The committee of the National Society of Fine Arts held a meeting today
at the Grand Palais, to render aid to painters, sculptors, and artists
in need of assistance, without regard to nationality, passed resolutions
of indignation at the injury of works of art in France and Belgium
committed by the German armies, and at the destruction of the objects of
art solicited by Germany and entrusted by France to the International
Exhibition at Leipsic, and unanimously voted to strike from the list of
members the names of all artists of German nationality.

The art critic of the _Gil Blas_, M. Louis Vauxelles, whose
scathing criticisms of the "classic" _pompier_ academic school of
painting and of sculpture, and whose intelligent censure of the extreme
"futurist" clique elicit the hearty approval of all true lovers of art,
in the United States, as well as in France, is serving as a simple
soldier in an infantry regiment, but finds time occasionally to write to
the _Intransigeant_ picturesque descriptions of military life.

I received a letter from a friend at Tours, where the refugees are
becoming less numerous, but the hospitals on the contrary are nearly
full of wounded. Comtesse Paul de Pourtales is doing splendid work there
as the head of the Red Cross, and M. Gaston Menier, the popular senator,
a warm personal friend of Mr. Andrew Carnegie and the owner of the great
chocolate works, has turned his Chateau of Chenonceaux into a perfectly
organized hospital with a corps of surgeons and professional nurses,
which he maintains at his own expense. Nearly a hundred French wounded
are already being cared for in the Chenonceaux hospital. As soon as they
get well enough, they are sent back to rejoin their regiments. All the
villas in the neighborhood of Tours are already leased to families that
have gone away from Paris.