lies French prisoners in Germany
with the now famous comfort packages. Some of them she and her
committee put up themselves; others are brought in by members of the
family or the friends of the unfortunate men in Germany. The piece de
resistance had always been a round loaf of bread, but on the day I
first visited the salon consternation was reigning. Word had come from
Germany that no more bread nor any sort of food stuff should be sent
in the packages, and hundreds were being unpacked. Crisp loaves of
bread that would have brought comfort to many a poor soul were lying
all over the place.

The secret of the order was that civilian Germans were begging bread
of the French prisoners, and this, of course, was bad for the tenderly
nursed German morale.

IV

MADEMOISELLE JAVAL AND THE ECLOPES

I

Mlle. Javal, unlike Madame Balli, was not a member of the fashionable
society of Paris, a _femme du monde_, or a reigning beauty. But in
certain respects their cases were not dissimilar. Born into one of the
innumerable sets-within-sets of the upper bourgeoisie, living on
inherited wealth, seeing as little as possible of the world beyond her
immediate circle of relatives and friends, as curiously indifferent to
it as only a haughty French bourgeoisie can be, growing up in a large
and comfortable home--according to French ideas of comfort--governing
it, when the duty descended to her shoulders, with all the native and
practised economy of the French woman, but until her mother's illness
without a care, and even then without an extra contact, Mlle. Javal's
life slipped along for many years exactly as the lives of a million
other girls in that entrenched secluded class slipped along before the
tocsin, ringing throughout the land on August 2, 1914, announced that
once more the men of France must fight to defend the liberty of all
classes alike.

Between wars the great central mass of the population in France known
as the bourgeoisie--who may be roughly defined as those that belong
neither to the noblesse at one end nor to the industrials and peasant
proprietors at the other, but have capital, however minute, invested
in _rentes_ or business, and who, beginning with the grande
bourgeoisie, the haughty possessors of great inherited fortunes,
continuing through the financial and commercial magnates, down to the
petite bourgeoisie who keep flourishing little shops, hotels,
etc.--live to get the most out of life in their n