factory hands had been mobilized at the outset of the war. The
women of Paris were plunged into dire poverty, and thousands of
them into idleness, which makes poverty more awful. Even now I can
hardly guess how many of these women lived during the first months
of the war. There were many wives who had been utterly dependent
for the upkeep of their little homes upon men who were now earning
a sou a day as soldiers of France, with glory as a pourboire. So many
old mothers had been supported by the devotion of sons who had
denied themselves marriage, children, and the little luxuries of life in
order that out of their poor wages in Government offices they might
keep the woman to whom they owed their being. Always the greater
part of the people of Paris lives precariously on the thin edge of a
limited income, stinting and scraping, a sou here, a sou there, to
balance the week's accounts and eke out a little of that joie de vivre,
which to every Parisian is an essential need. Now by the edict of war
all life's economies had been annihilated. There were no more wages
out of which to reckon the cost of an extra meal, or out of which to
squeeze the price of a seat at a Pathé cinema. Mothers and wives
and mistresses had been abandoned to the chill comfort of national
charity, and oh, the coldness of it!

The French Government had promised to give an allowance of 1
franc 25 centimes a day to the women who were dependent on
soldier husbands. Perhaps it is possible to live on a shilling a day in
Paris, though, by Heaven, I should hate to do it. Nicely administered it
might save a woman from rapid starvation and keep her thin for quite
a time. But even this measure of relief was difficult to get. French
officials are extraordinarily punctilious over the details of their work,
and it takes them a long time to organize a system which is a
masterpiece of safeguards and regulations and subordinate clauses.