Then came the War.
Mlle. Thompson's plans were formed in a day, her Committees almost as quickly. La Vie Feminine opened no less than seven ouvroirs, where five hundred women were given work. When the refugees began pouring in she was among the first to ladle out soup and deplete her wardrobe. She even went to the hastily formed hospitals in Paris and offered her services. As she was not a nurse she was obliged to do the most menial work, which not infrequently consisted in washing the filthy poilus wounded after weeks of fighting without a bath or change of clothing. Sometimes the dirt-caked soldiers were natives of Algiers. But she performed her task with her accustomed energy and thoroughness, and no doubt the mere sight of her was a God-send to those men who had for so long looked upon nothing but blood and death and horrors.
Then came the sound of the German guns thirty kilometers from Paris. The Government decided to go to Bordeaux. Mlle. Thompson's father insisted that his daughter accompany himself and her mother. At first she refused. What should she do with the five hundred women in her ouvroirs, the refugees she fed daily? She appealed to Ambassador Herrick. But our distinguished representative shook his head. He had trouble enough on his hands. The more beautiful young women who removed themselves from Paris before the Boche entered it the simpler would be the task of the men forced to remain. It was serious enough that her even more beautiful sister had elected to remain with her husband, whose duties forbade him to flee. Go, Mademoiselle, and go quickly.
Mlle. Thompson yielded but she made no precipitate flight. Collecting the most influential and generous members of her Committees, she raised the sum needed for a special train of forty cars. Into this she piled the five hundred women of her ouvroirs and their children, a large number of refugees, and an orphan asylum—one thousand in all. When it had steamed out of Paris and was unmistakably on its way to the South she followed. But not to sit fuming in Bordeaux waiting for General Joffre to settle the fate of Paris. She spent the three or four weeks of her exile in finding homes or situations for her thousand helpless charges, in Blanquefort, Lourdes, Bayonne, Marseilles, Bordeaux and other southern cities and small towns, forming in each a Committee to look out for them.
III
Soon after her return to Paris she conceived and put into operation the idea of an École Hôtelière.
Thousands of Germans and Austrians, employed as waiters or in other capacities about the hotels, either had slunk out of Paris just before war was declared or were interned. Even the Swiss had been recalled to protect their frontiers. The great hotels supplied the vacancies with men hastily invited from neutral countries, very green and very exorbitant in their demands. Hundreds of the smaller hotels were obliged to close, although the smallest were, as ever, run by the wife of the proprietor, and her daughters when old enough.
But that was only half of the problem. After the war all these hotels must open to accommodate the tourists who would flock to Europe. The Swiss of course could be relied upon to take the first train to Paris after peace was declared, but the Germans and Austrians had been as thick in France as flies on a battlefield, and it will be a generation before either will fatten on Latin credulity again. Even if the people of the Central Powers revolt and set up a republic it will be long before the French, who are anything but volatile in their essence, will be able to look at a Boche without wanting to spit on him or to kick him out of the way as one would a vicious cur.
To Mlle. Thompson, although men fall at her feet, the answer to every problem is Woman.
She formed another powerful Committee, roused the enthusiasm of the Touring Club de France, rented a dilapidated villa in Passy, and after enlisting the practical sympathies of furnishers, decorators, "magazins," and persons generally whose business it is to make a house comfortable and beautiful, she advertised not only in the Paris but in all the provincial newspapers for young women of good family whose marriage prospects had been ruined by the war and who would wish to fit themselves scientifically for the business of hotel keeping. Each should be educated in every department from directrice to scullion.