mployed
about theaters, great and small.

The poor of France do not invest their money in savings' banks. They
buy bonds. On the Monday after mobilization the banks of France
announced that they would buy no bonds. These poor bewildered women
would have starved if the women of the more fortunate classes had not
immediately begun to organize relief stations and ouvroirs.

Madame Lepauze, better known to the reading public of France as Daniel
Lesauer, who is also the wife of the curator of the Petit Palais, was
the first to open a restaurant for soup, and this was besieged from
morning until night even before the refugees from Belgium and the
invaded districts of France began to pour in. Her home is in the Petit
Palais, and in the public gardens behind was Le Pavillion, one of the
prettiest and most popular restaurants of Paris. She made no bones
about asking the proprietor to place the restaurant and all that
remained of his staff at her disposal, and hastily organizing a
committee, began at once to ladle out soup. Many other depots were
organized almost simultaneously (and not only in Paris but in the
provincial towns), and when women were too old or too feeble to come
for their daily ration it was left at their doors by carts containing
immense boilers of that nourishing soup only the French know how to
make.

Madame Lepauze estimates that her station alone fed a million women
and children. Moreover, she and all the other women engaged in this
patriotic duty had soon depleted their wardrobes after the refugees
began streaming down from the north; it was generally said that not a
lady in Paris had more than one useful dress left and that was on her
back.

Many of these charitable women fled to the South during that
breathless period when German occupation seemed inevitable, but
others, like Madame Pierre Goujon, of whom I shall have much to say
later, and the Countess Greffuhle (a member of the valiant Chimay
family of Belgium), stuck to their posts and went about publicly in
order to give courage to the millions whose poverty forced them to
remain.

II

The next step in aiding this army of helpless women was to open
ouvroirs, or workrooms. Madame Paquin never closed this great branch
of her dressmaking establishment, and, in common with hundreds of
other ouvroirs that sprang up all over France, paid the women a wage
on which they could exist (besides giving them one meal) in return for
at least half a day