The Government agreed to put up the baraques, and did so with the least possible delay.  Mlle. Javal and her Committee furnish the beds (there were seven hundred in one of the depots she showed me), support the dietary kitchen and the hospital baraques, and supply the bathrooms, libraries, and all the little luxuries.  The Government supports the central kitchen (grand regime), the doctors, and, when necessary, the surgeons.

VI

Mlle. Javal took me twice through the immense establishment on the Champs Elysees, where she has not only her offices but workrooms and storerooms.  In one room a number of ladies—­in almost all of these oeuvres women give their services, remaining all day or a part of every day—­were doing nothing but rolling cigarettes.  I looked at them with a good deal of interest.  They belonged to that class of French life I have tried to describe, in which the family is the all important unit; where children rarely play with other children, sometimes never; where the mother is a sovereign who is content to remain within the boundaries of her own small domain for months at a time, particularly if she lives not in an apartment, but in an hotel with a garden behind it.  Thousands of these exemplary women of the bourgeoisie—­hundreds of thousands—­care little or nothing for “society.”  They call at stated intervals, upon which ceremonious occasion they drink coffee and eat pastry; give their young people dances when the exact conventional moment has arrived for putting them on the market, and turn out in force at the great periodicities of life, but otherwise to live and die in the bosom of The Family is the measure of their ambition.

I shall have a good deal to say later of the possible results of the vast upheaval of home life caused by this war; but of these women sitting for hours on end in a back room of Mlle. Javal’s central establishment in Paris it is only necessary to state that they looked as intent upon making cigarettes in a professional manner, beyond cavil by the canny poilu, as if they were counting the family linen or superintending one of the stupendous facts of existence, a daughter’s trousseau.  Only the one to whom I was introduced raised her eyes, and I should not have been expected to distract her attention for a moment had not she told Mlle. Javal that she had read my books (in the Tauchnitz edition) and would like to meet me when I called.

It seemed to me that everything conceivable was in those large storerooms.  I had grown used to seeing piles of sleeping-suits, sleeping-bags, trench slippers, warm underclothes, sabots, all that is comprised in the word vetement; but here were also immense boxes of books and magazines, donated by different firms and editors, about to be shipped to the depots; games of every sort; charming photogravures, sketches, prints, pictures, that would make the baraques gay and beloved—­all to be interspersed, however, with mottoes from famous writers calculated to elevate not only the morale but the morals of the idle.