The Living Present Part 9

Naturally out of thirty girls there were some antagonistic personalities, and two or three I took such an intense dislike to that I finally prevailed upon Mlle. Jacquier to keep them out of my room and away from my table. But the majority of the students were "regular girls." At first I was as welcome in the dining-room as a Prussian sentinel, and they exchanged desultory remarks in whispers; but after a while they grew accustomed to me and chattered like magpies. I could hear them again in their dormitories until about half-past ten at night. Mlle. Jacquier asked me once with some anxiety if I minded, and I a.s.sured her that I liked it. This was quite true, for these girls, all so eager and natural, and even gay, despite the tragedy in the background of many, seemed to me the brightest spot in Paris.

It is true that I remonstrated, and frequently, against the terrific noise they made every morning at seven o'clock when they clamped across the uncarpeted hall and down the stairs. But although they would tiptoe for a day they would forget again, and I finally resigned myself. I also did my share in training them to wait on a guest in her room! Not one when I arrived had anything more than a theoretical idea of what to do beyond making a bed, sweeping, and dusting. I soon discovered that the more exacting I was--and there were times when I was exceeding stormy--the better Mlle. Jacquier was pleased.

She had her hands full. Her discipline was superb and she addressed each with invariable formality as "Mademoiselle----"; but they were real girls, full of vitality, and always on the edge of rebellion. I listened to some stinging rebukes delivered by Mlle. Jacquier when she would arise in her wrath in the dining-room and address them collectively. She knew how to get under their skin, for they would blush, hang their heads, and writhe.

VI

But Mlle. Jacquier told me that what really kept them in order was the influence of Mlle. Thompson. At first she came every week late in the afternoon to give them a talk; then every fortnight; then--oh la! la!

I listened to one or two of these talks. The girls sat in a semicircle, hardly breathing, their eyes filling with tears whenever Mlle. Thompson, who sat at a table at the head of the room, played on that particular key.

I never thought Valentine Thompson more remarkable than during this hour dedicated to the tuning and exalting of the souls of these girls.

Several told me that she held their hearts in her hands when she talked and that they would follow her straight to the battlefield.

She, herself, a.s.sumed her most serious and exalted expression. I have never heard any one use more exquisite French. Not for a moment did she talk down to those girls of a humbler sphere. She lifted them to her own. Her voice took on deeper tones, but she always stopped short of being dramatic. French people of all cla.s.ses are too keen and clear-sighted and intelligent to be taken in by theatrical tricks, and Mlle. Thompson made no mistakes. Her only mistake was in neglecting these girls later on for other new enterprises that claimed her ardent imagination.

She talked, I remember, of patriotism, of morale, of their duty to excel in their present studies that they might be of service not only to their impoverished families but to their beloved France. It was not so much what she said as the lovely way in which she said it, her impressive manner and appearance, her almost overwhelming but, for the occasion, wholly democratic personality.

Once a week Mlle. Thompson and the heads of the Touring Club de France had a breakfast at the ecole and tables were laid even in the salon. I was always somebody's guest upon these Tuesdays, unless I was engaged elsewhere, and had, moreover, been for years a member of the Touring Club. Some of the most distinguished men and women of Paris came to the breakfasts: statesmen, journalists, authors, artists, people of _le beau monde_, visiting English and Americans as well as French people of note. Naturally the students became expert waitresses and cha.s.seurs as well as cooks.

Altogether I should have only the pleasantest memories of the ecole Feminine had it not been for the mosquitoes. I do not believe that New Jersey ever had a worse record than Paris that summer. Every leaf of every one of those beautiful trees beyond my window, over whose tops I used to gaze at the airplanes darting about on the lookout for taubes, was an incubator. I exhausted the resources of two chemist shops in Pa.s.sy and one in Paris. I tried every invention, went to bed reeking with turpentine, and burned evil-smelling pastiles. Mlle. Jacquier came in every night and slew a dozen with a towel as scientifically as she did everything else. All of no avail. At one time I was so spotted that I had to wear a still more heavily spotted veil. I looked as if afflicted with measles.

Oddly enough the prettiest of the students, whose first name was Alice, was the only one of us all ignored by the mosquitoes. She had red-gold hair and a pink and white skin of great delicacy, and she might have been the twin of Elsie Ferguson. A few of the other girls were pa.s.sably good-looking but she was the only one with anything like beauty--which, it would seem, is practically confined to the n.o.blesse and grande bourgeoisie in France. Next to her in looks came Mlle.

Jacquier, who if she had a dot would have been snapped up long since.

Alice had had two fiances (selected by her mother) and both young officers; one, an Englishman, had been killed in the first year of the war. She was only eighteen. At one time the northern town she lived in was threatened by the Germans, and Mrs. Vail of Boston (whose daughter is so prominent at the American Fund for French Wounded headquarters in Paris), being on the spot and knowing how much there would be left of the wildrose innocence that bloomed visibly on Alice's plump cheeks, whisked her off to London. There she remained until she heard of Mlle. Thompson's School, when Mrs. Vail brought her to Paris. As she was not only pretty and charming but intelligent, I exerted myself to find her a place before I left, and I believe she is still with Mrs. Thayer in the Hotel Cecilia.

VII

The ecole Feminine, I am told, is no more. Mlle. Thompson found it impossible to raise the necessary money to keep it going. The truth is, I fancy, that she approached generous donators for too many different objects and too many times. Perhaps the ecole will be reopened later on. If not it will always be a matter of regret not only for France but for Valentine Thompson's own sake that she did not concentrate on this useful enterprise; it would have been a definite monument in the center of her s.h.i.+fting activities.

I have no s.p.a.ce to give even a list of her manifold oeuvres, but one at least bids fair to be a.s.sociated permanently with her name. What is now known in the United States as the French Heroes' Fund was started by Mlle. Thompson under the auspices of _La Vie Feminine_ to help the reformes rebuild their lives. The greater number could not work at their old avocations, being minus an arm or a leg. But they learned to make toys and many useful articles, and worked at home; in good weather, sitting before their doors in the quiet village street. A vast number of these Mlle. Thompson and various members of her Committee located, tabulated, encouraged; and, once a fortnight, collected their work. This was either sold in Paris or sent to America.

In New York Mrs. William Astor Chanler and Mr. John Moffat organized the work under its present t.i.tle and raised the money to buy Lafayette's birthplace. They got it at a great bargain, $20,000; for a large number of acres were included in the purchase. Another $20,000, also raised by Mr. Moffatt, repaired and furnished the chateau, which not only is to be a sort of French Mt. Vernon, with rooms dedicated to relics of Lafayette and the present war, as well as a memorial room for the American heroes who have fallen for France, but an orphanage is to be built in the grounds, and the repairs as well as all the other work is to be done by the blind and the mutilated, who will thus not be objects of charity but made to feel themselves men once more and able to support their families. The land will be rented to the reformes, the mutiles and the blind.

Mlle. Thompson and Mrs. Chanler, with the help of a powerful Committee, are pus.h.i.+ng this work forward as rapidly as possible in the circ.u.mstances and no doubt it will be one of the first war meccas of the American tourists so long separated from their beloved Europe.

VIII

The most insistent memory of my life in Pa.s.sy at the Hotel Feminine is the Battle of the Somme. After it commenced in July I heard the great guns day and night for a week. That deep, steady, portentous booming had begun to exert a morbid fascination before the advance carried the cannon out of my range, and I had an almost irresistible desire to pack up and follow it. The ancestral response to the old G.o.d of war is more persistent than any of us imagine, I fancy. I was close to the lines some weeks later, when I went into the Zone des Armees, and it is quite positive that not only does that dreary and dangerous region exert a sinister fascination but that it seems to expel fear from your composition. It is as if for the first time you were in the normal condition of life, which during the centuries of the ancestors to whom you owe your brain-cells, was war, not peace.

IX

MADAME WADDINGTON

I

One has learned to a.s.sociate Madame Waddington so intimately with the glittering surface life of Europe that although every one knows she was born in New York of historic parentage, one recalls with something of a shock now and then that she was not only educated in this country but did not go to France to live until after the death of her father in 1871.

This no doubt accounts for the fact that meeting her for the first time one finds her unmistakably an American woman. Her language may be French but she has a directness and simplicity that no more identifies her with a European woman of any cla.s.s than with the well-known exigencies of diplomacy. Madame Waddington strikes one as quite remarkably fearless and downright; she appears to be as outspoken as she is vivacious; and as her husband had a highly successful career as a diplomatist, and as his debt to his brilliant wife is freely conceded, Madame Waddington is certainly a notable instance of the gay persistence of an intelligent American woman's personality, combined with the proper proportion of acuteness, quickness, and charm which force a highly conventionalized and specialized society to take her on her own terms. The greater number of diplomatic women as well as ladies-in-waiting that I have run across during my European or Was.h.i.+ngton episodes have about as much personality as a door-mat. Many of our own women have been admirable helpmates to our amba.s.sadors, but I recall none that has played a great personal role in the world. Not a few have contributed to the gaiety of nations.

Madame Waddington has had four separate careers quite aside from the always outstanding career of girlhood. Her father was Charles King, President of Columbia College and son of Rufus King, second United States Minister to England. When she married M. Waddington, a Frenchman of English descent, and educated at Rugby and Cambridge, he was just entering public life. His chateau was in the Department of the Aisne and he was sent from there to the National a.s.sembly. Two years later he was appointed Minister of Public Instruction, and in January, 1876, he was elected Senator from the Aisne. In December of the following year he once more entered the Cabinet as Minister of Public Instruction, later accepting the portfolio for Foreign Affairs.

During this period, of course, Madame Waddington lived the brilliant social and political life of the capital. M. Waddington began his diplomatic career in 1878 as the first Plenipotentiary of France to the Congress of Berlin. In 1883 he was sent as Amba.s.sador Extraordinary to represent France at the coronation of Alexander III; and it was then that Madame Waddington began to send history through the diplomatic pouch, and sow the seeds of that post-career which comes to so few widows of public men.

Madame Waddington's letters from Russia, and later from England where her husband was Amba.s.sador from 1883 to 1893 are now so famous, being probably in every private library of any pretensions, that it would be a waste of s.p.a.ce to give an extended notice of them in a book which has nothing whatever to do with the achievements of its heroines in art and letters in that vast almost-forgotten period, Before the War.

Suffice it to say that they are among the most delightful epistolary contributions to modern literature, the more so perhaps as they were written without a thought of future publication. But being a born woman of letters, every line she writes has the elusive qualities of style and charm; and she has besides the selective gift of putting down on paper even to her own family only what is worth recording.

When these letters were published in _Scribner's Magazine_ in 1902, eight years after M. Waddington's death, they gave her an instant position in the world of letters, which must have consoled her for the loss of that glittering diplomatic life she had enjoyed for so many years.

Not that Madame Waddington had ever dropped out of society, except during the inevitable period of mourning. In Paris up to the outbreak of the war she was always in demand, particularly in diplomatic circles, by far the most interesting and kaleidoscopic in the European capitals. I was told that she never paid a visit to England without finding an invitation from the King and Queen at her hotel, as well as a peck of other invitations.

I do not think Madame Waddington has ever been wealthy in our sense of the word. But, as I said before, her career is a striking example of that most precious of all gifts, personality. And if she lives until ninety she will always be in social demand, for she is what is known as "good company." She listens to you but you would far rather listen to her. Unlike many women of distinguished pasts she lives in hers very little. It is difficult to induce the reminiscent mood. She lives intensely in the present and her mind works insatiably upon everything in current life that is worth while.

She has no vanity. Unlike many ladies of her age and degree in Paris she does not wear a red-brown wig, but her own abundant hair, as soft and white as cotton and not a "gray" hair in it. She is now too much absorbed in the war to waste time at her dressmakers or even to care whether her placket-hole is open or not. I doubt if she ever did care much about dress or "keeping young," for those are instincts that sleep only in the grave. War or no war they are as much a part of the daily habit as the morning bath. I saw abundant evidence of this immortal fact in Paris during the second summer of the war.

Nevertheless, the moment Madame Waddington enters a room she seems to charge it with electricity. You see no one else and you are impatient when others insist upon talking. Vitality, an immense intelligence without arrogance or self-conceit, a courtesy which has no relation to diplomatic caution, a kindly tact and an unmistakable integrity, combine to make Madame Waddington one of the most popular women in Europe.

II

This brings me to Madame Waddington's fourth career. The war which has lifted so many people out of obscurity, rejuvenated a few dying talents, and given thousands their first opportunity to be useful, simply overwhelmed Madame Waddington with hard work and a mult.i.tude of new duties. If she had indulged in dreams of spending the rest of her days in the peaceful paths of literature when not dining out, they were rudely dissipated on August 1st, 1914.

Madame Waddington opened the Ouvroir Holophane on the 15th of August, her first object being to give employment and so countercheck the double menace of starvation and haunted idleness for at least fifty poor women: teachers, music-mistresses, seamstresses, lace makers, women of all ages and conditions abruptly thrown out of work.

Madame Waddington, speaking of them, said: "We had such piteous cases of perfectly well-dressed, well-educated, gently-bred women that we hardly dared offer them the one-franc-fifty and 'gouter' (bowl of cafe-au-lait with bread and b.u.t.ter), which was all we were able to give for four hours' work in the afternoon."

However, those poor women were very thankful for the work and sewed faithfully on sleeping-suits and underclothing for poilus in the trenches and hospitals. Madame Waddington's friends in America responded to her call for help and M. Mygatt gave her rooms on the ground floor of his building in the Boulevard Haussmann.

When the Germans were rus.h.i.+ng on Paris and invasion seemed as inevitable as the horrors that were bound to follow, Mr. Herrick insisted that Madame Waddington and her sister Miss King, who was almost helpless from rheumatism, follow the Government to the South.

This Madame Waddington reluctantly did, but returned immediately after the Battle of the Marne.

It was not long before the Ouvroir Holophane outgrew its original proportions, and instead of the women coming there daily to sew, they called only for materials to make up at home. For this ouvroir (if it has managed to exist in these days of decreasing donations) sends to the Front garments of all sorts for soldiers ill or well, pillow-cases, sheets, sleeping-bags, slippers.

Moreover, as soon as the men began to come home on their six days'

leave they found their way to the generous ouvroir on the Boulevard Haussmann, where Madame Waddington, or her friend Mrs. Greene (also an American), or Madame Mygatt, always gave the poor men what they needed to replace their tattered (or missing) undergarments, as well as coffee and bread and b.u.t.ter.

The most difficult women to employ were those who had been accustomed to make embroidery and lace, as well as many who had led pampered lives in a small way and did not know how to sew at all. But one-franc-fifty stood between them and starvation and they learned.

To-day nearly all of the younger women a.s.sisted by those first ouvroirs are more profitably employed. France has adjusted itself to a state of war and thousands of women are either in Government service and munition factories, or in the reopened shops and restaurants.