Marje.
IX
FROM MARJORIE
Villa des Dames,
79 rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, Paris.
(February 4, 1917.)
Dearest Family:—
Oh, Mother and Daddy, this work here is so interesting. Now that I have settled down to it more, and can see what I am doing and where it all leads to, I am very, very interested. I think that I shall be useful, too. My typewriter hasn’t stopped clicking for many hours since I came. It is now being adjusted over Sunday, and they are going to give me a price on having the French accents put on it. I tried to exchange it for a French keyboard one, same machine, Corona, of course, but find it would cost twenty dollars, which is an absurd price, I think. Of course, they are selling so many here, they can ask what they want. However, I jollied the lady a good deal, and she is going to see how much it would cost to add the accents only to mine,—for you see it takes a lot of extra, and just now pretty valuable, time, to go back over every page and put on the accents. If they give me a good price, I think I shall do it out of the money Mr. M. gave me.
I have been put in entire charge of the mail now, and, therefore, I try to get to the Vestiaire by twenty minutes to nine, which gives me twenty minutes free all to myself to get the letters opened at least, and somewhat sorted. I am becoming a regular Sherlock Holmes when it comes to guessing at names, addresses, and whether the letters are from soldiers’ wives, cultivated persons, or the regular appeals! After I sort them, I head them with the last name, the address, and the arrondissement, and then file what I can, and deliver the rest to the various workers who are by this time assembling, and, as I have chosen the mantelpiece for my desk, pro tem., I find every one gathers towards the fire, which saves me lots of time! Because I am new, and the streets are so very peculiar to me still, and it takes longer to look over a French letter than it would an English one, I do not get ready for calling until about 9.45. Then I get off, the others having paired off and started soon after 9.10. Call all morning, but usually only three visits, for it takes time to get all the details we want, and, as it is really pretty much up to the visitor and her report as to what the conference votes Saturday, we don’t hurry, but try to give them each their due, as it were. When I was home, of course, I thought that I knew what the war over here meant, but now I am beginning to realize that if I stayed here the rest of my life (which I hope I will not have to do, even with the new international complications), I would find new horrors, new complications and results every day. Of course, the object of our visiting is to determine whether the family deserves what it has asked for, and also to decide if they deserve what we can do, but they never dream of asking us to move them. Of course, the greatest difference between our work here and the ordinary visiting done by social service workers at home, is that usually the people at home have brought their present condition of misery on themselves in one way or another, while these poor souls over here have not. They have had homes, gardens, rabbits, and savings, which they tell you about as a rule with pleasure, and not emotionally. (That is one thing, these people have suffered so they do not weep any more.) These people used to help others a little, and were driven out in various horrible and less horrible ways,—marching for days on foot, a whole family, old and young, and not able to save anything, and some families separated forever, perhaps by the blowing up of a bridge behind them to keep back the “Boches.” We have one family who got across a bridge just in time. The mother and two youngest children they saw on the other side before the bridge was blown up, and they have never heard of or from them since. Then the days of walking, sleeping in caves, sometimes for weeks, eating only when chance put food in their ways; women having their babies born in straw in cellars under bombardment, and the children surviving, sometimes. Then after weeks of this, they arrive here, for it is certainly true of Paris as of Rome, that “all roads lead to Rome,” to find that they being refugees must pay rent. No one wants to take them in when they have many children. The Government is wonderful the way it does give its “allocation” to them. The Mairies give coal once a month and potatoes twice; and the schools give sabots or jalottes every three months. But even with this, it is hard, after having had a “home,” to live in hôtels all in one room, or two at the most (and these people that were a pretty good class of persons formerly). I don’t know whether their mental as well as physical suffering is more pitiful than those common miners’ families, refugees who always lived a squalid life, but whose actual physical misery is usually worse than the first class.
Of course, the Parisians have a certain definite advantage right from the first, because, according to law, they do not have to pay rent; that is, none who have a member at the front, and goodness knows that includes all Parisiennes, at any rate. This law does not refer to refugees, so you see it makes a good big difference in the comparative cost of living.
I suppose that it must be the Rockefeller Foundation that gives so many of these people from the “pays envahis” such excellent aid if they pass through Switzerland. We hear over and over again that in “Suisse on est bien traité.”