"But is Marie the only person in the world? Without her, would you be a slave for ever and ever? There must be plenty of people that we could get to look after Scrappie."
"You don't know what it means to have a child!" said Scrappie's mother.
"I guess I look pretty healthy for a fellow who has just landed in Paris with a wife and a baby and 250 francs!" said my husband.
"Can't make us mad," said I; "we're in Paris."
You pile up on one side of the scale heaps of things that ought to worry you, but if you put on the other side the fact that you are in Paris, down goes the Paris side with a sure and cheerful bang, up goes the other side, and the worries tumble off every which way into nowhere.
The main threads of the world's spider web start very far from Paris in all directions and the heaviest urge of traffic is towards the centre. Paris was the centre of the spider web long before Peace Delegates came here to discover the fact. Students, diplomats, travel-agencies, theatrical troupes knew it and whole shelves of books have been written, down the years, to prove it. If Paris is your birth-place, you learn that you are in the capital of the world long before you know how to read the books. If you are an expert on ancient coins, if you are a wood-carver, if you are a singer wanting a voice that will make your fortune because it was trained in France, if you are a baker, if you are a burglar, if you are a silk merchant, if you are a professor from Aberdeen hunting for manuscripts that will prove your thesis concerning Pelagius, if you are an apache, if you are an English nursemaid,—you'll never be lonely in Paris. No matter how isolated or queer or misunderstood you were where you came from, in Paris you'll find inspiration, competition, companionship, opportunity and pals. The papers tell us every week that the birth rate is going down. But the population of Paris is increasing. So in peace, in war and in peace again, there was one constant quantity underpinning existence—Paris, the centre of the spider web. The spider that lures is liberty to work out one's ideas in one's own way in a friendly country. It is a wonder the men who make maps in France can draw lines latitudinally and longitudinally. What difference did it make then if we had only two hundred and fifty francs?
CHAPTER V
THE PENSION IN THE RUE MADAME
WE started our search for a temporary home at the Observatoire, and good fortune took our footsteps down the Rue d'Assas rather than down the Boulevard Saint-Michel. Had we turned to the right instead of to the left, we should probably have found a pension that satisfied our requirements on the Rue Gay-Lussac, the Rue Claude Bernard, the Rue Soufflot, or behind the Panthéon. But a short distance down the Rue d'Assas, we turned into the Rue Madame, which held two possibilities on our list. The first place advertised proved to be a private apartment, whose mistress was looking for boarders for one room who would not only pay her rent but her food and her old father's as well. We got out quickly, and kept our hopes up for the second place. It was a small private hotel just below the Rue de Vaugirard, with a modest sign: Pension de Famille.
A beaming young woman, who told us that she was Mademoiselle Guyénot, propriétaire et directrice de la maison, answered our first question in a way that won our hearts forever. "Do I mind a baby!" she exclaimed. "I love them. No trouble in the world. Wish the bon dieu would allow me to have one myself. If any boarder complains about babies crying in my house, I ask them how they expect the world to keep on going. Parfait! Bring the little rabbit right along. Of course there is no charge. Is it I who will feed her? Think of it, then!" And Mademoiselle Guyénot opened wide her arms and lifted them Heavenward. Her eyes shone, and she laughed.
We engaged a room on the court, two flights up, for seventy francs a week tout compris, lodging, food, boots, wine. Lights would not amount to more than a franc a week. We could give what we wanted for attendance. The arrangement with Marie was perfect. She would stay at home and come for the days we wanted her. That meant only her noonday meal on our pension bill—one franc-fifty.