Odette, still carried away with the life at Surville, sick at heart with those friends of hers who were doing nothing but dying of ennui and so demoralizing those around them, found comfort in frequenting such hives of activity as the Franco-Belgian headquarters and its numerous annexes, all congregated in the same building on the Champs-Elysées, where it seemed that all the misery of the world was perpetually going up and down its staircases, without respite and without end. She would go there as if in answer to a summons. So many, so many unfortunates who had lost their dearest possessions, their house, their village church! Meeting them on the muddy steps, she seemed to see, reflected in their startled eyes, a bit of countryside, a poplar-bordered road, a bit of garden, a hillside, fields of beets or of wheat. She had travelled, she knew all those sights which are the natural companions of the life of men. The odor of the hamlets came back to her, the warm breath of stables, the noisome scent of stagnant pools, the sharp smell of the tanneries in the north, the balsamic fragrance of cedar smoke from the bakeries, the appetizing aroma of warm bread, so little known in Paris. Then she would picture to herself the bewilderment of all these folk who had found refuge in a great, strange city to which they were not born, of these families who would never, never again see anything but the ruins of their villages, their countryside made unrecognizable by the absence of every elm, every bit of woods! She could have embraced them as they passed her; she longed to give them everything she possessed, things which, alas! could not replace what they had lost!
She thought to herself: "What have they done? Of what are these people guilty? Why are these men tortured? Why were they captured and their poor homes and little fields destroyed, and the sons of their blood, who alone gave a moral meaning to their lives? Why were not these people masters of themselves? Why were they the prey of bandits who consider even their own people as puppets, created to serve their vainglory as soldiers, and who care less for the existence of thousands of living creatures than a child for his tin soldiers?" Her heart throbbed, her soul revolted. She reached the top of the stairs.
To this building she had come without invitation to see an American woman who was freely and calmly consecrating her fortune, her intelligence, and her time to the unfortunates of the war. She came to ask if there was not something that she could do. The American woman looked at her with a smile.
"You have something better to do for your country."
"What?" asked Odette.
"Oh, we will speak of that later."
This answer had already been made to her. It had been said to her even at Surville, in the hospital, and with a mysterious air.
She was disturbed by it, and spoke of it, on a venture, to Simone de Prans, whom she saw that evening.
Simone and her husband both smiled as the American lady had done.
"What do you all mean?"