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.