Paris had been the centre of the world during the whole war, the prize for which the Germans fought, because they knew that success or failure depended upon taking Paris. When they recrossed the Marne a second time and retreated from Château-Thierry, the war was lost: and they knew it then, and only then. You know that last poem of Rostand about the Kaiser climbing to the top of a tower to witness the final assault against Paris. Paris deserved the Peace Conference. So logical was the choice that none protested. It was the only point on which the "principal Allied and Associated Powers" were agreed. As a resident of Paris I was proud that we were going to continue for another winter to be the centre of the world—without certain decided disadvantages the honor had cost us in the four previous winters! As a writer and the wife of a writer, tied up by contracts to report the Conference, it meant that we could stay in our own home and in our own workshops instead of living in hotel rooms in some other place for long months.
We kept open house for all—from premiers of belligerent states and plenipotentiaries to delegates of subject nationalities, ignored by the Big Five. Greeks redeemed and unredeemed, Rumanians and Transylvanians, Jugo-Slavs of all kinds, Russians from Grand Dukes to Bolshevists, Lithuanians, Esthonians, Letts, Finns, Poles, Czecho-Slovaks, Ukranians, Georgians, Armenians, Syrians, Egyptians, Arabs of every persuasion, Albanians, Persians, Siamese, Chinese, not to speak of the specialists and propagandists and newspapermen of the Big Five, wrote their names in my guestbook, ate at my table, and discussed each other over cigars and cordials before my salon fire. Few lacked honesty of purpose and sincerity and loyalty to ideals. But the ideals were those of their own national or racial interests. Aside from a desire to see justice done to France and Belgium, there was no unity, no internationalism in the views of my guests. Most of them I respected; many of them I admired; for some I came to have real affection. My husband and I formed personal ties that I trust will never be broken. But I confess that the more I listened to tabletalk and salon talk in my own home, the more bewildered I grew. I saw the Society of Nations vanishing in the thin air. My own narrow nationalism, that had been gradually reviving ever since the A. E. F. started to come to France, was strengthened. After all, was not all human nature like the nature of my own paternal ancestors, who believed—as they believed the Bible, with emphasis on the Old Testament—that
Ulster will fight
And Ulster will be right?
I took refuge in the humorous side of the Peace Conference, as I did not want to get mad or to become gloom-struck and weep. When Fiume came up, for instance, I would talk to Jugo-Slavs and Italians about getting seasick on the Adriatic and the respective merits of Abbazia and the Lido and whether they ever felt like d'Annunzio's lovers talked. The best fun was with my own compatriots. We Americans had nothing at stake as a nation, and (if I except a few of Wilson's specialists who never were listened to but always hoped they would be) the members of the American Delegation lost no sleep while they were remaking the map of Europe.
A Pole was explaining to us one day that the Ukranians were not and never had been a nation, and he was in dead earnest. A captain in the American Navy had been listening politely for an hour. Then he thought it was time to change the subject. He turned to me and broke in out of a clear sky, "Helen, you have no idea how fussy Colonel House is. Found he couldn't get waffles in Paris. Telegraphed an S. O. S. to Brest. My machinist spent the better part of two days making a waffle-iron, and it was so precious and the Colonel was in such a hurry that I sent the machinist to Paris to take it to him. Don't you think that was the right thing for me to do, Doctor ——sky? House is pretty close to our Commander-in-Chief, you know."
When touring Paris starts up again, the Cook megaphone man will add a new item to his history of the Place de la Concorde: "See that building on the corner opposite the Ministry of Marine I was tellin' yuh 'bout? Number Four it is. Offices of the American Peace Commission during the famous Conference, 'n b'fore that f'r t'ree years American Red Cross Headquarters. 'N at tother end of the row is th' Hotel Crillon, where th' Merican delegates lived. There President Wilson tried to make a 'Siety 'v Nashuns!"
And from now on I shall never pass through the Place de la Concorde without thinking of our press-room at Number Four, where we swapped rumors and waited for an open covenant, openly arrived at. Press headquarters were housed in the former concierge's loge—three wee rooms on the ground floor to the right of the porte-cochère as you enter, and one of those was the post-office of the Delegation. The quarters were prophetic of the importance and dignity of the press as looked upon by the leaders of the Conference. The Americans arrived in Paris with different ideas. The name chosen by the Delegation and printed on all the stationery was a sign of American naïvety, and caused much merriment among our British and French friends. AMERICAN COMMISSION TO NEGOTIATE PEACE. Negotiate peace? Our European allies wondered where and how such a notion entered the heads of the Americans. We stuck to the name throughout—but not to the idea.
The Hotel Crillon and Four Place de la Concorde were filled with Americans—college professors, army and navy officers, New York financiers, the mysterious Colonel and his family and family's friends, the other Delegates, Embassy secretaries and clerks, stenographers, soldiers and sailors, and journalists. The sensible ones were profiting by the months in the center of the world to see Paris, old and new; hear music; and do the theatres. For the time spent on their specialties, trying to influence the course of the peace pourparlers and being sympathetic to the swarm of representatives, official and otherwise, of downtrodden races, did not budge a frontier an inch or write one line into the Treaty of Versailles.
When I applied for a press-card, an American major, whose acquaintance with a razor seemed no more than what anyone could gain from looking at a display in a drug-store window, looked me over doubtfully. Was I really writing for the Century and newspapers to boot? At length he called a soldier. "Take this lady to get her photograph made," he said. Up four flights of stairs we climbed. On every landing was a soldier at a desk. "Through this way, mom," said my guide. He opened a tiny yellow door all black around the knob, and there were more stairs.