“What an honor and pleasure it is to meet you both,” I said, having read about their herculean efforts to house refugees and displaced children. Assisting French feminist Valentine Thomson, they had nearly a thousand women and children in their care in Bordeaux alone, to say nothing of their work with the Red Cross and the American Hospital in Neuilly.
Sporting a navy blue suit with a hemline so daring it showed the tops of her white buttoned spats, Clara Simon offered us cigarettes, and when we declined, she said, “How quaint! It’s a vice I picked up from my husband’s smoke-filled back rooms.” She explained that her in-laws were among the first Jews to serve in French government. “But some converted to Christianity. We are a family of mixed religious and political views.”
I grinned. “They say love overcomes all . . .”
And Madame Simon replied, “They’re idiots who say that.”
Meanwhile, Madame LeVerrier was intent on the work at hand. “Your Lafayette kits are in such demand we give them only to the most deserving soldiers. We could use several hundred thousand more.”
I nearly deflated. Miss Sloane and I had been so proud of the forty thousand Lafayette kits we’d shipped, but now, to be faced—the very moment our feet touched French soil—with having fallen short of the enormous need might have dispirited lesser ladies. Fortunately, Emily merely scratched in her notebook, Several hundred thousand more. And I said, “I’ll cable our committee to step up the work in New York. In the meantime, may I introduce my relations, Mr. and Mrs. John Jay Chapman? They have a son at the front.”
“Oh, yes!” said Madame LeVerrier, smiling warmly. “Everyone in France is talking of these young Americans who have come to fight for us. Our own men are fighting for their own country, but your boy places himself at our side, against the wishes of his own government, for no other reason than to make right triumph over wrong. That is worthy of a special honor. And it comforts those of us who are in the struggle.”
The Chapmans both reddened, overcome with emotion. Perhaps to spare them embarrassment, Madame LeVerrier continued, “I hope you had an uneventful journey without sight of a submarine.”
As if she’d not spent nearly two weeks heaving over the side rail, Emily chirped, “It was a perfectly pleasant trip, and danger was the farthest thing from our minds. We’re simply happy to do something for France in the name of Lafayette.”
“Lafayette, Lafayette, Lafayette,” Clara Simon said, lighting her cigarette with amusement. “Perhaps the only French name Americans know except for the fashion houses. Lafayette, Hermès, Louis Vuitton . . .”
Clara was witty but biting. She’s not sure she likes us, I realized. She had, perhaps, seen too many American socialites eager to roll bandages in expectation of a war decoration. Ah, well, we’d simply have to prove ourselves.
* * *
—
On the road to Paris, I feared to find the city in rubble. A fear made worse when the Eiffel Tower came into view, now armed with antiaircraft guns and encircled with barbed wire—a reminder that the iconic structure was a working communications tower the Germans would dearly love to topple.
When we’d fled the previous autumn, the city had been a somber place, the lamplights extinguished along the Champs-élysées by curfew to protect against zeppelin attacks, people hiding behind barred doors at the encroachment of both the war and winter. Now the springtime weather was warm and healing, and life was beginning to show itself. The cafés were open, despite the fact the nation was battling for its existence but a few miles away.
That part could not be forgotten, of course. Not with French soldiers on every street corner—bright-eyed boys who’d left home six months ago, now hardened veterans on furlough. Each wore a different shade of blue, as military scientists had yet to determine which hue best disguised them in the muddy trenches. Meanwhile, women strolled in somber dresses in a narrow range of colors between stygian black and mahogany brown.
“The fashion is so disappointing this year,” I teased.
“It is wartime,” said Emily.
“I refuse to think my pink hat ribbon will undermine the war effort! Color boosts morale.”
We took lodgings at the St. James & D’Albany. It wasn’t the Ritz, but had a few things to recommend it. In the first place, our luxurious lodgings were directly across from the Tuileries gardens, which were now a defiant blooming riot of pink, purple, and yellow blossoms. And in the second place, the St. James was the last extant remnant of the old H?tel de Noailles, where Lafayette once lived with his wife. “We’re walking in the hero’s footsteps,” I said in the black-and-white-checkered expanse of the lobby.