The Living Present | Page 5

that all seven were yelping in the rear, at the mercy
of the concièrge.
There were seven passengers in the automobile, however, of which the
anxious driver, feeling his way through the crowded streets and
apprehensive that his car might be impressed at any moment, had not a
suspicion. They were in hat boxes, hastily perforated portmanteaux, up
the coat sleeves of Madame Balli and her maid, and they did not begin
to yelp until so far on the road to the north that it was not worth while
to throw them out.
III
At Dinard, where wounded soldiers were brought in on every train,
Madame Balli was turned over to friends, and in a day or two, being
bored and lonely, she concluded to go with these friends to the
hospitals and take cigarettes and smiles into the barren wards. From
that day until I left Paris on the seventeenth of August, 1916, Madame
Balli had labored unceasingly; she is known to the Government as one
of its most valuable and resourceful aids; and she works until two in the
morning, during the quieter hours, with her correspondence and books
(the police descend at frequent and irregular intervals to examine the
books of all oeuvres, and one mistake means being haled to court), and
she had not up to that time taken a day's rest. I have seen her so tired
she could hardly go on, and she said once quite pathetically, "I am not
even well-groomed any more." I frequently straightened her dress in
the back, for her maids work almost as hard as she does. When her
husband died, a year after the war broke out, and she found herself no
longer a rich woman, her maids offered to stay with her on reduced
wages and work for her oeuvres, being so deeply attached to her that
they would have remained for no wages at all if she had really been
poor. I used to beg her to go to Vichy for a fortnight, but she would not
hear of it. Certain things depended upon her alone, and she must remain
at her post unless she broke down utterly.[A]

[A] She is still hard at work, June, 1917.
One of her friends said to me: "Hélène must really be a tremendously
strong woman. Before the war we all thought her a semi-invalid who
pulled herself together at night for the opera, or dinners, or balls. But
we didn't know her then, and sometimes we feel as if we knew her still
less now."
It was Madame Balli who invented the "comfort package" which other
organizations have since developed into the "comfort bag," and
founded the oeuvre known as "Réconfort du Soldat." Her committee
consists of Mrs. Frederick H. Allen of New York, who has a home in
Paris and is identified with many war charities; Mrs. Edward Tuck,
who has lived in and given munificently to France for thirty years;
Madame Paul Dupuy, who was Helen Brown of New York and has her
own oeuvre for supplying war-surgeons with rubber, oil-cloth, invalid
chairs, etc.; the Marquise de Noialles, President of a large oeuvre
somewhat similar to Madame Dupuy's; the Comtesse de Fels, Madame
Brun, and Mr. Holman-Black, an American who has lived the greater
part of his life in France. Mrs. Willard sends her supplies from New
York by every steamer.
Madame Balli also has a long list of contributors to this and her other
oeuvres, who sometimes pay their promised dues and sometimes do not,
so that she is obliged to call on her committee (who have a hundred
other demands) or pay the deficit out of her own pocket. A certain
number of American contributors send her things regularly through
Mrs. Allen or Mrs. Willard, and occasionally some generous outsider
gives her a donation. I was told that the Greek Colony in Paris had been
most generous; and while I was there she published in one of the
newspapers an appeal for a hundred pillows for a hospital in which she
was interested, and received in the course of the next three days over
four hundred.
IV
I went with her one day to one of the éclopé stations and to the Dépôt
des Isolés, outside of Paris, to help her distribute comfort

packages--which, by the way, covered the top of the automobile and
were piled so high inside that we disposed ourselves with some
difficulty. These packages, all neatly tied, and of varying sizes, were in
the nature of surprise bags of an extremely practical order. Tobacco,
pipes, cigarettes, chocolate, toothbrushes, soap, pocket-knives, combs,
safety-pins, handkerchiefs, needles-and-thread, buttons, pocket mirrors,
post-cards, pencils, are a few of the articles I recall. The members of
the Committee meet at her house twice a week to do up the