustache.

Fortune once treated him otherwise kindly too: up to the time of the war, he worked in a desultory way on the fruitful farmlands of his father, but now the property has been destroyed and he must learn to toil more seriously, if he lives to see the day.

Trecki, the son of an Algerian Sheik, has not even a dilettante education, he can neither read nor write, though he has the manner of a seigneur. He holds his turbaned head straight like a statue and flashes his diamond-black eyes towards their corners to look around at you. A bullet that glanced between his delicate eye-brows, on its way in and out of the tight skin covering his bony right cheek, to lodge in his arm, has added to his bronze-colored countenance of a god man's mark of a hero.

He has killed five Germans single-handed and he is l'enfant gâté of the doctor's sixty wounded « children », not, of course, because he killed five Germans but because he made a tour de force. He recites his own story in halting sing-song like a school child, as a man of his regiment has taught it to him: how he killed five Germans in a wood as night came on and as he chants the tale the terror that I used to feel for the « Babes in the Wood » comes back to me.

In spite of the Belgian's big sentiments, in spite of the Colonials, broad generosity towards the motherland, in spite of the twentieth century, the primitive man is ever there with his instinct to kill: Richepin the Immortal who would treasure his reddened sword as Trecki treasures his brown-stained knife. I watch the dancing eyes of our good docteur major as Trecki tells his story and I watch the lips of the doctor's good wife close tightly to dissemble the trembling of the lower one; her eyes meet mine and they are overcast, they do not dance. If man has not lost his instinct to kill, woman, though she has not deserted him in his hour of need, has lost her instinct for man when he is killing and that may be a step towards a goal that all will reach, some day, by the woman.

Paris, November 29, 1914.

The great cables are at this moment running a race beneath fathoms of ocean to tell you a tale, of which, with all deference to their stentorian tones, they may only render the tune notes, as the chimers of Flanders call them; yet, like the other grand stories that war has given us, this one also has its refrain for the pen which the big base of the cable knows better than to attempt.

It will surely not tell you that the Gare des Invalides, despite so heroic an appellation, is a smaller station little known to Americans, since, until the coming upon us of military manœuvring, its name was never connected with that of any sea port of France; that its nice, airy waiting room and the descent of a flight of broad steps to the train platforms make it seem like an American railroad station deliberately planned for the scene which took place there this morning.

Nor, perhaps, that that impressive scene of farewell, in which an excellent American lady and gentleman were the central figures, meant just a little more to those gathered about them than the whole list of martial occasions that have preceded it, for it was the final word in the first war chapter of Paris, which began four months ago in an hour of bustle and confusion shared by many, rapidly arriving at that tenser day of preparation for the worst, witnessed by a lesser number, when our now departing Ambassador and his wife, so splendidly, so unostentatiously performed their duty , as they are pleased to define it.

Poor and rich, small and great, the Americans of early September all seemed to move in the same groove with Mr. and Mrs. Herrick. Why, on September the fifth (once more we shall reason from a special, in the manner in which this feminine chronicle seems to have insisted upon), on September the fifth, when I got to the American Express at about nine o'clock, Mr. Herrick was already there, leaning democratically against the counter as he conferred with some of its representatives.

You may be sure that we of September were at the Gare des Invalides not bright and early, alas, but grey and early this morning to listen while the Governor General of Paris presented our countryman with the highest recognition that his own land might offer; while the gorgeous, convalescent officers from that substantial monument, the American Ambulance, tendered him their touching resolutions, but in the hand-shake word that followed, graciously timed for each and all, I think there was something for us Americans in which even these friendly grandees did not share.

Then the train moved out: accommodation, five hours to Havre, bound for the second class boat, the Rochambeau, and with it went the little life , the petite vie, that made such simplicity seem no unusual thing, even for the Ambassador who had been its diplomatic protector ---that little Paris faded away with the engine's smoke.

« All the same, there are certain Ambassadors, that I prefer to see alive », said the voice of General Galliéni, who stood in the crowd nearby, referring of course to the historic mot made by Mr. Herrick the day that he escaped the German bombs:

« A dead Ambassador is sometimes more useful than a live one ».

Galliéni, waving his bon voyage there, was literally taking leave of the rest of us; next week he too will go, to join hands with Joffre, we are told, as the Government re-enters the gates and Paris will pass from a peaceful military camp into a turbulent, national capital; the theaters will open, the restaurants, the hotels will open, all sorts of people are already re-appearing, the city is even now almost normally populated; one no longer feels the tug for human sympathy which prompted the sometimes far-fetched question put to the stray fellow being encountered in the telephone or police bureau; gone are the halcyon days when the compatriots sharing our board ushered in the booted and spurred French cavalry commandant encountered in a neighbouring café, or the Italian Count who had just had a sure tip that he would be called to join his regiment before the end of the month; we who said « Après vous, Monsieur,  » to the anxious-faced one at the telegraph or post office window, have even been known to jostle a hurrying passerby in the now crowded boulevard, upon whose platanes branches the unclaimed bracelet may no longer hang in safety. Verily the new order changeth back to the old; the gentle Paris of Herrick days has gone never to return, God willing--- we say reluctantly, like a paradoxical, proud lover who would hide his beautiful sweetheart from all eyes but his own.

Goodbye, little Paris!   

Adieu, petit Paris!