had disappeared. It lasted
just long enough to let us see the fairy-like Place Stanislas raise its
beautiful gilded gates and white palaces between the snow and the
moon-light--a sight not soon forgotten.

We were welcomed at Nancy by the Prefet of the Department, Monsieur Leon
Mirman, to whom an old friend had written from Paris, and by the
courteous French officer, Capitaine de B., who was to take us in charge,
for the French Army, during our stay. M. Mirman and his active and
public-spirited wife have done a great work at Nancy, and in the
desolated country round it. From the ruined villages of the border, the
poor _refugies_ have been gathered into the old capital of Lorraine, and
what seemed to me a remarkably efficient and intelligent philanthropy
has been dealing with their needs and those of their children. Nor is
this all. M. Mirman is an old Radical and of course a Government
official, sent down some years ago from Paris. Lorraine is ardently
Catholic, as we all know, and her old Catholic families are not the
natural friends of the Republican _regime_. But President Poincare's
happy phrase, _l'union sacree_--describing the fusion of all parties,
classes, and creeds in the war service of France, has nowhere found a
stronger echo than in Lorraine. The Prefet is on the friendliest of
terms with the Catholic population, rich and poor; and they, on their
side, think and speak warmly of a man who is clearly doing his patriotic
best for all alike.

Our first day's journeyings were to show us something of the qualities
of this Catholic world of Lorraine. A charming and distinguished
Frenchwoman who accompanied us counted, no doubt, for much in the warmth
of the kindness shown us. And yet I like to believe--indeed I am
sure--that there was more than this in it. There was the thrilling sense
of a friendship between our two nations, a friendship new and
far-reaching, cemented by the war, but looking beyond it, which seemed
to me to make the background of it all. Long as I have loved and admired
the French, I have often--like many others of their English friends and
admirers--felt and fretted against the kind of barrier that seemed to
exist between their intimate life and ours. It was as though, at bottom,
and in the end, something cold and critical in the French temperament,
combined with ignorance and prejudice on our own part, prevented a real
contact between the two nationalities. In Lorraine, at any rate, and for
t