Round about Bar-le-Duc

by Susanne R. Day

Sometimes we fell upon stale cough lozenges, on mouldering biscuits, on dried fruits, on chocolate, on chewing-gum, on moth-eaten bearskin rugs, or on a brilliant yellow satin coverlet with LOVE in large green capitals on it. The tale is unending, but it was not all tragic. There were many days when our hearts sang in gladness, when good, useful, sensible things emerged from the bales and we fitted our people out in style.

But all the rubbish in the world must have been dumped upon France in the last two years. Never has there been such a sweeping out of cupboards, such a rummaging of dust-bins. The hobble skirts that submerged us at one period nearly drove us into an early grave. Picture us, with a skirt in hand. It is twenty-seven inches round the tail, perhaps twenty-three round the waist. And Madame, who waits with such touching confidence in the discrimination of Les Anglaises, tells you that she is forte. As you look at her you believe it. It is half a day's journey to walk round her. You pace the wide circle thoughtfully, you make rapid calculations, you give it up. The thing simply cannot be done. And you send up a wild prayer that before ever there comes another war French women of the fields will take to artificial means of restraining their figures. As it is, like Marguerite, many of them occupy vast continents of space when they take their walks abroad. And when they stand on the staircase, smiling deprecatingly at you, and you have nothing that will fit....

And when it does fit it is blue, or green, and they have a passion for black. Something discreet. Something they can go to Mass in. I often wonder why they worship their God in such dolorous guise. Something, too, they can mourn in. So many are en deuil. Once a woman who came for clothes demanded black, refusing a good coat because it was blue. The cousin of her husband had died five months before, and never had she been able to mourn him. If the English would give her un peu de deuil? She waited weeks. She got it and went forth smiling happily upon an appreciative world, ready to mourn at last.

The weather is stifling, the Clothes-room an inferno. The last visitor for the morning has been sent contentedly away—she may come back to-morrow, though, and tell us that the dress of Madeleine does not fit, and may she have one the same as that which Madame Charton got? Now the dress of Madame Charton's Marie was new and of good serge, whereas that of Madeleine was slightly worn and of light summer material. But then Marie had an old petticoat, whereas Madeleine had a new one. But this concession to equality finds no favour in the eyes of Madeleine's mother. She has looked upon the serge and lusted after it. We suggest that a tuck, a little arrangement.... She goes away. And in the house in rue Paradis there is lamentation, and Marie, I grieve to say, lifts up her shrill treble and crows. It is one of the minor tragedies of life. Alas, that there are so many!

But as Madame the mother of Madeleine departs, we know nothing of the reckoning that waits us on the morrow. We only know that we promised to go and see the Basket-makers to-day, that time is flying, and haste suicidal with the thermometer at steaming-point.

"Madame, we are going out. We cannot see any one else."

Bon. Madame is a Cerberus. She will write down the names of callers and so ease our minds while we are away.

We fling on our hats, we arm ourselves with pencil and notebook, and wend our way up the Avenue du Château to the rue des Ducs de Bar. It is well to choose this route sometimes, though it is longer than that of the rue St. Jean, for it goes past the old gateway and shows you the view over the rue de Véel. It is wise to look down on the rue de Véel; it is rather foolhardy to walk in it. For motor-lorries whiz through it at a murderous speed, garbage makes meteoric flights from windows, the drainage screams to Heaven, every house is a tenement house, most of them are foul and vermin-ridden, and all are packed with refugees.

Well, perhaps not quite all. Even the rue de Véel has its bright particular spots, one of them being the house, set a little back from the street, in which Pétain, "On-les-aura Pétain," lived during the battle of Verdun. The street lies in a deep hollow, with cultivated hills rising steeply above it. Higher up there are woods on the far side, while above the sweeping Avenue du Château the houses are piled one above the other in tumbled, picturesque confusion.

Once in the rue des Ducs we go straight to No. 49, through a double-winged door into a courtyard, up a flight of worn steps into a wee narrow lobby, rather dark and noisome, and then, if any one cries Entrez! in response to our knock, into a great wide room.