Madame la Comtesse d'Haussonville, it is generally conceded, is not only the greatest lady in France but stands at the very head of all women working for the public welfare in her country. That is saying a great deal, particularly at this moment.
Madame d'Haussonville is President of the first, or noblesse, division of the Red Cross, which, like the two others, has a title as distinct as the social status of the ladies who command, with diminishing degrees of pomp and power.
Société Française de Secours aux Blessés Militaires is the name of the crack regiment.
The second division, presided over by Madame Carnot, leader of the grande bourgeoisie, calls itself Association des Dames Françaises, and embraces all the charitably disposed of that haughty and powerful body.
The third, operated by Madame Perouse, and composed of able and useful women whom fate has planted in a somewhat inferior social sphere—in many social spheres, for that matter—has been named (note the significance of the differentiating noun) Union des Femmes de France.
Between these three useful and admirable organizations there is no love lost whatever. That is to say, in reasonably normal conditions. No doubt in that terrible region just behind the lines they sink all differences and pull together for the common purpose.
The Red Cross was too old and too taken-for-granted an organization, and too like our own, for all I knew to the contrary, to tempt me to give it any of the limited time at my disposal in France; so, as it happened, of these three distinguished chiefs the only one I met was Madame d'Haussonville.
She interested me intensely, not only because she stood at the head of the greatest relief organization in the world, but because she is one of the very few women, of her age, at least, who not only is a great lady but looks the rôle.
European women tend to coarseness, not to say commonness, as they advance in age, no matter what their rank; their cheeks sag and broaden, and their stomachs contract a fatal and permanent entente with their busts. Too busy or too indifferent to charge spiteful nature with the daily counter-attacks of art, they put on a red-brown wig (generally sideways) and let it go at that. Sometimes they smudge their eyebrows with a pomade which gives that extinct member the look of being neither hair, skin, nor art, but they contemptuously reject rouge or even powder. When they have not altogether discarded the follies or the ennui of dress, but patronize their modiste conscientiously, they have that "built up look" peculiar to those uncompromisingly respectable women of the first society in our own land, who frown upon the merely smart.
It is only the young women of fashion in France who make up lips, brows, and cheeks, as well as hair and earlobes, who often look like young clowns, and whose years give them no excuse for making up beyond subservience to the mode of the hour.