It is a recognition rather than a preface that I would add to this little chronicle (why is it nobody ever wants to acknowledge a preface), a thanks to those ladies who have so kindly aided me, either directly or indirectly, through the pangs of stage fright: Mrs. Thackara, Mrs. Joseph N. Blake, and Miss Gertrude Lynch. Should you find anything to please you (or otherwise) in these ´ true stories of real people ª (as Miss Lynch called them) it is as much due to their kindness as to the great war itself which has made a story of everything and everybody connected with it, above all of this Paris, so plaintive in its simplicity, standing stripped in its hour of danger of all those banal artifices with which the selfish pleasure-seeker from afar demands that it shall trim itself for his indiscriminating delectation.

That is the Paris of which they have helped me to tell you, a gentle city just revealed to me after eight or nine years of residence within its gates: there is no city in the world so little understood as Paris. Make me known, it has seemed to say to us who have learned to know it through its days of supplice.

Make me known to that cosmopolitan population which has now flown from me to the four quarters of the globe, to those men and women who have known me only as the marionette of their own illusions. Tell them all about the little people of my streets and my great industries for whom the perils of war have obliterated the embarrassments of convention in order that they may take you, a stranger, in among them as one of themselves, permitting you to realize the strength of their stoicism and abnegation, the courage that it requires to live back in the unvarnished wings and push all unperceived, from dawn to dawn, the scenes of a brilliant pantomime the Paris of the stranger.

Make these things known to your compatriots who already love me for my beauty, in order that they may love me the more tenderly for the calm and simplicity of my own people in this my hour of trial.