the Government and much casual help during the first year of the war,
when money was still abundant, from charitable members of the noblesse
or the haute bourgeoisie. As their dot had been carefully invested in
_rentes_ (bonds) if it continued to yield any income at all this was
promptly swallowed up by taxes.

As for the women of the industrial class, they not only received
one-franc-twenty-five a day but, if living in Paris, seventy-five
centimes for each child--fifty if living in the provinces; and
families in the lower classes of France are among the largest in the
world. Five, ten, fifteen children; I heard these figures mentioned
daily, and, on one or two occasions, nineteen. Mrs. Morton Mitchell of
San Francisco, who lives in Paris in the Avenue du Bois de Bologne,
discovered after the war broke out that the street-sweeper to whom she
had often given largesse left behind him when called to the Front
something like seventeen dependents. Indeed, they lost no time
acquainting her with the fact; they called on her in a body, and she
has maintained them ever since.

While it was by no means possible in the case of the more moderate
families to keep them in real comfort on the allocation, the women,
many of them, had a pronounced distaste for work outside of their
little homes, as they had their liberty for the first time in their
drab and overworked lives and proposed to enjoy it. No man to dole
them out just enough to keep a roof over their heads and for bread and
stew, while he spent the rest on tobacco, at the wine-shops, or for
dues to the Socialist or Syndicalist Club. Every centime that came in
now was theirs to administer as they pleased.

The Mayoress of a small town near Paris told me that she had heard
these women say more than once they didn't care how long the war
lasted; owing to the prevalence of the alcoholism octopus which has
fastened itself on France of late years the men often beat their wives
as brutally as the low-class Englishmen, and this vice added to the
miserliness of their race made their sojourn in the trenches a welcome
relief. Of course these were the exceptions, for the Frenchman in the
main is devoted to his family, but there were enough of them to emerge
into a sudden prominence after the outbreak of the war when charitable
women were leaving no stone unturned to relieve possible distress.

There is a story of one man with thirteen children who was called to
the colors on August s