that home opened to grandmother and grandfather, aunts and uncles,
children and grandchildren, quite regardless of the extra burden it put
on their resources, limitations on their space, the irritations and
complications that are always bred by the injection of extra persons,
however beloved and close, into a settled group.

It was in June, 1882, that I went back home, dusted my desk in the Tower
room now shared with my sister’s playhouse and dolls—set up my
microscope and went to work on the Hydrozoa. But not for long.

                                   5
                     A FRESH START—A SECOND RETREAT

It was the custom of the Tarbell household to do its part in
entertaining the Methodist ministers and presiding elders who
periodically “filled the pulpit” of our church. In the winter after my
return from the Poland venture we had a guest, an important local
personage, Dr. Theodore L. Flood, a preacher who had retired from active
ministry to take the editorship of a magazine called _The Chautauquan_,
published in the town thirty miles from Titusville where I had so
recently spent four years—Meadville, the home of Allegheny College.

On this visit Dr. Flood asked me to “help him out” for a month or two in
a new department in his magazine. I was quick to accept, glad to be
useful, for I had grown up with what was called the Chautauqua Movement.
Indeed, it had been almost as much a part of my life as the oil
business, and in its way it was as typically American. If we had a truer
measure for values we would count it more important.

This Chautauqua Movement had grown out of a Methodist camp meeting held
annually at Fair Point on the pleasant lake which in my childhood had
been the terminus of our most ambitious all-day excursions. The
president of this Association by 1870 was a man justly respected in all
that part of the world for his good deeds, as well as his business
acumen—Lewis Miller, a manufacturer of Akron, Ohio. Mr. Miller was to be
known nationally as the father-in-law of Thomas Edison, but old-time
Chautauquans put it the other way: “Edison is Lewis Miller’s
son-in-law.” That was enough recommendation for Edison in their minds.

Lewis Miller’s interest in Chautauqua went beyond the annual camp
meeting. He saw the opportunity to build up there a summer home where
parents could give their children healthy out-of-door amusement,
protection from the evil ways of the unregenerate, and sound modern
instruction in the Bible. Sympathy with this program induced a
half-dozen families in the Titusville Methodist Church to join in the
purchase of a lot on the outskirts of the grounds and start a Titusville
settlement—a cottage with a mess hall and a few rooms—tents serving as
sleeping quarters for extras. Father joined the colony soon after we
moved to Titusville. We had a tent and a flat-bottomed boat.

Through the years I have been recalling, the years in high school,
college, as Preceptress of Poland Union Seminary, part of all my summers
had been spent at Chautauqua. Lewis Miller’s laudable attempt to furnish
attractive instruction in the Bible meant little or nothing to me at
first; the flat-bottomed boat meant a great deal. But in 1874 something
happened that dragged me away from the water. Lewis Miller had persuaded
the most eminent advocate of the Sunday school in America, Dr.
(afterwards Bishop) John H. Vincent, to select Fair Point as the home of
a National Interdenominational Sunday School Institute which he and
those who saw with him had been for some time planning. The first
session of this new organization was held in 1874 under the name of the
Chautauqua Assembly. It was recognized at once as a revolution upsetting
the old order.

The most spectacular feature of the revolution was the Chautauqua
platform, making as it did stirring, challenging contacts with current
intellectual life. There one heard the great speakers of the day on all
sorts of subjects. There fine concerts were given. It was the scientific
lectures which caught me, particularly those of Dr. R. Ogden Doremus of
New York. His platform experiments, in which two skillful women
assisted, excited me as I had never been before. But what aroused me
most were certain demonstrations with a magnificent microscope which
they were giving in a little building at one side. Nothing in the world
seemed to matter to me so much as to be able to talk with these women,
to ask their advice about the work I was beginning with the little
instrument bought with my own carefully saved money. Perhaps, oh,
perhaps, I dreamed, they would let me look through the great beauty they
handled so deftly, focus it, watch the life which went on in its field.
So one day I hung around after the talk was over, slipped up to them,
steeled myself to tell them that I was going to be a microscopist,
begged them to give me a few lessons, advise me. The two ladies smiled
down from their height, so plainly showing they thought me a country
child with a queer behavior complex. “Quite impossible,” they said, and
turned back to their conference with Dr. Doremus.

Abashed, humiliated, but luckily too angry to cry I made my way back to
my flat-bottomed boat. I would show them, I resolved, clenching my
fists!

It was years before I attempted again to get from a Chautauqua
undertaking more than it was offering to the public at large. There were
many of these undertakings. Dr. Vincent saw to that. A man better fitted
by experience, conviction, and personality to persuade a half-asleep,
wholly satisfied community to accept a new order could not have been
found in the America of the eighties. John Vincent was forty-two years
old when he came to Chautauqua—handsome, confident, alert, energetic,
radiating well-being. And he was an orator, and orating at Chautauqua
made men tolerant even of heresy. He went about his business of
organizing the work of the Assembly with a skill which commanded the
admiration of everybody, even those hostile to the secularization of
their beloved camp meeting. As a platform manager I never have known his
equal. He had magnetism, but he knew when and how to turn it on; he was
shrewd, cunning, pungent. He pricked bubbles, disciplined his audience.
The Chautauqua audience came to be one of the best behaved out-of-door
audiences in the country. The fact that we were out of doors had
persuaded us that we were free to leave meetings if we were bored or
suddenly remembered that we had left bread in the oven, or that the baby
must have wakened. When the performance had been stopped once or twice
to “give that lady a chance to go out without further disturbing the
speaker” we learned to stay at home or to sit out the lecture.

There is only one word to describe what Lewis Miller and Dr. Vincent now
did to Chautauqua, and that is “electrification.” The community was made
up mainly of hard-working men and women who wanted a vacation in
surroundings where they would not “have to worry about the children.”
Certainly if high fences with gates through which you could not pass in
or out after ten P.M.—never pass without your ticket, and not even with
one on Sundays—if watchful guards and ten o’clock curfew, if a mass
public opinion on the part of elders in support of these restrictions,
could have suppressed all the mischief and lawlessness in the youth
which swarmed Chautauqua, parents were right in sleeping tranquilly. As
a matter of fact I never knew of any serious offenses, though there
probably were many which I was still too much of a little girl to
recognize. The worst mischief in which I personally assisted was playing
tag up and down the relief model of Palestine, which skirted the lake as
Palestine does the Mediterranean. It was spotted with plaster-of-Paris
models of towns from Damascus to Bethsaida. I remember one rule of our
game was that you could not be tagged if you straddled Jerusalem. The
most serious vandalism of which I knew and in which I had no part was
stealing Damascus or Nazareth or Tyre and carrying it away bodily.

Dr. Vincent did not change the restrictions, but he made them more
endurable by the fresh interest he put into our lives. His effect on the
community physically was immediate. It began to grow. The sound of the
hammers nailing together the, for the most part, flimsy cottages was
never still. The result was very like what Mark Twain found in the
summer colony of Onteora in the Catskills in its first year—“the
partitions so thin you can hear the women changing their minds.”

Housekeeping improved. It had been as sketchy as the cottages—picnic
housekeeping. You saw them at it, out in the rear of their cottages,
over an old wood stove or stone fireplace, the men in their shirt
sleeves, the women in big aprons, if not wrappers. Planks on sawhorses
for tables, mats (we had not learned to say “doilies” yet), benches for
seats. The natural practice of bringing discarded furniture from home to
furnish the cottages led to the only distinctive piece of Chautauqua
furniture I recall—a long high-backed bench made from an old-fashioned
four-post bedstead. There were few garrets in all the country about
Chautauqua that did not harbor one or more such bedsteads. They had been
hidden away when families could afford the new-styled quartered-oak or
walnut bedroom suites. Some ingenious mind had seen that by shortening
the sidepieces of a four-poster to seat width, using the headboard for a
back, you had a commodious and, with cushions, a comfortable seat, even
couch. They were scattered all over the place.

With the coming of Dr. Vincent, Chautauqua rapidly developed a Promenade
along the south end of the lake front. Cottages here were lathed and
plastered, had wicker chairs on their verandahs, and the residents soon
were taking their meals at the really stately Athenaeum Hotel. It was in
this front row that Dr. and Mrs. Vincent came to live in a tent, a tent
de luxe with a real house—so it looked to us—behind it.

Sometimes when we were properly dressed and shod we walked past the
hotel and the cottages housing our aristocrats, and if by chance we saw
Dr. or Mrs. Vincent or, best of all, the “Vincents’ little boy”—George,
we later learned his name to be—why, then we boasted of it at the supper
table as one might say today, “I saw President Roosevelt, Mrs.
Roosevelt, Sistie, Buzzie.”

Dr. Vincent kept the place on its toes not only by the steady
improvement of its platform, its amusements, in the quality of the
people who came to teach and preach, but by a steady flow of new
undertakings. He planned incessantly to stir not only our souls but our
minds. We came to expect new ideas at each successive session and were
never disappointed if sometimes a little bewildered. Behind all these
various undertakings was the steadying hand of Lewis Miller, the silent
partner, who had begun by spying out the land, establishing a community,
laying the foundations for the Institution as it exists today—a center
of democratic, Christian culture.

Dr. Vincent’s masterpiece, as I always thought, came in 1878 when he
laid before his Chautauquans a plan which had been long simmering in his
never quiet mind. He did this in the finest of what we call
inspirational talks that I ever heard—at least it stirred me so deeply
that I have never forgotten the face of the orator nor, more important,
the upturned faces of his hearers. He announced a scheme for a four-year
course of home reading under the direction of the Chautauqua management
adapted to men and women who had missed a college education, but who
felt a deep desire for knowledge and were willing to adopt any practical
plan which would give them a college outlook. It was to be called the
Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle.

Now this does not sound exciting; but as a matter of fact it was deeply
exciting, for the speaker was pouring out his heart. He had never had a
college education; he had never ceased to feel the lack of what he
believed it would have given him. He had struggled to make up for his
loss by persistent, systematic daily reading and study. Establishing the
habit as a boy, he had never abandoned it. It had given him deep
satisfaction, supplied, he thought, the college outlook. He believed
there were thousands of men and women in the United States, scores,
possibly hundreds, in his audience, who had been forced, as he had been,
to sacrifice their early ambitions for education. They had hidden the
hunger in their hearts where at times it still gnawed. He was offering
them the same help he had found, and confidently, glowingly, he outlined
the course of home reading which Dr. John H. Finley has so aptly named
the American Adult Education Pioneer.

The uplifted faces all about me told the story, particularly the faces
of the women of thirty or more. Women of that generation had had their
natural desire for knowledge intensified by the Woman’s Rights movement,
in which the strongest plank had been a demand for the opportunity for
higher education. These women were now beyond the day when they could go
to college, but here was something which they saw intuitively was
practical.

The immediacy of their response was in a degree accounted for by their
devotion to Dr. Vincent. I suppose most of the women who frequented
Chautauqua were more or less in love with him, the worship a man of
overflowing sentiment receives from the benches, but most of his
audience would have preferred to die rather than reveal their secret
passion.

Well, it was a great emotional experience with large and immediate
practical results, for, before the summer session was over, eight
thousand people had joined the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific
Circle.

They had joined, and they were buying the books chosen. The most
important volume in that first year’s course was Green’s “Short History
of the English People”—in my judgment the most important book save one
that the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle ever included, that
exception being W. C. Brownell’s “French Traits.” The sudden demand for
so large and expensive a volume as Green’s History, outside of regular
trade channels, followed as it was by spectacular sales of other books
from which neither publisher nor writer had expected anything out of the
normal, set the whole publishing world agog, and naturally raised the
question, “How are we to get in on this new market?”

There were many approaches, all legitimate enough so far as I know. I
found a rather amusing proof of one not long ago in Marjorie Wiggin
Prescott’s fine collection of manuscripts and rare books—a volume of Lew
Wallace’s “Ben Hur” enriched by a letter to the publisher, signed by
Mrs. Wallace and dated November 24, 1884. The letter, which is
self-explanatory, is reproduced here with Mrs. Prescott’s permission.

                                        Crawfordsville, Nov. 24, 1884.

  Dear Sir

  Because of inquiries of correspondents as to the _number_ of _wives_
  Gen. Wallace has had, I have thought best to instruct you to add to
  the dedication of _Ben-Hur_, making it:

                                   To
                          The Wife of My Youth
                        who still abides with me

  This with Gen. Wallace’s consent.

  Several literary clubs have made it a handbook for study in
  connection with Roman History. If by some means you could have it
  adopted by the Chautauqua Club, which numbers twenty thousand
  members, it might be worth while to try. Pardon the suggestion.

  May I ask you to furnish me a report of the sales of _Ben-Hur_, year
  by year, from the beginning?

  With high regard,

                                         Very truly yours
                                                     SUSAN E. WALLACE.

As the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle grew, there came
increasing necessity of a steady sympathetic administration. To help in
this task it was decided in 1880 to establish a monthly organ—_The
Chautauquan_, it was to be called—in which portions of the required
readings could be published more cheaply than in book form, and through
which by counsel and suggestions the leaders could keep in closer touch
with the readers—better meet their needs. Dr. Vincent was quick to sense
weak places in the organization, and ingenious in devising ways to take
care of them. It was to try out one of his devices that Dr. Flood was
now asking my temporary help.

Here was the situation that had been uncovered—hundreds of those who had
joined the great circle and bought its books were without dictionaries,
encyclopaedias, explanatory helps of any kind, and they lived too far
away—on the Plains, in the mountains, on distant farms—to reach
libraries. Headquarters were inundated with questions: How do you
pronounce this word, translate this phrase? Who was this man, this
woman? What does this or that mean?

“Could not _The Chautauquan_ take care of this difficulty,” suggested
Dr. Vincent, “by annotating the portions of the various texts to be read
in that particular month? Let some one try it out.”

As I happened to be the “some one” within reach when Dr. Flood received
the suggestion, the attempt was put up to me—temporary trial, I was made
to understand. Now I had known from childhood homes and towns where
there were practically no books beyond the Bible and the children’s
spellers. As books had always come after bread in our household I
naturally pitied those who did not have them; so I undertook the notes
with the determination to make them as helpful as I could.

To my surprise and delight Dr. Vincent sent word to me that I had caught
his idea, and that he had advised Dr. Flood to ask me to prepare similar
notes each month.

“Will you do it?” asked Dr. Flood.

I jumped at the chance, calculating that it would take not over two
weeks of my month, give me pin money, and leave time for the
microscope—that my future was in it, I did not dream.

But my task required better equipped libraries than Titusville offered;
Meadville, only thirty miles away, headquarters for _The Chautauquan_,
had them, and so I arranged to do my work there, remaining until I had
read the proofs—an exacting job which never ceased to worry me. What if
the accent was in the wrong place? What if I brought somebody into the
world in the wrong year? Something of the kind happened occasionally,
and when it did I quickly discovered that, while there might be many
Chautauqua readers who did not have books of reference, there were more
that did and knew how to use them.

Once in touch with the office of _The Chautauquan_ I began to see things
to do. Dr. Flood had little interest in detail. The magazine was made up
in a casual, and to my mind a disorderly, fashion. I could not keep my
fingers off. A woman is a natural executive: that has been her business
through the ages. Intuitively she picks up, sets to rights, establishes
order. I began at once to exercise my inheritance, proved useful, was
offered a full-time job, and threw myself heartily into an attempt to
learn how to make up a magazine in the way I suspected a magazine should
be made up.

When the long-suffering foreman of the printing office discovered I was
in earnest he undertook my education, taught me the vocabulary—the only
galley I had heard of up to that time was a war vessel of the Middle
Ages—suggested dummies, and offered a model. He installed a proper
respect for the dates on which copy was to be in, and forms closed:
showed me the importance of clean copy by compelling me to see with my
own eyes the time it took to make a correction, trained me until I could
stand over the closing of the last form and direct the necessary changes
to be made in order to make room for a three-line advertisement which
had just arrived, and which, such was the need of _The Chautauquan_ for
advertising, must under no consideration be thrown out. When I could do
that nonchalantly I felt as if I had arrived. And this training I owed
to as fine a craftsman as there was in the trade at the time; as well,
he was a courteous and patient gentleman—Adrian McCoy, long the head of
the pressroom where _The Chautauquan_ was printed.

My willingness to take on loose ends soon brought to my desk much of the
routine office correspondence—letters to be answered by a more or less
set form, signed with Dr. Flood’s name and mailed without troubling him
to read them.

In this grist were many letters from readers, women chiefly, who laid
their troubles and hopes on our shoulders, confident of understanding
and counsel. Dr. Flood’s answers to such communications were courteous
but formal. Probably he appreciated as I did not that there lay safety.
I felt strongly that such an appeal or confidence should have a
personal, sympathetic letter, and I began producing them, pouring out
counsel and pity. I shudder now to think of the ignorant sentiment I
probably spilled. But my career as a professional counselor was checked
suddenly by the unexpected result of a series of letters to a
contributor. This gentleman, a foreign lecturer and teacher, had been
chilled by the lack of understanding by Americans of his ideals. And all
of this he was expressing in letters to the office after our acceptance
of one or two of his articles. I was deeply touched by his outpourings
and answered in kind—of course signing my editor’s name. Then one day
Dr. Flood received a letter saying that on such a day the gentleman
would be in Meadville. He must see the one who so understood him. And
come he did. Poor Dr. Flood did not know what it was all about.

“But these letters,” the visitor exclaimed. “Oh,” Dr. Flood said, “Miss
Tarbell wrote those. We’ll speak to her.”

And so he was presented—letters in hand—Dr. Flood looking sternly at me
and leaving me to my fate.

“Did you write these letters?” the bewildered and disappointed stranger
asked.

All I could say was, “Yes, I wrote them.”

“And Dr. Flood never saw them?”

“No,” I said, “he never does.”

“I might have known it was a woman,” he groaned, and fled. And that was
the last we ever saw or heard of him. But it made a vast difference in
my editorial correspondence.

I was not satisfied, however, with setting things to rights and
counseling the unhappy. Having convinced my editor-in-chief that I could
keep his house in better order than he had been interested in doing, I
became ambitious to contribute to its furnishing, to extend its field
beyond matters purely Chautauquan. I began by offering contributions to
what was called the Editor’s Table—the Editor’s Note Book. I began to
write articles, even went off on trips to gather information on subjects
which seemed to me to be fitting.

The first and most ambitious of these undertakings was an investigation
made in the Patent Office in Washington of the amount of inventing the
records showed women to have done. I had been disturbed for some time by
what seemed to me the calculated belittling of the past achievements of
women by many active in the campaign for suffrage. They agreed with
their opponents that women had shown little or no creative power. That,
they argued, was because man had purposely and jealously excluded her
from his field of action. The argument was intended, of course, to
arouse women’s indignation, stir them to action. It seemed to me rather
to throw doubt on her creative capacity. Power to create breaks all
barriers. Women had demonstrated this, I believed, again and again while
carrying on what I as an observer of society was coming to regard as the
most delicate, complex, and essential of all creative tasks—the making
of a home. There was the field of invention. At the moment it was being
said in print and on the platform that, in all the history of the Patent
Office, women had taken out only some three hundred patents.

I had seen so much of woman’s ingenuity on the farm and in the kitchen
that I questioned the figures; and so I went to see, feeling very
important if scared at my rashness in daring to penetrate a Government
department and interview its head. I was able to put my finger at once
on over two thousand patents, enough to convince me that, man-made world
or not, if a woman had a good idea and the gumption to seek a patent she
had the same chance as a man to get one. This was confirmed by
correspondence with two or three women who at the time were taking out
patents regularly.

These dashes into journalism, timid and factual as were the results,
gave my position more and more body, began slowly to arouse my
rudimentary capacity for self-expression. At the same time my position
was enriched by a novel feature of our undertaking, one that any editor
of a monthly journal can appreciate. We published but ten issues,
suspending in July and August in order to get out on the grounds at
Chautauqua an eight-page newspaper—the Chautauqua Assembly _Daily
Herald_. This meant moving our Meadville staff bodily to the Lake late
in June.

I was soon contributing two columns of editorials a day to the _Herald_,
comments on the daily doings of the Assembly, and making many
stimulating acquaintances in doing it. Among them I valued particularly
Dr. Herbert B. Adams and Dr. Richard T. Ely of Johns Hopkins University,
men who were stirring youth and shocking the elders by liberal
interpretations of history and economics. We felt rather proud of
ourselves at Chautauqua that we were liberal enough to engage Dr. Adams
and Dr. Ely as regular lecturers and teachers, and that our constituency
accepted them, if with occasional misgivings.

It was not only the faculty of Johns Hopkins which was adding to my
friends. One who remains today among those I most value came from its
student body—Dr. John H. Finley. Dr. Finley gave several summers to the
Assembly _Herald_, reading its copy and its proofs among other things.
It was he who read my two columns and, no doubt, kept me out of much
trouble; but once there did slip by him a misquotation over which he
still chuckles when we talk of Chautauqua days. I made it a practice to
head my first column with a digest of the day’s happenings—a line to an
event and, as a starter for the paragraph, a quotation. I had been
rather pleased one day to select a line from James Thomson:

  _Office staff of The Chautauquan, 1888: Miss Tarbell at left, sitting_
]

              The meek-eyed Morn appears, mother of dews.

A copy of the paper was always thrown on the verandah of my upstairs
room around five o’clock in the morning, and I hopped out of bed to see
what had happened to my column. That morning something dire had
happened, for my quotation ran:

            The _weak_-eyed _Worm_ appears, mother of dews.

Eminence came from across the water annually and gave color and
importance, so we thought, to our doings. A foreign visitor with whom I
had a pleasant acquaintance running over some years was Dr. J. P.
Mahaffy of the University of Dublin. Dr. Mahaffy had contributed a
series of delightful articles to the required readings in _The
Chautauquan_—“Gossip About Greece”—and in the summer of 1889 he came
over for two or three courses of lectures at the Assembly. A
distinguished figure, he was, and such a contrast in his tweeds, his
free movements, his spirited wide-ranging talk to most of us.

My acquaintance grew out of our mutual interest in the flora of any spot
where we happened to be. One day as I came in from a botanizing
expedition outside the grounds carrying stocks of the lovely field
lilies common in the region, Dr. Mahaffy seized my arm: “You care for
flowers and plants? I thought American women had no interest in them.” A
libel I quickly hooted. In defense of my sisterhood I went diligently to
work to show him our summer flora. But he cared for nothing as much as
our summer lilies, begged me after the flowering was over to send him
bulbs, which I proudly did. In exchange I received from his Dublin
garden seeds of a white poppy which, he wrote me, he had originally
gathered in the shadow of the statue of Memnon in Egypt. Those poppies
have always gone with me; they flourished in my mother’s garden in
Titusville—now they flourish in my Connecticut garden.

My life was busy, varied, unfolding pleasantly in many ways, but it also
after six years was increasingly unsatisfactory, so unsatisfactory that
I was secretly, very secretly, meditating a change.

I was scared by what _The Chautauquan_ seemed to be doing to the plan I
had worked out for the development of my mind. I had grown up with a
stout determination to follow one course of study to the end, to develop
a specialty. The work I was doing demanded a scattering of mind which I
began to fear would unfit me for ever thinking anything through. I
realized that an editor of value must have made up his mind about more
things than had I, feel himself ready to fight for those things if
necessary. I had no program in which _The Chautauquan_ was interested.
Moreover, I did not want to be an editor.

But to break with _The Chautauquan_ meant sacrificing security. I had
always had a vision of myself settled somewhere in a secure corner,
simple, not too large. I never had wanted things; I always had a dislike
of impedimenta, but I wanted something cheerful and warm and enduring.
There I could work over that which interested me, day in and day out,
with no alarm for my keep. Now _The Chautauquan_ was a secure berth; so
far as I could figure, it would last through my time at least. To give
it up meant complete economic insecurity. I probably should not have
been willing to sacrifice what I think I had honestly earned if there
had not been growing upon me a conviction of the sterility of security.
All about me were people who at least believed themselves materially
secure. They lived comfortably within their means, they were busy
keeping things as they were, preserving what they had. They were the
most respectable people in town, but secretly I was beginning to suspect
their respectability.

One day, listening to a fine elderly Scotch Presbyterian minister who
had in his congregation a large group of these stable, secure, best
citizens, I was startled when he leaned over his pulpit and, shaking his
fist at us, shouted, “You’re dyin’ of respectability.” Was that what was
happening to me? I saw with increasing clearness that I could not go
beyond a certain point on _The Chautauquan_, mentally, socially,
spiritually. If I remained, it was to accept a variety of limitations,
and my whole nature was against the acceptance of limitations. It was
contrary to the nature of things as I saw them; to be happy, I must go
on with fresh attempts, fresh adventuring. The thing that frightened me
earlier in my youth came to the top now: that thing that made me
determine I would never marry because it meant giving up freedom, was a
trap. It was clear enough that I was trapped—comfortably, most
pleasantly, most securely, but trapped.

As time went on I realized that this security to which people so clung
could not always be counted on. They might think so, but had I not seen
beautiful homes sold under the hammer in Titusville, homes of those whom
the town had looked on as impregnable financially? In my years on _The
Chautauquan_ in Meadville I had been a shocked observer of one of the
many dramatic political failures of the eighties, the defeat of the
Republican candidate for Governor of Pennsylvania at a critical moment—a
Meadville banker, Wallace Delamater. I was too much of a mugwump to
sympathize with the Republican platform, but I liked Wallace Delamater.
I believed him, as I think the records show, to be a tool of a past
master of machine politics—Matthew Quay. Taken up by Quay, the resources
of the Delamater bank and of allied banks in Meadville at the call of
his party, he made a campaign which was called brilliant. There was no
doubt of the result in Meadville.

I went to bed early, the night of the election, expecting to be aroused
by the ringing of bells, the blowing of whistles, for there was to be a
celebration. When I awakened with a start it was broad daylight. Had I
slept through the celebration? A sense of doom hung over me; I dressed
hurriedly, went down to get the paper. Wallace Delamater was defeated.
Promptly the Delamater bank closed and, one after another, four banks of
the town followed. There was a heavy run on the one remaining, the one
where I had my little deposit. The panic in the town was desperate;
everything was going. I don’t think I have ever been more ashamed of
anything in my life connected with money than I was when I took my bank
book and went to my bank to ask for my deposit. It was all the money I
had in the world—times were bad. But I have always continued to be a
little ashamed that I yielded to the panic, the more because my bank
didn’t fail!

No, the security men flattered themselves they had achieved was never
certain. Moreover, my security was costing more in certain precious
things than I was willing to pay. Take the matter of making something
professionally sound, useful, justifiable, out of myself, which is the
only one of these “precious things” that I am talking about! I could do
no more towards it where I was. To begin with, I at last knew what I
wanted to do. It was no longer to seek truth with a microscope. My early
absorption in rocks and plants had veered to as intense an interest in
human beings. I was feeling the same passion to understand men and
women, the same eagerness to collect and to classify information about
them. I find the proofs of this slow and unconscious change of
allegiance in an accumulation of tattered notebooks tucked away for
years, forgotten and only brought out after I had set myself this
curious task of tracing the road I have traveled through my eighty
years, trying to find out why I did this thing and not that, getting
acquainted with my own working life.

I seem to have begun to enter observations on human beings soon after I
had settled down to learn how to put a magazine together in an orderly
fashion. I applied the same method that I had used for so many years in
collecting and classifying natural objects which excited my curiosity.
Take leaves, on which I was always keen. I started out in high school to
collect them from all the flora in my territory, classifying them by
shapes, veins, stalks, color. Rarely do I take up a family book of those
early years that there do not fall out from between the pages leaves of
one thing or another that I had pressed to help me carry on my scheme of
classification. I suspect that I did not get much beyond a glib naming
of parts.

Something analogous happened when I recognized that men and women were
as well worth notes as leaves, that there was a science of society as
well as of botany.

What had happened was undoubtedly that the tumults, the challenges of my
day had finally penetrated my aloofness, and that I was feeling more and
more the need of taking a part in them. The decade I spent in Poland and
on _The Chautauquan_ had a background not so unlike that of the present
decade. At its beginning we were only fifteen years from a civil war
which had left behind not only a vast devastated region with the problem
of its reconstruction, but the problem of a newly freed people. It had
left bitterness which in intensity and endurance no war but a civil war
ever leaves. We had had our inflation, a devastating boom followed by
seven years of depression, outbreaks of all the various forms of radical
philosophy the world then knew. Youth talks glibly of communism today as
if it had just appeared in the country; but Marxian Communists
transferred the headquarters of the International to New York City in
the seventies. More conspicuous than the Communists were the Anarchists.
Every city in the United States had its little group, preaching and
every now and then practicing direct action. Indeed, they were a factor
in all the violent labor disturbances of the period.

In 1879 prosperity had come back with a whoop, and, as she usually does
after a long absence, had quickly exhausted herself by fantastic
economic excesses. By the time I undertook to annotate the Chautauqua
Literary and Scientific Circle’s readings the country had begun to
suffer again from its wanton speculation and reckless overbuilding of
railroads. Factories and mines and mills shut down; and when work
stopped disorder began, particularly on the railroads of the Southwest,
the awful massacre of Chinese in Wyoming—more awful, the Haymarket riot
in Chicago followed as it was by the execution of four men, all
counselors of violence to be sure, but no one of them found guilty
either of making or of throwing the bomb.

The eighties dripped with blood, and men struggled to get at causes, to
find corrections, to humanize and socialize the country; for then as now
there were those who dreamed of a good world although at times it seemed
to them to be going mad.

_The Chautauquan_ interested itself in all of this turbulent and
confused life. Indeed, it rapidly became my particular editorial
concern. We noted and discussed practically every item of the social
program which has been so steadily developing in the last fifty years,
the items which have crystallized into the Square Deal, the New Freedom,
the New Deal.

The present argument for high wages, we made in the eighties. We called
it “the new economic coefficient in our industrial life.” “It is the
well-paid workman,” said _The Chautauquan_, “who is a relatively large
consumer. We are built upon a foundation of which this well-paid workman
is an important part.”

As for hours and conditions, we were ardent supporters of the eight-hour
day, organized labor’s chief aim in the eighties, and we were for
contracts between labor and capital, each being held responsible for his
side of the bargain. We were for education, arbitration, legislation,
the program of the Knights of Labor rather than the program of force
which the growing American Federation of Labor was adopting. We
discussed interminably the growing problem of the slums, were
particularly strong for cooperative housing, laundries and bakeshops; we
supported the popular Town and Country Club, seeking to keep a healthy
balance between the two; we were advocates of temperance but shied at
prohibition—largely, I think, because it had become a political issue,
and we did not like to see our idealists going into politics, as Bellamy
and Henry George and the leaders of many causes were doing.

That is, in the decade of the eighties we were discussing and thinking
about the same fundamentals that we are today.

My realization of the stress of the period began at home. Titusville and
all the Oil Region of Pennsylvania were struggling to loosen the hold of
the mighty monopoly which, since its first attack on the business in
1872, had grown in power and extent until it owned and controlled over
90 per cent of the oil industry outside of the production of the raw
crude. The region was divided into two hostile camps—the Independent
Producers and Refiners, and the Standard Oil Company. Their maneuvers
and strategy kept town and country in a constant state of excitement, of
suspicion, of hope, and of despair.

There was a steady weakening of independent ranks both by the men worn
out or ruined by the struggle, and those who saw peace and security for
themselves only in settling and gave up the fight.

In those days I looked with more contempt on the man who had gone over
to the Standard than on the one who had been in jail. I felt pity for
the latter man, but none for the deserters from the ranks of the
fighting independents. Those were the days when the freeing of
transportation, the privilege which had more to do with the making of
the monopoly than anything else, more even than the great ability of its
management, was the aim of all reformers. For years the Independents had
worked for an interstate commerce law which would make rate
discrimination a crime. To me such a law had come to have a kind of
sanctity. It was the new freedom, and when it was passed in 1887 I felt
an uplift such as nothing in public life, unless I except Mr.
Cleveland’s tariff message of the year before, had ever given me.

But it was not the economic feature of the struggle in the Oil Region
which deeply disturbed or interested me. It was what it was doing to
people themselves, to the people I knew, to my father and mother and
their friends. It was the divided town, the suspicion and greed and
bitterness and defeats and surrenders. Here was a product meant to be a
blessing to men—so I believed; and it was proving a curse to the very
ones who had discovered it, developed it.

I began to fill pages with notes of things seen and heard, and finally I
decided I should write a novel about it. Very secretly indeed, I went at
it, assembling a cast, outlining a plot, writing two or three chapters.
Poor stuff. Luckily I soon found out I was beyond my depth and gave it
up.

From my notebooks I judge that I abandoned my novel the more readily
because I had conceived what I called “a more fundamental research”!
This was nothing less than a Science of Society to be illustrated by my
own observations on men and women. Looking over it now, I see that the
framework came from reading the voluminous discussions of the nature of
society then flooding the public. I took my framework where I found it,
but I filled it in with observations, gathered on all sides, of people I
knew, heard about, particularly read about in the newspaper.

But this ambitious work soon met the same fate as the novel. It broke
off at the end of the third chapter because I had concluded I could not
construct society as it was until I knew more about woman. I suspected
she had played a larger part in shaping society than she realized or
perhaps was willing to admit. I was questioning the argument that this
is entirely a man-made world. I had found too many woman-made parts in
it to accept the characterization at its face value. My science of
society would not be honest, I concluded, if the only part woman was
allowed to play in it was that of doormat, toy, and tool. I was
troubled, too, by the argument that women must be given suffrage if
society was to be improved. Man had made a mess of the world, I was
told; woman must take his tools and straighten things up. I did not feel
the confidence of my courageous friends. “Why should we expect them to
do better with the vote than men have done?” I asked. “Because they are
women,” I was told. But they were human beings, like men, and they were
human beings with no experience of the tools they wanted to use; and I
had enough sense of the past to believe that experience counted, and
that it would be wise for all men and women to consult it when they
tried new ventures.

There had been women in public life in the past. What had they done? I
had to satisfy myself before I went further with my science of society
or joined the suffragists. It was humiliating not to be able to make up
my mind quickly about the matter, as most of the women I knew did. What
was the matter with me, I asked myself, that I could not be quickly
sure? Why must I persist in the slow, tiresome practice of knowing more
about things before I had an opinion? Suppose everybody did that. What
chance for intuition, vision, emotion, action?

My notebooks show that I began my plodding by making out a list of women
who seemed to offer food for reflection. The group that excited me most
were the women of the French Revolution. I made little studies of
several, wrote little pieces about them, and these little pieces I
submitted to the editor of _The Chautauquan_; he published several of
them—a study of Madame de Staël, of Marie Antoinette, of Madame Roland.
But soon I became heartily ashamed of my sketches, written as they were
from so meager an equipment. I felt this particularly about Madame
Roland. I made up my mind that I was going to know more about this
woman, that she probably would teach me what sort of contribution might
be expected from a woman in public life.

That meant research. How was I to carry it on? Whatever studying I did
depended on my ability to support myself while doing it; whatever
studying I did while on _The Chautauquan_ must be turned into something
available for the magazine. My time and strength belonged to it.
Obviously, I could not do sufficient research and continue my position;
it was as impossible as it had been to act as preceptress of the Poland
Union Seminary and at the same time carry on my study with the
microscope. Where was I to carry on this research? There was but one
place—Paris. And how was I to finance myself in Paris—a strange country
and a strange tongue—long enough to write a book? I did not consider the
possibility of getting a regular job: I did not want one. I wanted
freedom, and I had an idea that there was no freedom in belonging to
things, no freedom in security. It took time to convince myself that I
dared go on my own. But finally I succeeded.

Coming to a decision has a loosening, tonic effect on a mind which has
been floundering in uncertainty. Liberated, it rushes gaily, hopefully,
to the charting of a new course. I had no sooner resolved to strike out
on my own than my mind was bubbling with plans. I forgot that I was
thirty-three years old and, according to the code of my time and my
society, too old for new ventures; I forgot that outside of my very
limited experience on _The Chautauquan_ I knew nothing of the writing
and publishing world, had literally no acquaintance among editors; I
forgot that I was afraid of people, believed them all so much greater
and more important than they often turned out to be that it cost me
nervous chills to venture with a request into a stranger’s presence.

Dismissing all these real handicaps, I plunged gaily into planning for a
career in journalism, self-directed, free-lance journalism. Surely I
could find subjects enough in Paris to write about, subjects that would
interest American newspapers. We were in the thick of a great agitation
over the condition and the conduct of American cities. _The Chautauquan_
had touched it occasionally. How did Paris keep house? I planned a
syndicate of my own which would answer all questions. Out of my
newspaper work might not articles grow for magazines? I thought so, and
books, beginning of course with my study of Madame Roland. So long as I
told nobody about my plans, they worked beautifully, carried me upward
and onward into a new and happier, more profitable, more satisfying
world. But when I announced my decision, laid out what I proposed to do,
all the glow and confidence went out of me, all the weaknesses in my
venture came again to the top. There were friends who said none too
politely: “Remember you are past thirty. Women don’t make new places for
themselves after thirty.” There were friends who resented my decision as
a reflection on themselves. A woman whose friendship I valued said
bluntly: “You are one of us. Aren’t we good enough for you?” My act was
treason in her eyes. The whole force of the respectable circles to which
I belonged, that respectable circle which knew as I did not the value of
security won, the slender chance of replacing it if lost or abandoned,
was against me and so out of friendliness.

When I told my editor-in-chief I was leaving, going to Paris to study,
he was shocked. “How will you support yourself?” he asked, really
anxious, knowing that I must depend on my own efforts.

“By writing,” I said.

“You’re not a writer,” he said. “You’ll starve.”

He had touched the weakest point in my venture: I was not a writer, and
I knew it. I knew I never should be one in the high sense which I then
and still more now give to that word. I had neither the endowment nor
the passion nor the ambition to be a writer. I was rather a student,
wanting to understand things quite regardless of how I could use that
understanding if I reached it. There was much selfishness in my wanting
to know for the sake of knowing, much of a dead scholar in me; and that
dead scholar has always hung, more or less a weight, about my neck.

But if I was not a writer I had certain qualifications for the practice
of the modest kind of journalism on which I had decided. I counted no
little on my habit of planning in advance what I was going to do, and I
had a strong conviction that a plan of my own was worth more than any
plan which was made for me. Again, if I could not write, I did have a
certain sense of what mattered in a subject and a strong conviction that
it was my sense of what mattered, and not somebody else’s, that would
give my work freshness and strength if it was to have any.

Then there was my habit of steady, painstaking work—that ought to count
for something. And perhaps I could learn to write. If I were to do so,
could I do better than soak myself in French prose? I had read French
steadily from my school days; I had done not a little translating of
articles from the big reviews for _The Chautauquan_. If I could live
with the language, might I not master something of what seemed to me its
essential qualities, those which gave it both body and charm? These
qualities were the soundness of structure, the way it held together, and
the beautiful clarity of expression. At least I could try for them.

But when I tried to explain all this to my critical friends they
continued frankly skeptical, indignant. It was my father and mother who
backed me up, though I think they were both puzzled and fearful. “I
don’t know what you can do, Ida,” my father said, “that’s for you. If
you think you can do it, try it.” But in the end it took all the grit I
had to go ahead.

Breaking up established relations is not easy. You begin by pulling up
deeply rooted things, rooted in your heart; you abandon once cherished
purposes. When I left _The Chautauquan_ I was no longer the eager and
confident young woman who ten years before had started out for herself
in Poland, Ohio; I was ten years older, and I was keenly conscious that
I had in those ten years accumulated a fairly complete collection of
shattered idols. That I could forget them as quickly and as completely
as I did, I owe to the Paris of the nineties. I had scarcely passed her
gates before I had fallen under her spell. At once I was experiencing
all the amazing rejuvenation that comes from falling in love, whatever
the object. It was not to be “See Paris and die,” as more than one
friend had jeered. I knew with certainty it was to be “See Paris and
live.”

                                   6
                             I FALL IN LOVE

Falling in love with Paris at first sight—a _coup de feu_, it was—in no
way dimmed the energy and the care with which on the day of my arrival I
began to put into operation the cautious and laborious Plan for
self-support I had brought along. It rather intensified it. As I must
begin at the bottom to build up contacts with strangers on the other
side of the ocean, and as there was but $150 in my pocket, there was no
time to waste.

In the ten years I had been trying to support myself I had learned that
the art of spending money is quite as important in a sound financial
program as the art of earning it. I had been going on the theory, as I
still am—practice is another story—that what I earned must cover my
expenses and leave a surplus for emergencies and expansion. I had
applied my principles to my small salary on _The Chautauquan_—never over
$100 a month—well enough to get myself to Paris and have this little
reserve to care for myself while I was proving or disproving that I
could convince a few American editors whom I had never seen that my
goods were worth buying.

The first step, obviously, in carrying out my program was cheap living.
Luckily for me, two of my associates on _The Chautauquan_, excited by my
undertaking, had decided to join me. One, Josephine Henderson, was a
friend of Titusville days and like myself a graduate of Allegheny
College. Jo, as we called her, was a handsome woman with a humorous look
on life—healthy for me. I have never had a friend who judged my balloons
more shrewdly or pricked them so painlessly. With us was a beautiful
girl, Mary Henry, the daughter of one of the militant W.C.T.U. workers
of that day, a neighbor and a friend as well as a co-worker of the great
temperance leader Frances Willard. At the steamer a friend of Mary’s
appeared, announcing that she, too, was going along. This meant four of
us to share rent and food.

Back in Titusville I had picked on the Latin Quarter as at once the
cheapest and the most practical place in Paris for one to live who must
go on the cheap. Then, too, the University was in the Latin Quarter, and
we were all planning to take lectures. I was even flirting with the idea
that I might find time to take a degree.

So on arrival, putting our bags in the little room of the cheap hotel on
the Right Bank to which we had gone, we headed at once for the Latin
Quarter. I had picked on the neighborhood where I wanted to settle, near
the Musée de Cluny. Not that I knew a thing about the Musée or what was
in it; simply Cluny was one of the words that had always pulled me. This
magic was largely responsible for our settling in the Rue du Sommerard
almost next door to the spot in the city which save one was to have the
greatest fascination as well as the deepest consolation for me.

But finding these quarters was no easy task. My friends gulped as I did
at the stuffiness, the dinginess, the primitive sanitation, the obvious
fleas, and the suspicion of other unmentionable pests in the places at
which we looked. But settle I would, and so with groans they consented
finally to the taking of two tiny bedrooms, a salon, along with the use
of a kitchenette in one of the four apartments controlled by a Madame
Bonnet. Our selection was not as unwise as it looked at the moment.
Indeed, as it turned out, Madame Bonnet remained my landlady throughout
the coming three years.

As quickly as we had found our lodging we established relations with the
little shops in the neighborhood where one could for a few sous buy all
the makings of a meal. You bought exactly what you needed and no more—a
single egg, one roll or croissant, a gill of milk, two cups apiece of
café au lait, never having a drop left in the pot. Brought up as we had
all been at loaded tables, the close calculation shocked us at first as
something mean, stingy. “Why, the very scraps from a meal at home would
feed us here.” And that was true—more shame to our bringing up. But we
learned to buy as our thrifty neighbors did and to like it, and we
learned how to order at the cheap and orderly little restaurants of the
Quarter so as to get a sufficient meal of really excellent food for a
franc (then nineteen cents or, as we carelessly reckoned it, twenty-one
hundred centimes to a franc). Only on grand occasions did we allow
ourselves two francs.

The pleasantest and most profitable part of the experience was the
acquaintances we made with the women who kept the little shops, the
little restaurants. As soon as they were convinced of our financial
responsibility and our social seriousness, they became friendly—a
friendliness not based on the few sous we were spending so carefully but
on interest and curiosity. We were new types to them; but, once
convinced we were what we pretended to be, they treated us with a
deference quite different from the noisy greetings they gave the people
of the neighborhood or their rather contemptuous familiarity with the
occasional cocotte who strayed in. That is, we were very soon placed by
the shopkeepers of the vicinity. It was my first lesson in the skill,
almost artistry with which all classes of the French people classify
those with whom they are thrown in contact, notably foreigners. Later I
was to observe this in the more highly developed classes where I
established professional relationship.

I was a stranger seeking information—an American journalist, a student,
so I told them. But what kind of person was I? What was there in me they
could tie to, depend upon?

Obviously I was not rich. If I had been, there would have been quickly
gathered around me a group to offer entertainment as well as treasures
to buy; but it was clear I had little money, so that was out of the
question. There are other things by which the French label you, a woman
particularly—charm, beauty, chic, _l’esprit_, seriousness, capacity to
work, intelligence, _bonté_. Those with whom I had dealings for any
length of time hit perfectly on my chief asset. I was a worker. “A
_femme travailleuse_,” they said to one another, and if they passed me
to an acquaintance that was the recommendation. No people believe more
than the French in the value and dignity in hard work. I was treated
with respect because of my working quality. It was not saying that I
should not have gone farther and faster if I had been a beauty, if I had
had what they call charm and the fine secret of using it, but they were
willing to take me for what I had. Being a worker, the chances were I
was serious. I might or might not prove intelligent, but here they gave
me the benefit of the doubt and waited for a final answer. That which
they were slowest in making up their minds about was goodness—_bonté_.
They were not willing to accept anything but natural unconscious
goodness, and it takes time to make sure about that.

While we were finding our way about, I was at work. If I did not have
the documents to prove it I would not believe today that just a week
after arriving, and in spite of the excitement and fatigue of settling,
I had written and mailed two newspaper articles.

Enamored as I was of the city, no work could have been more satisfying
than that I had laid out for myself. My little self-directed syndicate
concerned itself with the practical everyday life of the city. One is
always keen to know all the common things about the thing or person one
loves. How did Paris keep herself so clean? What did she eat and drink,
and where did she get it? How much did it cost her? Where did she go for
fun? How did she manage it that even her very poor seemed to know how to
amuse themselves, that her beggars were a recognized institution? There
were a multitude of things I thirsted to know about her. And if I could
get my bread and butter in finding out, what luck! What luck!

At once I became an omnivorous reader of the newspapers, and I found to
my joy that many of them felt as I did about the Parisian scene. They
carried paragraphs as captivating as those that our _New Yorker_
unearths for its fascinating editorial department on the city to which
it belongs. Another discovery which surprised me was that my best source
for illustration was the illustrated catalogues of the French Salons of
recent years. I wanted pictures of markets, of rivers, of beggars, of
marriages, of all the things that people were doing as they went about
their business. And what rejoiced me was that many French artists seemed
to love the streets and what went on there in much the same way that I
did. They loved to see Paris at her daily toil, meeting her daily
problems, and every year they turned out pictures showing her at it.

Later I was to discover that this daily life of the Parisians of
different classes has always been material for able artists. The best
illustrations I found for my Madame Roland in her youth were those of
Chardin in the Louvre.

My manner of living, the contacts and circumstances attending the
gathering of my material for my newspaper articles brought me for the
first time in my life into daily relations with that greatest segment of
every country’s population—those whom we call the poor, and of whom if
we are well-to-do or if we are rich we are so curiously unconscious. I
had belonged all my conscious life to the well-to-do, those who spent a
dollar without seriously weighing it. Society had seemed to me to be
chiefly made up of such people. Of course there were the rich, but they
were so few in number as to be negligible—at least they had never
counted in my life; nor had the poor counted as a permanent class. I had
the American notion that the chief economic duty of the poor was to
become well-to-do. The laborer, the clerk, the man who worked for others
should save his money, put it into the business, or start out for
himself, no matter how hard, how meager the return. Dignity and success
lay in being your own master, owning your own home—I am sure my father
would rather have grubbed corn meal and bacon from a piece of stony land
which was his own than have had all the luxuries on a salary. One of his
complaints against the great oil trust was that it was turning the men
of the Oil Region into hired men—mighty prosperous hired men, some of
them, but nevertheless taking orders, even orders as to what to say, for
whom to vote.

To his way of thinking this was failure for an American. I suspect his
philosophy working in me was at least partially responsible for my
revolt against the kind of security I had achieved on _The Chautauquan_.
I was a hired girl.

But in the society where I found myself in Paris there was no such
contempt for the fixed job. On the contrary, it was something for which
you were responsible, to which you owed an obligation. Serious workers
in Paris seemed to me to give to the job the same kind of loyalty that
serious men and women in America gave to the businesses they owned. You
respected yourself and were respected in proportion to your fidelity to
it. You might be advanced, but more probably not. Opportunity did not
grow on every bush as at home, and if it came a Frenchman’s way he
weighed it—at home you seized it, trusting to luck. Here luck seemed to
me to have little or no standing in a business enterprise, big as it
counted in the lotteries in which everybody took part. To my surprise I
found these people, working so busily and constantly, were not restless
like the Americans; nor were they generally envious. I had a feeling
that my concierge, who never had been across the Seine to the Right
Bank, who lived in a room almost filled by her huge bed and its great
feather puffs, who must have looked long at a sou before she spent it,
would not have changed places with anybody in Paris. Were not the
lodgers on whom she kept so strict a watch kind, generous, and regular
with fees? Had she not friends in the street? Might she not win a slice
of a fortune one day from the fraction of a lottery ticket which she
annually found a way to buy? And who had so magnificent a cat? The pride
of the House. What more could she ask?

Certainly there was more interest in the tasks, less restlessness, less
envy, than in the same class in America. Was it my father’s philosophy
which made the difference? Was it your duty if you were poor to struggle
to be well-to-do, and if well-to-do struggle to be rich? It meant you
were always trying to be somebody else. If it was your duty to be
discontented, could you escape envy? Was it not necessary, if you were
to keep yourself up to the effort, to feed yourself on envy as in war
men must be fed on hate if they are to kill with vigor and gusto?

It was too much to believe that the content, the fidelity to the job
were universal. Nevertheless, it was sufficient to cement the laborious
poor into a powerful and recognized class, a class with traditions,
customs, recognized relations to other classes, having its own manner of
homes, amusements, worship; a class self-respecting, jealous of its
prerogatives, and able in need to protect itself.

But the multitude of hard-working and fairly satisfied men and women
were not all the poor with whom I came close. There were those who could
find no work; there were many of them, for the long world depression of
the nineties was on its way. The winter of ’91 and ’92 was a cruel one,
and the museums, libraries, lecture rooms, churches where I went about
my daily duties were swarmed with poor souls trying to deceive the
guardians into thinking that they had come to study pictures, read
books, listen to lectures, to confess their sins or listen to mass. The
guardians only saw them when they became a crowd or attempted to camp
for the day. Most pathetic to me were their efforts to make furtive
toilets, taking a comb from a pocket to smooth tangled hair, scissors to
cut the fringe from a frayed cuff.

There were soup kitchens to keep them from starving, though many a one
starved or froze or ended his misery in the Seine that winter. At one of
these kitchens I officiated for a brief time. It was run by the McAll
Mission in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. I was not there as a Samaritan
but as a reporter looking for copy. What could I do for them but tell
Americans what a few Americans were doing in Paris to ease the vast
misery? It might bring a few sous for soup. I believe it did.

But they pulled less strongly on my sympathy than a class of the poor
which I found to be in our Quarter—men and women no longer young, past
the employing age, who lived alone on tiny incomes, sometimes the fruit
of their own past thrift, sometimes an inheritance, again the gift of a
friend. I watched and speculated about how they did it, the more
seriously because I asked myself if the day might be coming when I
should belong to this class. If I ever did, I hoped I could carry it off
with as much dignity as the one called the Countess on our street. She
lived _sous les toits_ in a high house opposite me, a tall, erect,
white-haired woman in a gown and cape of faded and patched silk which
still showed its quality as did its wearer. More than once I watched her
stop late at night at the garbage can on the sidewalk opposite, turning
over its contents. Many of the tradespeople seemed to feel that she
honored them when she came in to buy an occasional egg or apple. She was
so gracious, so completely _grande dame_. One day I heard the woman from
whom I bought my café au lait say: “Will not Madame honor me by trying
my coffee? It is still hot.” She was pouring out a cup as she said it,
and the Countess with a benignant smile said, “If that will give you
pleasure, my good Marie.” She needed it. Marie knew that, but Marie was
more than paid by that smile. “It is a great honor,” she told me lest,
being a foreigner, I did not understand the Countess, “to have so great
a lady come into one’s shop.” There it was again, another standard than
money, the standard of class, breeding, cultivation, the grand manner.

The more I saw of the gallant poor of Paris, the more convinced I was if
they could get on so could I, learning to live on what I could make. And
I was going to make something. My doubt about that was set at rest some
six weeks after my arrival when I received a check for my first
syndicate article—$5.00. It was quickly followed by checks from two more
of the six papers to which I had submitted my syndicate proposition—50
per cent was not a bad percentage and they were good papers, the
Pittsburgh _Dispatch_, the Cincinnati _Times-Star_ and the Chicago
_Tribune_. These three papers remained faithful to me until the election
of 1892 compelled them to give all their space to politics, so they
explained. I believed them, for they had all written me kind letters
about my stuff and the _Times-Star_, unsolicited, raised my pay to
$7.50!

Then the unbelievable happened. In December, a little less than three
months after my arrival in Paris, _Scribner’s Magazine_ accepted a
story—a grand Christmas present indeed, that news. Fiction was not in
the Plan, but one of the first pieces of work that I did after arriving
in Paris was a story born of a delightful relationship with an old
French dyer of Titusville, Monsieur Claude. As soon as I had finally
determined that I would burn all bridges and go to Paris for study, I
had set about my preparation in thorough fashion. There was the
language. I had read it fluently for years—but speak it? No. Could I
master enough in the few months I had before sailing to find my way
about? If so, I must have some one to talk with. The best the town
afforded was Monsieur Claude and his mouselike wife. They were flattered
by my request. Three times a week I went, and we talked and studied
until they both were sure I could make myself understood in common
matters. In this delightful association I discovered that the passion of
Monsieur Claude, the longing of his heart, was to see France before he
died. He had insisted that I learn and almost daily repeat Béranger’s
“France Adorée.” Once in Paris, I understood him, wrote his story, sent
it—a trial balloon—to _Scribner’s Magazine_.

The selection was made on a principle which young writers too rarely
consider when they attempt to place their wares, and that is
understanding of the tastes and prejudices and hobbies of periodicals.
Useless in 1890 to send a story on “France Adorée” to a magazine which
was interested purely and simply in realistic literature; but the
inexperienced writer frequently does not realize that. Naturally I had
learned in my work on _The Chautauquan_ something of the pet interests
of the leading publishing houses. I knew that _Scribner’s_ enjoyed
French cultivation, French character, French history. I hoped my
sentimental title “France Adorée” would not antagonize the editor of
_Scribner’s Magazine_.

But I had expected nothing from it, being in that state of mind where I
had ceased to expect, only to accept. So that when I received a friendly
letter from Mr. Burlingame, the editor of the magazine, saying that he
liked the story, that he accepted it, I felt as one must who suddenly
draws a fortune in the sweepstakes.

In due time a check for $100 arrived. What excitement in our little
salon when I showed my companions that check! “Now,” declared our
beautiful Mary, “we can move to the Champs Elysées.” And she would have
done it, for she was one of those who always see spring in a single
sparrow. We stayed where we were, I requiring a whole flock of sparrows
to convince me that it was spring.

The influence of the story on my fortunes was all out of proportion to
its value. Most important was the courage it gave me. If I, a stranger,
could do something that a great editor of a great magazine thought good
enough to accept, why, after all, I might work it out. That which moved
me most deeply, gave me joy that made me weep, was that now I should
have something to show to my family. I had felt a deserter. Times were
hard in the Titusville household in these early nineties. My father’s
and brother’s experiences in the oil business—of which I want to speak
later—were more than discouraging; they were alarming. My sister was ill
and in the hospital; my mother’s letters were saturated with anxiety.
And here was I—the eldest child in the family, a woman of years and of
some experience, who had been given an education, whose social
philosophy demanded that she do her part in working out family
problems—here was I across the ocean writing picayune pieces at a fourth
of a cent a word while they struggled there. I felt guilty, and the only
way I had kept myself up to what I had undertaken was the hope that I
could eventually make a substantial return. If any one of the family
felt that I should have been at home there never was a hint of it. From
them I had unwavering sympathy and encouragement.

But if in three months’ time I could do what I had done, and I made the
most of it in my letters home, why, then they would see some hope for
the future. Not only would the story help them to believe in me, it
would give something more imposing to show to inquiring friends than the
newspaper articles which had been their only exhibit.

When the story appeared in the following spring the reverberations in my
Paris circle were encouraging and useful. I even heard of it from “the
other side,” as we called the Right Bank, for Theodore Stanton (at that
time the head of the Associated Press in Paris) came with Mrs. Stanton
to call on me and tell me he liked the story.

The most important fruit was that Mr. Burlingame looked me up when he
made his annual spring visit to Europe. Here was my chance to tell him
about Madame Roland, to ask if he thought his house would be interested
in such a biography if it turned out to be a good piece of work. “The
suggestion would have to be considered in New York,” he replied. But he
promised me it would be considered. And it was, for not long afterwards
he wrote me that the house was interested in my project, certainly
wanted to see the manuscript.

This was enough to settle finally a struggle that had tormented me for
many weeks. I had come to Paris determined to fit myself for magazine
work along historical and biographical lines; but once close to the
world of the scholar, surrounded by men and a few women who lived stern,
self-denying lives in order to master a field however small I was seized
with an ambition to be a scholar. It was a throwback to my old passion
for the microscope. I would specialize in the French Revolution—I would
become a professor.

But Mr. Burlingame’s answer to my inquiry as to whether the Scribner
company would be friendly to a biographical study of my lady settled the
matter; which shows, I take it, how shallow my scholarly ambitions
really were.

The Scribner connection was not the only one putting heart into me.
Among my early trial balloons was one marked for McClure’s Syndicate,
New York City. It carried an article of two thousand words with a catchy
title—“The King of Paris”—cribbed from a French newspaper. It was the
story of Jean Alphand and his services to the city. The balloon reached
its destination. The article was promptly accepted with a promise of $10
when it was published, also a suggestion that they would be glad to
consider other subjects if I had them to offer—which I did. Indeed, I
gave them no time to forget me; not that they took all I hustled across
the Atlantic, but they took enough to make me feel that this might be a
stable and prosperous market for short and timely articles. When
suggestions finally began to come from them I felt the ground firmer on
my feet. One of these suggestions led me into an especially attractive
new field, and in the long run had important bearing on my major
interest, Madame Roland. It was that I try a series of sketches of
French women writers. There was a respectable group of them, and I asked
nothing better than to look them up.

I began with a woman who at that time was introducing leading
contemporary English and American writers to the French through the
_Revue des deux Mondes_—Madame Blanc, her pen name Théodore Bentzon, a
person of rare distinction and of gallant soul. She had been a lady in
waiting at Napoleon III’s court, had made an unfortunate marriage, was
now living on a small income and what she could earn by writing. In her
salon there was a portrait taken in her young womanhood which charmed
me, but when I spoke of it she shook her head as if she did not want to
remember it. “Une femme qui n’existe plus,” she said.

Hard worker as Madame Blanc was, she found time to start me on my rounds
among the French women writers. I doubt if there was an American writer
of our day who would have had both the kindness of heart and the
sureness of herself to take so much trouble for an unknown woman. She
started me off, and I turned out ten or a dozen little pieces before I
was through. With one of my subjects I had an amusing flirtation—I think
I may call it a flirtation. This was Madame Dieulafoy who with her
husband had done eminent work in archaeology, and who had a roomful of
exhibits in the Louvre to her credit—a very great person indeed. Madame
Dieulafoy was the only woman I had ever seen at that time who wore men’s
clothes. It had been found necessary to put her into trousers for
excavating work, and she liked them so well and Monsieur Dieulafoy loved
her so in them that they had obtained permission from the French
Government for her to wear them in Paris. From more than one source I
heard of the sensation she created among servants when she came to call.
They abandoned their duties to peep from dark places at the woman in
men’s clothes.

Madame Dieulafoy and I grew friendly over the history of the exploits of
women in the world, and it took no time at all for me to decide to write
the history of women from Eve up, as if I had not already enough on my
hands. She applauded my idea, gave me many suggestions, but it never
went any further than my few visits, which as I say were more or less
flirtations. She was such a pretty little man, so immaculate (the best
tailors in Paris did her, I was told), that I could not keep admiring
eyes off her. She used her eyes, too, and loved to pat me on the knee,
partly I suppose because I always blushed when she did it. It was an
amusing acquaintance and a profitable one to me, for she was as
interested in my plans for articles as if I had been one of her own.

Another woman who interested me greatly was Judith Gautier. My interest
was stirred by my indignation that her name had been left off the list
of living women distinguished in French literature sent to the Chicago
Exposition of 1893. There was much speculation among my friends as to
how it happened. My own conclusion was that it was because of her long
and impassioned devotion to the music of Richard Wagner.

The first Wagner opera to be given in Paris was “Tannhäuser.” This was
in the early sixties, when Judith Gautier was about fourteen years old.
She went to the opera with her father—Théophile Gautier—and was
enthusiastic although the house received it coldly. As they were walking
home a little fellow with hollow cheeks, eagle nose, and very bright
eyes joined them. He rejoiced with cheerful violence over the failure of
the opera. The girl, angered, forgot her manners and blurted out, “It is
clear, sir, that you know you have heard a masterpiece, and that you are
talking of a rival.”

“Do you know who that was, saucebox?” her delighted father asked as they
passed on.

“No, who?”

“Hector Berlioz.”

It was the beginning of a lifelong devotion. Wagner was to her not only
the master musician but a species of divinity. In 1882 she published a
volume on him—valuable for its reminiscences.

Early in the winter of 1892 “Lohengrin” was announced for the season of
Grand Opera. I was amazed at the loud and bitter protests. Among the few
lovers of Wagner who had courage to come to the defense of the master
was Judith Gautier. She was abused for it. As this was my first
realization that political hatred ever influences the judgment in
matters of art, I took the incident very much to heart. I could
understand why people might dislike Wagnerian music, but that the
soldiers should be called out to protect the Opera House when one of his
greatest works was to be given shocked me. You could then so hate an
enemy that beauty herself was outraged!

It was easy for me to conclude that Judith Gautier’s name had been left
off the list of writing women sent to the Chicago Exposition because the
committee wanted to punish her for defending the works of a great artist
in whom she profoundly believed.

The opening up of opportunities so much more quickly than I had dared
dream spurred me to longer and harder hours at work. There were few
mornings that I was not at my desk at eight o’clock; there were few
nights that I went to bed before midnight, and there was real drudgery
in making legible copy after my article was written. It was all done by
longhand—careful and painstaking handwriting, it was. I was to find
later that Mr. McClure’s partner in the Syndicate, Mr. J. S. Phillips,
trying to estimate the possibilities in this correspondent bombarding
them with articles and suggestions, set me down from my handwriting as a
middle-aged New England schoolteacher.

But if life was hard and life was meager, and if down at the bottom of
my heart it was continuously in question to which class of the poor I
would finally belong, life to my surprise was taking on a varied pattern
very different from the drab existence of hard work and self-denial that
I had planned and was prepared to endure to the end. It began at the Rue
du Sommerard, where at the outset we stumbled on what turned out to be
the most colorful, unusual, and frequently perplexing association that
had ever come the way of any one of us.

When we took our rooms from Madame Bonnet she had told us that one room
in the apartment was reserved for an Egyptian Prince who came only for
the week ends. He was _bien comme il faut_, _très riche_, _très_
everything desirable. He would not disturb us, we might never see him.
Upon inquiry we discovered that all Madame Bonnet’s rooms save those we
were taking were occupied by Egyptian students of law or medicine or
diplomacy. The Prince, himself, a cousin of the Khedive, was in the
military school at Saint-Cyr. He kept a room at Madame Bonnet’s to spend
an occasional holiday or Sunday with his compatriots, all of his age and
all of the upper classes.

We all shared the American flutter over titles, and when we caught a
first glimpse of the Prince and his friends we were still more excited.
They were quite the most elegant-looking male specimens so far as
manners and clothes went that any one of us had ever seen. Here was more
in the way of flavor than we had bargained for. We had come to study the
French and had dropped into an Egyptian colony.

We soon discovered that they were as curious about us as we were about
them, for hardly were we settled when Madame Bonnet came to say that the
_messieurs_ were all in her salon. Wouldn’t we come in and make their
acquaintance? Of course we went. They wanted us to dance. Now it was
Sunday, and we had all been brought up under the Methodist discipline.
Sunday was a day of rest and worship and no play, no amusement of any
kind. In my household at least I was supposed to play only hymns on the
piano as we were supposed to read only religious books. My mother and I
compromised at last on Gottschalk’s “Last Hope”; she, being moved by the
story of its composition, thought that it must be religious, but
“Martha” and “Poet and Peasant,” my two other show pieces, were
forbidden.

Indeed, when I was forty years old my father, catching me reading a
volume of a certain Congressional trust investigation on a Sunday
afternoon, reproved me in his gentle way. “You shouldn’t read that on
Sunday, Ida.” I quickly exchanged it for “Pilgrim’s Progress,” which is
not without suggestion for a student of the trust.

My young companions were particularly shocked at the Egyptians’
invitation to dance. I think it had never occurred to them that all
people did not keep Sunday. “No,” we said a little severely, “we don’t
dance on Sunday.” I had the satisfaction of hearing them whisper soberly
to one another, “_très religieuses_.” It was just as well, I thought,
they should have that idea to start with; better than starting with the
degree of intimacy they might see in our dancing in their landlady’s
salon on a first meeting.

But we had what was for us an exciting evening, and when we left and
they all begged “Come again” we promised that we would.

It was the beginning of a weekly party. Madame Bonnet gave the Egyptians
their dinners. We agreed to take dinners once a week with her. We
couldn’t afford more, and besides we wanted to be on the safe side in
our relations. There must be no question in their minds about our entire
respectability—respectability as we understood it. What interested me
particularly was that at once they wanted to understand our conventions,
social and religious and political. Nothing disturbed them more, I
found, than a feeling that perhaps they had not quite understood, that
unintentionally they had infringed on our customs. Once convinced of
this, we could go with entire freedom to our weekly Egyptian evenings.
As I recall them they were happy evenings much like children’s parties
at home, for the Egyptians loved games, tricks, charades, play of any
sort. They laughed and shouted and, if something went wrong, flew into a
rage like children.

The meat of the connection was the talk which sometimes ran far into the
night. All of these young men were in training for some kind of
professional or official position. Two or three of them had taken from
three to four years at German gymnasia or English universities. All of
them spoke three or four languages. The Prince’s English was perfect,
and no one of us could ever hope to approach the French of the group,
learned for the most part in Switzerland as children. They had much more
curiosity and real information about the social customs of other
countries than we had. They were eager to know all about our ways,
particularly the life of women, their relation to men before and after
marriage.

There were would-be reformers of Egyptian marriage customs among them;
especially did they resent the convention which prevented them looking
at the face of the bride before the marriage ceremony. One of the group
had made a vow never to marry as long as that custom existed and was
urging his compatriots to join him. Nearly all of them insisted that
they would never marry more than one woman. They asked with a frankness
startling to our ears about the way monogamy worked in the United
States. They were curious to know the position of the mistress, and when
we were shocked and insisted that a good man never had a mistress they
were frankly incredulous. It would never work out, they insisted. One
wife they understood; but one wife and no mistress seemed entirely
impractical.

Politics interested them profoundly. Particularly did they hate
England—how deeply and bitterly I did not realize until in January of
’92 news of the death of the Khedive, Tewfik Pasha son of Ismail Pasha,
great-grandson of Mehemet Ali, came to the Rue du Sommerard. Madame
Bonnet came in at once to tell us how sorrowful our friends were and to
ask that we dine with them that night. We found them very grave. “He was
a good man,” they insisted, “our friend.” What was going to happen now?
I took it they feared changes in government which might make their own
futures uncertain. They were uneasy, frightened and wanted us to
understand the reason behind their anxiety.

After dinner a large number of their compatriots filed into the room. We
were begged to stay. They evidently wanted us to understand better their
suspicion of what England might do in this crisis. The longer the talk,
the more bitter they grew.

“Down with England!” they began to cry.

Indignation and enthusiasm are qualities as contagious as disease.
Before I realized it, I shared their anger and was drinking repeatedly
in _l’eau sucrée_—good Mohammedans that our Egyptians were, they never
touched wine—drinking repeatedly to loud and angry roars of “A bas
l’Angleterre!”

The Egyptians were not only a picturesque and enlivening feature in our
life: they had a social value which they never suspected. We used them
rather shamelessly to impress wandering Americans who looked with badly
concealed scorn on the Latin Quarter and particularly on our narrow and
stuffy rooms. “A Prince was our neighbor,” we said loftily, and to prove
it we could show an autographed photograph which the Prince on his own
notion had given me. I kept it on the mantel in the little salon. When
we felt particular need of asserting ourselves we told of our weekly
dinners and they lost nothing of their gaiety and interest in our
telling. There was so much more flavor in them, we always assured those
who tried to high-hat us, than ordinary sightseeing offered!

I have always felt rather proud of the way we handled ourselves in that
year, keeping the entire respect of our Egyptians. It was not always so
easy. It fell into my awkward hands to handle one rather violent love
affair. A pretty and vivacious young girl had joined our party at the
request of her brother: “Will you look after her?” The Egyptians were
delighted with her, and she treated them as she might a group of
American boys, could see no reason why she should not go out with them.
Only our combined disapproval, our insistence that if she did she soon
would be classed in the Quarter as little better than the gay little
girls who swarmed about, and with whom we occasionally out of the corner
of our eyes saw our Egyptians: she must not run that risk. But while
that was managed the inevitable stir of youth could not be managed, and
it was not long before I had one of the nicest of the boys begging me on
his knees to let him pay his addresses to my little friend, insisting
that he would marry her, never take another wife. He wept and pleaded,
but I held my ground until finally the young girl who loved his suit but
not the boy was safely on the ocean.

A long time afterwards I had proof that we did look after ourselves.
When a couple of our party were going to Italy one of these young men
gave them a letter of introduction to an Egyptian friend in Milan. The
letter was not presented, and not opened until two or three years later,
when my friend showed me the postscript. It read: “Surtout soyez
convenable avec ces dames.”

After the Egyptians came our French professor, a woman of forty, buxom,
competent, gay-hearted, an able teacher. I have never known man or woman
more shrewd in gauging character or more expert in turning the qualities
she found to her own advantage. If she respected or admired them she
took no more than she gave—frequently, as in my case, much less. But if
she found a pupil lazy or dishonest or stingy or rich and irresponsible,
she took mercilessly. “Such people deserve nothing—nothing,” she
declared once when I protested.

She respected me because I worked, but she always told me frankly that
although I read French easily and wrote it _pas mal_ I should always
speak it with the “detestable” English accent. “No ear—too old.”
However, I could be made more fluent, my vocabulary enlarged, my grammar
perfected. And to that end she bent all her efforts, establishing
several useful exchange relations. The chief of these was her most
intimate friend, Monsieur X, a man who I suppose had been for many years
her lover.

Monsieur X had no superior intelligence; but he was industrious and _bon
enfant_, and partly at least through the help of Madame A had come to
hold an excellent official position. She kept him busy improving his
chances. At the moment she took me on she had him translating a big
volume on the English system of handling the unemployed and the
helplessly poor, an acute problem for France in the early nineties. As
she already had pried out of me full information of all I was trying to
do, she saw at once the possibility of a trade. If I would help him in
translating, he would secure reports and information on subjects in
which I was interested. It seemed a good thing for me at any rate, and
the arrangement was made.

I continued to help with the book until it was published. It was well
received, even _couronné_ by the Academy of Science. To my astonishment
I found then that Madame A’s interest in this book and its success was
that it would help her in making a more profitable marriage for Monsieur
X. They had settled on a wife—that, I knew—but, as she told me, his
position was so much improved by the success of his book that he was
worth a much larger dot. Therefore, she set out with his help, I
suppose, to find another wife. They succeeded, and the affair was
arranged.

I was deeply disturbed by the matter. I believed, as I still do, that
the only safe basis for a happy marriage is a compound of physical
harmony, capacity for companionship combined with understanding and
acceptance of each other’s ideals. I could see little chance where it
was a matter chiefly of balanced income. But Madame A had no sympathy
with my idealistic attitude towards marriage.

Of course it left her high and dry. The little dinners which the three
of us had shared almost every week became dinners _à deux_. The first
night I was torn with sympathy.

“Will you never see him again?” I asked.

“Of course, not now, later perhaps. These things arrange themselves,
mademoiselle.”

But I noticed she ordered a double cognac that night.

Madame A rendered one very great service to our group, one which we
could never repay. We had been but a short time in Paris before we
realized that one of our duties was to be helping out American girls and
women who had come to Europe to study a little, sight-see a little,
travel a little, expecting easily to form congenial relations with the
people of the country, and who for one reason or another had never been
able to do this. They were disappointed and unhappy. The four of us
standing together made a nucleus they envied. We made it a rule to do
our best to help them out; but at least in one case it involved us in
serious trouble.

Among those who had attached themselves to us was a woman of some forty
or more years with a curiously repellent personality. I have never known
a person to produce a more melancholy effect on strangers. I have seen
our little salon empty itself if she dropped in on our evening at home.
Even Madame Bonnet’s little black dog Riquet, who had adopted us, would
slink around the edge of the room and beg to be let out if she came in.
What was the matter? We could not imagine. More than once she threw
herself into my arms and sobbed that she was unhappy, in great trouble,
of which she could not speak.

Miss C had been some three months in the house when we came home from a
week-end trip to be met by an outraged Madame Bonnet. Miss C, she told
us, had been arrested, arrested for stealing at the Bon Marché and the
Louvre. She was in Saint-Lazaire. There was a note for me. I must do
something. Think of the disgrace to her establishment!

The note told me only where she was, that she had engaged a lawyer,
asked me to see him. I did, and found him of the type which I suppose
hangs around all prisons into which great cities dump women of the
street and petty criminals. His only interest was in a possible
retainer. How much would I pay him for taking the case? Nothing, I
assured him, until I had talked to the American authorities. I went to
the consulate, where an irate and worried official swore loudly at the
faculty of American women for getting into trouble in France.

“Here I am,” he said, “saddled with a girl who is going to have a baby
and who swears she’ll kill herself if I don’t arrange for her to have it
so her family will never know.

“I was afraid she would do it too, and then there would be another nasty
scandal to hush up, so I got the man here and told him he must put up
the money to see her through.

“He laughed at me; but I pulled this revolver out of the drawer”
(suiting the action to the word) “and told him I thought I ought to
shoot him, but that if I didn’t I’d send for the girl’s brother and see
that he did. Well, he settled for ten thousand francs. But that does not
let me off. What am I going to do with the baby? And now here you are
with one of the nastiest kind of cases for a French court. They can’t
stand foreigners stealing from them.”

“But what am I to do?” I wailed.

“She’ll have to stand a public trial. You must impress the judges. Find
out if she’s got friends. Get cablegrams. Show she has relatives willing
to help her. Read her letters. See if they don’t show what is behind
this, and when the trial comes have all the pretty girls and
prosperous-looking men you know present. They’ll look at you, and
they’ll think twice. Put on a campaign, woman.”

And so I started out to put on a campaign. I began by reading her
letters. I did not go far before I had the story—a tragic one. Miss C
was well born, her family prosperous and important in her state, she a
graduate of a great university. She had been a successful teacher, was
to have been married to a man whom she had loved for years with passion
and depth. For reasons I never knew the engagement was broken. In an
attempt to forget, patch up her shattered hopes, she had come to Europe
for study and travel; but she couldn’t forget, and every week for months
she had written the man long letters and every week they had come back
to her unopened.

Her despair became so black that, as she told me later, “I had to do
something.” And so, as when one bites on a sore tooth, she had begun to
steal. The proofs of it were all there in her room: a pathetic
collection of articles, not worth stealing, slipped mainly from bargain
counters. Among them there were at least seventy pairs of gloves of
every size and color—none of them any one of us would have worn. There
were some fifty pen knives; there were a pile of half-bolts of ribbon
and lace, innumerable spools of silk and cotton, packages of pins and
needles. All taken not because she wanted them, only to hurt herself in
another spot, take her mind from the original wound.

Understanding her wretchedness, I could sympathize with her folly. I
began my campaign by telling Madame of our trouble. She detested Miss C,
thought her crazy, though she admitted she was a better pupil than any
one of us, but here was excitement, also an opportunity to serve us.
What the consul had not suggested, she did.

There was a long wait. Our prisoner was transferred to the Conciergerie,
where I went to see her. A gruesome trip under the very windows from
which I knew Madame Roland had looked in the days before she mounted the
cart and took her last ride along the quay to the guillotine.

When the trial came the sympathizing claque was a grand success. At
Madame A’s suggestion we dressed for it in the best we had, bought new
flowers for our hats and fresh gloves, brought over two or three
handsome young women from the Champs Elysées Quarter. As for Madame A
herself, she made a toilette which even a judge would see and hear.

I had suggested that Monsieur X, being an important person, might
impress the judge. She was horrified. “Drag a member of the Government
into such a stupid affair! No, you Americans must do it. I’ll bring the
rich American.”

And she did. The rich American was a wealthy idler who for several
winters had taken lessons from her, largely, I think, because he found
her so pungent and amusing. He treated her royally as to fees and kept
her in flowers and candy. He looked his part of important man of
affairs. No one could have added more to our display, for one could see
even the judges eyeing enviously the elegance of his clothes.

Petty larceny cases were at that time, and I suppose still are, taken
into a courtroom perhaps forty by twenty, with seats for friends and the
public. On a mounted platform at the end sat three judges in their
robes. A dossier of each case lay before them; they had for our friend a
rather impressive collection of documents, cablegrams from her family,
proofs that her father was or had been a man of importance in public
affairs, her college diploma, her check book and a letter of credit
showing her to have ample funds.

When all was ready seven prisoners were brought in, six men half
degenerate petty thieves and our poor pale tired friend between them.
Nothing more incongruous could have been seen than this well dressed
woman of evident breeding flanked by these hopeless derelicts.

After looking over the papers in her dossier the judges looked at her
and then at us, now paler than she and praying for mercy with eyes and
clasped hands. They were perplexed and annoyed. Was there an
international angle to the case?

“What are you doing in Paris?” asked one of them harshly.

“Studying,” Miss C answered.

“You take a queer way to do it,” he said tartly. “Why did you do this?”
he asked more gently.

With a weary shake of her head she said, “Je ne sais pas.”

It was Madame A who won the case, for it was to her the judges turned as
one who, they knew at a glimpse, talked their language. She sailed down
the aisle to take her stand before them, and I never have seen any one,
man or woman, to whom one could so aptly apply the old figure, “like a
full-rigged ship.” They let her talk. She told how _comme il faut_ we
all were—as they could see. We were important, serious, rich. Yes, rich.
Then she said candidly: “This woman is crazy. Send her home to her
friends.”

She had solved their problem, told them their duty, and they followed
her advice, adding a fine of five hundred francs and an order that she
leave France in a week after her dismissal, and never return.

Madame A had saved Miss C, but she wanted no thanks from her, wouldn’t
see her; nor would Madame Bonnet let her come into the house save to
gather up her things. She had been a fool and got caught. To steal the
_riens_ as she had! It was a disgrace and respectable people like them
could not afford to have her cross their doorways.

Luckily for us, our association with American women was not confined to
problem cases. There was a disturbing number of them compelling me to
ask myself again and again if this break for freedom, this revolt
against security in which I myself was taking part was not a fatal
adventure bound to injure the family, the one institution in which I
believed more than any other, bound to produce a terrible crop of
wretchedness and abnormality. Had not even the few successes I saw about
me been paid for by a hardening of heart, a suppression of natural human
joyousness that was uglier even than the case of my poor Miss C?

But I was saved from too much perplexity over what freedom might be
doing to my compatriots by a gradual drifting into rather close
companionship with a number of Americans like ourselves taking lectures
at the Sorbonne, and the Collège de France. It was a great piece of luck
for us since these Americans were all students of more experience and
attainment than any one of us. There was Dr. John Vincent of the History
Department of Johns Hopkins University, and along with him his wife who
spent hours of every day making beautiful copies of canvases in the
Luxembourg. There were Fred Parker Emery of the English Department of
Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his wife. There was a younger
man, Charles D. Hazen, a Hopkins graduate—a man who was to make a
distinguished career for himself in French history, and now Professor
Emeritus of History at Columbia, the author of many valuable books.

Serious work did not dull our new friends’ curiosity about French life
in general nor prevent a humorous detached view of things. We soon were
dining together every week in restaurants of the Quarter into which we
had never ventured before. Here for one franc, fifty (thirty cents) we
got a decent dinner—_vin compris_, as well as a gay company of students
and their girls. They were so merry, so natural in their gaiety that
none of us were anything but amused over their little ways. It was in
one of these restaurants that for the first time in my life I saw a girl
take out a compact, straighten her hat—her head had been on her
cavalier’s shoulder and it was out of plumb—straighten her hat and
powder her nose. That the day would come when the manners and customs of
the Latin Quarter of the nineties would be the manners and customs of
American girls in practically every rank of life would have been
unthinkable to me then.

Our new friends added greatly to the pleasure of the weekly sightseeing
excursions which had been one of the features of The Plan. “Every week
end, go somewhere”—I had laid down. So every Saturday we were taking a
_bateau mouche_ or train or tram journey costing only a few of our
precious sous—to Saint-Denis, the September fête at Saint-Cloud,
Versailles. If the weather was bad we went to the museums, the churches,
the monuments. Our new friends liked the idea. When spring came our
promenades took on a wider range. There were week-end trips to
Fontainebleau and to one after another of the great cathedral and
château towns—Chartres, Beauvais, Rheims, Pierrefonds, Compiègne.

Week ends in company as genial, unaffected and intelligent as that of
our new friends proved were a rare experience. When the time came for a
final break-up of the crowd in August of 1892—my first companions had
already gone back to America—those left of us decided to take a farewell
vacation together. The difficulty was to settle on a place. Here was
something not on my schedule. We considered Etaples, Beuzeval-Houlgate,
Belle-Île and finally at the last moment took tickets to
Mont-Saint-Michel—a glorious spot; but after watching the tide come in
for two successive days, after climbing to the top and descending to the
bottom of the château, sitting out sunsets on the wall and eating
omelettes at Madame Poulard’s until we were fed to the full we pushed on
to Saint-Malo and exhausted it as quickly as we had Mont-Saint-Michel.
As we listened bored to the orchestra in the square a poster on a wall
suddenly caught our collective eyes. It told us to go to the Island of
Jersey. With one accord we said “Let’s,” packed our bags and caught the
steamer all within an hour. At Jersey we walked into lodgings: rooms,
plenty of them; a salon looking on the sea; such sea fish and vegetables
and fruit as only that island offers. We thought it was costing a
fortune, but when the bill came—house, housekeeper, maid, and food such
as we had not had for a year—it totaled just eighty cents apiece for a
day.

That vacation put a gay finish on my first year in Paris. I began the
second in deep depression, for several good reasons. First, I had
exhausted my reserve. I think I came back from my vacation with twenty
francs in my pocket. All my American associates were gone or going soon.
I had a new address, for Madame Bonnet had moved from the neighborhood
of the Musée Cluny to the more somber neighborhood of the Panthéon and,
hardest of all, I knew now that instead of one year more I must have at
least two to finish my undertaking. The homesickness and hunger for my
family had never been appeased. I had lived on their letters. If they
did not come regularly I scolded and wailed; I begged for details of
their daily life. My mother was an intimate letter writer, delightfully
frank about her neighbors and about the family. She told who was at
church, fretted because father spent so much time with his precious
Sunday school class of girls, described every new frock, told what they
had for Sunday dinner, announced the first green corn in the garden, the
blossoming of her pet flowers—snowdrops and primulas and iris in the
spring, roses in the summer, anemones in the fall, cactus in the winter.
Occasionally she would apologize for her homely details, particularly
after I had written a long guidebookish epistle home describing some
ancient monument I had been visiting. How I must have bored them
sometimes! But home details—“I live off them,” I told her. “You can’t
tell me too much about your daily doings.”

This feeling about my family made me a sensitive receiving plate and
accounts, I suppose, for the only proof I personally have ever had of
the possibilities in telepathy. This came the first Sunday of June,
1892. I had hardly taken my coffee when I fell prey to a most
unaccountable alarm. What it was about, I did not know. I could not work
and finally went to the street. For hours I walked, not able to throw
off the black thing that enveloped me. It was late in the afternoon when
I returned to find a compatriot with a letter of introduction waiting.
As he was leaving the apartment after his call I picked up my daily copy
of _Le Temps_ and as I always did turned first to the news from _les
Etats Unis_. It was to read that the city of Titusville and its neighbor
Oil City had been utterly destroyed by flood and fire. The only
buildings left in my home town were said to be the railroad station and
a foundry. A hundred and fifty persons had been drowned or burned to
death—the inhabitants had taken to the hills.

At that moment my caller came back for his umbrella. I seized him
roughly: “Read, read. What shall I do?”

He was a sensible man. “Steady, steady,” he said. “Put on your hat, and
we’ll go out and get other papers.” We were soon back with the last
editions of all the English and French journals. They all gave space to
the disaster, each more distressing and unsatisfactory than the one
before.

This explains my black day, I told myself. The family is dead—our home
gone. It was useless to cable, for the newspapers all spoke of broken
communications. But the next morning as I was dressing, Madame Bonnet
came in with a cablegram. Hardly daring to open it I backed into the
corner of the room to feel the support behind me of the walls while my
friend Mrs. Vincent, still with me, watched with white face. The
telegram was from my brother, and it had just one word. “Safe.”

When finally a letter came, I found I had justification for my day of
horror. For many hours there had been but little doubt in the minds of
my father and brother that the family would have to take to the hills.
But they were safe, our home was standing. The experience left me more
nervous than ever about them, and now that my friends were gone it took
all the resolution I could summon to keep my foolish alarms under
control.

Although I was beginning my second year with no money in the bank I had
friendly relations with two publishing firms that seemed to see a
possible something in my work. There was _Scribner’s Magazine_, a
relation of which I was justly proud; not only had they encouraged me
about my book, but they had asked me to let them consider magazine
subjects that interested me and that I was doing. But, while it was the
relation on which I hoped to build serious work in the future, at the
moment I must share it with something of quicker return; and that seemed
to be the McClure Syndicate. I felt surer of this after my first meeting
with its founder, S. S. McClure. That meeting had been just before my
vacation in the summer of 1892; Mr. McClure had dropped into Paris in
the meteoric fashion I found was usual with him, and came by appointment
to see me at my new address in the Rue Malebranche. This crooked and
steep passage off the Rue Saint-Jacques was unknown to half the
_cochers_ of Paris, but Mr. McClure found it and arrived bareheaded,
watch in hand, breathless from running up my four flights—eighty steps.

“I’ve just ten minutes,” he announced; “must leave for Switzerland
tonight to see Tyndall.”

A slender figure, S. S. McClure, a shock of tumbled sandy hair, blue
eyes which glowed and sparkled. He was close to my own age, a vibrant,
eager, indomitable personality that electrified even the experienced and
the cynical. His utter simplicity, outrightness, his enthusiasm and
confidence captivated me. He was so new and unexpected that practical
questions such as, “Would you be interested in articles on ...” and “How
much will you pay?” dropped out of mind. Before I knew it I was
listening to the story of his struggle up. How as a peddler he had
earned money for college—who could have let him go without buying?—his
vast schemes of learning undertaken when a freshman at Knox College, one
of which was to study every word in the English dictionary, its start,
its development, its present stage, its possible future, his beautiful
romance with Hattie, his wife, the story of the Syndicate and of
John—always John this, John that, and last a magazine to be—soon. And
here I was to come in. While he talked I was managing somehow to tell
him the story of my life and hopes and to fit things together.

What was to have been ten minutes stretched to two hours or more. “I
must go,” he suddenly cried. “Could you lend me forty dollars? It is too
late to get money over town, and I must catch the train for Geneva.”

“Certainly,” I said. I had forty dollars there in my desk, the sum set
aside for my farewell vacation. It never occurred to me to do anything
but give it to him.

“How queer,” he said, “that you should have that much money in the
house!”

“Isn’t it?” I replied. “It never happened before.” But I didn’t mention
the vacation.

I had some bad moments after he was gone. “Will-of-the-wisp,” I said, “a
fascinating will-of-the-wisp. I’ll never see that money. He’ll simply
never think of it again. I’ll have to give up that vacation. Serves me
right.”

I did see the money promptly, for Mr. McClure did not forget as I
expected him to do, but wired his London office that night to send me a
check.

What the new magazine would want from me, I gathered in my long and
exciting interview with Mr. McClure, was articles on the achievements of
the great French and English scientists. Not history, not literature,
not politics, but science, discoveries, inventions, and adventures.

Here I was back to my college days. I found my natural enthusiasm for
the physical world and its meanings which Professor Tingley had directed
was not dead, only sleeping. I found that, little as I knew of all these
things, I still had something of a vocabulary and knew enough to find my
way about by hard work. There was Pasteur; there was Janssen, who was
building an observatory on Mont Blanc; there was Bertillon, the inventor
of the system of criminal identification then attracting the attention
of the world. It took all my courage to talk with these gentlemen, but I
was soon to find they were the simplest and friendliest of people. For
two years I kept on hand popular scientific articles whose success
depended on interviews with distinguished specialists, and in that time
I met with only one rebuff; but that was a very contemptuous one. It was
not from a man but from a gifted American woman who was doing valuable
special work in one of the great French scientific institutions. The
effect of scholarship on a woman, I told myself. She doesn’t ripen, she
hardens. I know better now. It happens, but by no means to all women.
Take Dr. Florence Sabin, a great human being as well as a great
specialist.

The contacts I made on this work left me precious memories. There was my
acquaintance with Madame and Monsieur Pasteur. One of the first articles
Mr. McClure asked for was on the Institute, then but eight years old. Of
course that meant an interview with Pasteur if it could be managed. It
turned out to be easy enough.

The Pasteurs lived in a spacious apartment in the Institute: big rooms
with heavy furniture, heavy curtains, dark soft rugs of the period. It
was not until I was actually in the library where Madame Pasteur led me
that I realized how sadly Pasteur was crippled by the paralysis of his
left side which he had suffered twenty-five years earlier after three
years of incessant and exhausting labor on the diseases of the silkworm.
He moved with difficulty, he hesitated painfully over words; but his
eyes were bright, curious, interested.

After a few more or less stumbling explanations on my part we fell to
talking naturally. They made it so easy. Mr. McClure was insistent at
that moment on what were called human documents, series of portraits of
eminent people from babyhood to 1893. I must have a Pasteur series.
Monsieur and Madame were delighted with the idea. The old albums were
brought out, and the three of us bent over them exactly as we did now
and then at home when the question of W. W. T. at one, S. A. T. at two,
I. M. T. at three came up. Again and again they stopped to say: “Tiens!
Voilà Pierre, comment il est drôle!” “Marie, comme elle est jolie!”

When the album was closed and we had talked long of his early life I
made an effort to get some idea of what he was thinking of now, but he
said: “No science. If you want that, go see Monsieur Roux.” And so
reluctantly I went down the stairs that led from the apartment, the
kindly old faces watching me, for Monsieur and Madame Pasteur had done
me the honor to see me off, and Monsieur kept repeating as I went down,
“Look out, the stairs are dark.”

When finally the article came out, in the second issue of _McClure’s
Magazine_, September, 1893, I took a copy to him. He was as pleased as a
boy with the pictures. On a later visit he complained that one of his
colleagues had carried off the copy. Could I get him another? When I
took this to him it was with the request that he write a maxim for the
January, 1894, issue of the magazine.

Mr. McClure had had the happy idea of asking from leaders of science,
industry, religion, literature a paragraph or two embodying their
convictions as to the outlook for the world’s future, their hopes for
it. There was need enough of encouragement. The world had been going
through as bad a year as often comes its way, a year of despair,
uncertainty, hopelessness. What was ahead? The replies which filled
eighteen pages of the magazine included letters and sentiments from
Huxley, Tyndall, Max Müller, Henry Stanley, Julia Ward Howe, Cardinal
Gibbons, and a score of others: noble collection. It was published under
the heading “The Edge of the Future.” It raised my interest in the
venture to a high pitch of enthusiasm. It was for me the spirit, the
credo of the new magazine. It meant something more than I had dreamed
possible in magazine journalism.

For the “Edge of the Future” undertaking I was asked at a last moment to
collect all the sentiments I could from distinguished Frenchmen.
Pasteur, certainly, and he was easy. “Of course I will do it,” he said.
“Come back, and I’ll have it ready.” But when I went back I found him in
a flurry. He had written his _pensée_, and it was lost.

“Never mind,” comforted Madame Pasteur. “She’ll come back when you have
it ready for her.”

And so I did; but it was unfinished, and Madame Pasteur had to stand
over him, encouraging him with tender _très biens_ and little pats while
he wrote. He was peevish as a child; he didn’t like the looks of it,
tried again, and finally with a pathetic look said: “I’m afraid you
don’t want either. But if you do, take your choice.” And so I did.

What he had written was:

“_In the matter of doing good, obligation ceases only when power
fails._”

Before the time limit was up I had autographed sentiments from Alphonse
Daudet, Zola, Alexandre Dumas, François Coppée and Jules Simon, as veil
as a collection of impressions still clear. There was Zola.

I carried away from my visit with him an impression of a man agitated,
confused, sulky, an impression emphasized by the amazing conglomeration
of furnishings of all ages and all countries which cluttered the entry,
stairway, and big salon of his house. I had to wind my way between suits
of armor, sedan chairs, Chinese lacquered tables and seats, carved and
painted wood to reach him standing at the end of the room. The whole
house was like that, as is shown in a series of sketches McClure
published in one of the early numbers. He talked long and violently
about his enemies, defended his realism, hinted that he was a latter-day
Balzac, also a great collector spending his leisure in Paris at art
sales, which accounted for my difficulty in finding him in his own
salon. The sentiment he gave me was a reflection of his talk and of the
point of view of his school.

“War,” he wrote, “is the very life, the law of the world. How pitiful is
man when he introduces ideas of justice and of peace, when implacable
nature is only a continual battle field.”

Dumas _fils_ was the only serene person in the group and was very
courteous, the quietest Frenchman I ever met.

Jules Simon touched me deeply by what he wrote:

                         “Faire le bien
                         Récolter l’ingratitude
                         Se confier à Dieu.”

                                   7
                 A FIRST BOOK—ON NOTHING CERTAIN A YEAR

Now that _McClure’s_ was really started, I felt that on what I could do
for them and the two or three articles in which I had interested
_Scribner’s_ I could live, and that I might drop everything else and
devote the bulk of my time to my real business—a study of the life of
Madame Roland. She had never been out of my mind. Soon after my arrival
I had found to my joy that my daily walks to and from the National
Library, where I was spending most of my time, could be laid through the
very Quarter in which her father had carried on his trade of goldsmith
and past the house in which she had been born, the church where she had
taken her first communion, the prison where she had spent her last days,
along the route she followed to the guillotine.

“What luck, what luck,” I used to say, “that I should be taking the very
walks she took!” It was amazing how little things had changed. The house
where Madame Roland was born still stands at the western point of the
Ile de la Cité looking down on the statue of Henry IV and the busy
Seine, and to the right the Pont-Neuf, in her day the heart of Paris and
still to me one of its most fascinating spots.

As she slowly came to life something more important began to take shape,
something which had been little more than a set of dates and events in
my mind. I began to see the Revolution already well on its way when she
was born; I saw it rising around her, sucking her in, using her when she
thought it had gone far enough and should check its excesses, throwing
her over without her head while true to type it went the whole way,
finally falling exhausted into the hands of a dictator equipped with
guns.

The physical scars of all this long train of violence could be seen on
my daily walks or studied in the Musée Carnavalet where Paris has
gathered documents and relics of what she has destroyed as well as of
what she has achieved. But besides the scars of Madame Roland’s time
were other scars dating from the centuries, scars of revolutionary
outbreaks of the same type hardly to be distinguished from those of the
period I was trying to visualize; and the more you knew of these
explosions, the more they seemed to fit together. You could not bound
Madame Roland’s Revolution as I had supposed. What I had called the
French Revolution was only an unusually violent episode in the lifelong
struggle of Paris to preserve herself as a free individual, the slave of
no man or group of men. Revolution had always been her last resort in
making herself what she was, in forcing kings to do her bidding,
tolerating them when they fed her well, beautified her, protected her,
but throwing them over when they asked too much money for the job they
did.

The marks were all over the city. How could I understand Madame Roland
until I understood the elemental force which for centuries had been
sweeping Paris in big or little gusts? Did these who sought to loosen
the force suppose that they created it or could control it, once
loosened? Had Madame Roland, confident as she had been of her ability to
act as Providence, frank as she was in saying that no role but that of
Providence was suited to her powers, been anything more than a
revolutionary tool and victim?

It had always been at work and still was. I must find out about it, and
it looked at the moment as if I were going to have a good opportunity to
watch a revolutionary revival—of what proportions no man could tell.

The Panama affair had disgusted all self-respecting Frenchmen. “Is the
Republic to be a failure?” they were asking. Nothing so gives heart to
the leaders of lost causes, disappointed political groups, advocates of
panaceas and particularly to the radical-minded, as a rousing political
scandal. Panama stirred all the parties of France to action—Bourbons and
Bonapartists, extreme conservatives, socialists of all the many
varieties, and particularly the anarchists.

There were four groups of the latter, no one of which would have
anything to do with any of the others. It was the Independents who now
went into action. Members of this group worked alone, letting not even
their fellows know what they had in mind. A branch of the order existed
in the United States, and it was one of them, Alexander Berkman, who
attempted this same year, 1892, to assassinate Henry Frick in
Pittsburgh. The Independent who acted first in Paris was Jules Ravachol
by name, a man some thirty-three years old, a dyer by trade, with a
courageous but not a criminal face. So I thought when, a little later, I
secured his photograph and measurements from the Criminal Identification
Bureau for _McClure’s Magazine_.

Ravachol began by blowing up various houses. It was like a tocsin. All
over France similar outrages followed, and they continued at intervals
for two or more years—the crowning one a bomb thrown in the Chamber of
Deputies in December of 1893 by a notorious anarchist known as Auguste
Vaillant. Several Deputies and eighty or more spectators in the gallery
were wounded seriously. It was a ghastly affair.

The outbreaks and the rumors of outbreaks as well as the actual
destruction had a bad effect on the nerves of many of the French. There
was Alphonse Daudet.

Madame Daudet had offered to get me a _pensée_ for the collection I was
making for _McClure’s Magazine_, and arranged for me to call for the
copy. After we had tea she took me to the library to see how “Alphonse
was getting on.” It was my first glimpse of him: a little man, with a
shock of straight black hair which stood out rather ferociously at the
moment, evidently from running his fingers through it. His face was
pale, his eyes astonishingly black and bright. He had lost two or three
teeth, and the remaining ones were not very good. He was terribly
excited. He had not finished his _pensée_, he said, because he had just
had a visit from an anarchist. The servant had let in a man who had
demanded twenty francs to buy a wagonload of dynamite to blow up the
Hôtel de Ville. He grew more and more excited as he talked.

“I really expected the man to kill me,” he said, “and I got out this
revolver which I always keep in the drawer.” And he pulled it out to
show it to me. “A pretty affair,” he said, “if while you two were
visiting in there a tragedy had gone on in here.”

I so shared the general nervousness that, more than once when I saw a
man on the omnibus carrying a package, I feared a bomb and abruptly
descended; yet along with all my nervousness I was always nosing around,
hoping to see a bomb go off. It seemed to me that was my journalistic
duty, but I never saw anything more than the ruins they had caused. I
did see a pretty good revolution, one that had all the earmarks that I
had been finding in my attempted study of Revolution. It was in July of
1893. This time it was youth in revolt, the youth of the Latin Quarter
and the Beaux Arts. From start to finish the revolt went on practically
under my windows.

The Annual Ball of the Beaux Arts in the winter of 1893 had scandalized
Paris. As I remember, the exhibit which outraged was a lady who
promenaded with no other covering than a mosquito net. The protest
finally reached the Chamber of Deputies, where a member—Berenger—took it
up in a serious way and proposed a restrictive law which angered the
students. It was, they said, an interference with their right to amuse
themselves. Immediately long and picturesque _monômes_—single lines of
men, one hand on the shoulder of the man in front, the other grasping a
hand of the one behind—threaded their way up and down the boulevards,
particularly in the vicinity of the Luxembourg, chanting at the top of
their voices, “Conspuez Berenger!” “Conspuez Loze [Chief of Police]!”
“Down with the puritans!”

The demonstration began on a Saturday, and that night a great crowd
centered in a café in my neighborhood. The place was packed inside and
out with youths noisier and noisier as the hours went on. Finally the
crowd became so unruly that a squadron of police charged them. There was
a great hubbub and in the mêlée somebody hurled one of the heavy white
match boxes which were used on all the tables in the Latin Quarter