on
this work involved a three months' correspondence with all the Mayors
of France. It further involved the fastening of ribbons and pins
(furnished by herself) upon fifteen million medallions. Madame Paquin
is also on many important committees, including "L'Orphelinat des
Armees," so well known to us.

MADAME PAUL DUPUY

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

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

XIV

ONE OF THE MOTHERLESS

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

There is a small but powerful oeuvre in Paris, composed with one
exception of Americans devoted to th