A soldier's mother in France

by Rheta Childe Dorr

At Aix-les-Bains, where our soldiers went for their first vacation leaves, there was a young girl who was an almost startling example. She was about twenty years old and very pretty, in a delicate, patrician way. Before the war this girl would never have gone out of the house unattended. She had been educated in a private school with girls of her own social class, and but for the war would have been married by this time to a man chosen for her in the family council.

Now she was driving her own little Ford ambulance for the benefit of the American soldiers. She had joined the American Y. M. C. A., wore its becoming gray and blue uniform, with a boy’s soft hat pulled down over her bobbed black hair, and she was as busy as a maternal little wren.

I don’t know where she and the little car had operated before, but when the boys began to arrive at Aix she drove down from Paris, entirely alone except for a girl chum, an English girl, I believe, and a dozen times a day she sat at the wheel speeding between Aix and Chambéry, four miles away, carting supplies from one Y. M. C. A. headquarters to the other, and taking soldiers back and forth as well.

Mademoiselle Marcelle spoke English quaintly but fluently, but she was not a very conversational young person. She was grave and very dignified, and she loved all American soldiers too well to favor any one very much. They treated her like a princess and were ready any minute to clean the car, or oil it, or spend half a day doing things to its insides.

She was a charming little creature, Mademoiselle Marcelle. My son confided in me one evening that he didn’t think he would have to look farther for his life’s ideal, but then, so did at least a dozen other doughboys, so I considered his chances rather slim.

Even before the war the position of the French girl showed signs of change. The quality of her education had immensely improved, and in fact was practically the same as that of boys. Coeducation was unknown in the schools and in higher institutions, but in the Sorbonne, the oldest of all French universities, men and women attended the same lectures.

There have been individual parents who desired the fullest freedom for their daughters, and who educated them for the professions. There are not many women doctors in France, but the woman lawyer is highly respected and even encouraged.

One daughter of such modern parents is at present rendering good service to her country in the French foreign office. Mademoiselle St. René Taillandier is a member of the press section of the foreign office, and because of her fluent English is of the greatest assistance to English and American correspondents, especially women correspondents.

Mademoiselle St. René Taillandier’s father is a veteran member of the diplomatic corps, and her mother is a very modern minded woman. Having lived in many countries of the world, and observing the constantly widening field of women’s activities, they agreed that their daughter should be brought up as an English or an American girl. She was given a sound education, part of it in England, and she was allowed the fullest possible freedom of choice and action.

Very recently having received at the Sorbonne a degree corresponding to our master of arts, this fortunate young French woman has entered upon a most promising literary career. She has acted in the capacity of secretary to the famous novelist, Paul Bourget, and it was he who discovered her literary gift and insisted upon her developing it. Her first stories were published in the dignified Revue des Deux Mondes, and have just appeared in book form.