Chapter IV: Part 4

These dashes into journalism, timid and factual as were the results, gave my position more and more body, began slowly to arouse my rudimentary capacity for self-expression. At the same time my position was enriched by a novel feature of our undertaking, one that any editor of a monthly journal can appreciate. We published but ten issues, suspending in July and August in order to get out on the grounds at Chautauqua an eight-page newspaper—the Chautauqua Assembly _Daily Herald_. This meant moving our Meadville staff bodily to the Lake late in June.

I was soon contributing two columns of editorials a day to the _Herald_, comments on the daily doings of the Assembly, and making many stimulating acquaintances in doing it. Among them I valued particularly Dr. Herbert B. Adams and Dr. Richard T. Ely of Johns Hopkins University, men who were stirring youth and shocking the elders by liberal interpretations of history and economics. We felt rather proud of ourselves at Chautauqua that we were liberal enough to engage Dr. Adams and Dr. Ely as regular lecturers and teachers, and that our constituency accepted them, if with occasional misgivings.

It was not only the faculty of Johns Hopkins which was adding to my friends. One who remains today among those I most value came from its student body—Dr. John H. Finley. Dr. Finley gave several summers to the Assembly _Herald_, reading its copy and its proofs among other things. It was he who read my two columns and, no doubt, kept me out of much trouble; but once there did slip by him a misquotation over which he still chuckles when we talk of Chautauqua days. I made it a practice to head my first column with a digest of the day’s happenings—a line to an event and, as a starter for the paragraph, a quotation. I had been rather pleased one day to select a line from James Thomson:

_Office staff of The Chautauquan, 1888: Miss Tarbell at left, sitting_
]

The meek-eyed Morn appears, mother of dews.

A copy of the paper was always thrown on the verandah of my upstairs room around five o’clock in the morning, and I hopped out of bed to see what had happened to my column. That morning something dire had happened, for my quotation ran:

The _weak_-eyed _Worm_ appears, mother of dews.

Eminence came from across the water annually and gave color and importance, so we thought, to our doings. A foreign visitor with whom I had a pleasant acquaintance running over some years was Dr. J. P. Mahaffy of the University of Dublin. Dr. Mahaffy had contributed a series of delightful articles to the required readings in _The Chautauquan_—“Gossip About Greece”—and in the summer of 1889 he came over for two or three courses of lectures at the Assembly. A distinguished figure, he was, and such a contrast in his tweeds, his free movements, his spirited wide-ranging talk to most of us.

My acquaintance grew out of our mutual interest in the flora of any spot where we happened to be. One day as I came in from a botanizing expedition outside the grounds carrying stocks of the lovely field lilies common in the region, Dr. Mahaffy seized my arm: “You care for flowers and plants? I thought American women had no interest in them.” A libel I quickly hooted. In defense of my sisterhood I went diligently to work to show him our summer flora. But he cared for nothing as much as our summer lilies, begged me after the flowering was over to send him bulbs, which I proudly did. In exchange I received from his Dublin garden seeds of a white poppy which, he wrote me, he had originally gathered in the shadow of the statue of Memnon in Egypt. Those poppies have always gone with me; they flourished in my mother’s garden in Titusville—now they flourish in my Connecticut garden.

My life was busy, varied, unfolding pleasantly in many ways, but it also after six years was increasingly unsatisfactory, so unsatisfactory that I was secretly, very secretly, meditating a change.

I was scared by what _The Chautauquan_ seemed to be doing to the plan I had worked out for the development of my mind. I had grown up with a stout determination to follow one course of study to the end, to develop a specialty. The work I was doing demanded a scattering of mind which I began to fear would unfit me for ever thinking anything through. I realized that an editor of value must have made up his mind about more things than had I, feel himself ready to fight for those things if necessary. I had no program in which _The Chautauquan_ was interested. Moreover, I did not want to be an editor.

But to break with _The Chautauquan_ meant sacrificing security. I had always had a vision of myself settled somewhere in a secure corner, simple, not too large. I never had wanted things; I always had a dislike of impedimenta, but I wanted something cheerful and warm and enduring. There I could work over that which interested me, day in and day out, with no alarm for my keep. Now _The Chautauquan_ was a secure berth; so far as I could figure, it would last through my time at least. To give it up meant complete economic insecurity. I probably should not have been willing to sacrifice what I think I had honestly earned if there had not been growing upon me a conviction of the sterility of security. All about me were people who at least believed themselves materially secure. They lived comfortably within their means, they were busy keeping things as they were, preserving what they had. They were the most respectable people in town, but secretly I was beginning to suspect their respectability.

One day, listening to a fine elderly Scotch Presbyterian minister who had in his congregation a large group of these stable, secure, best citizens, I was startled when he leaned over his pulpit and, shaking his fist at us, shouted, “You’re dyin’ of respectability.” Was that what was happening to me? I saw with increasing clearness that I could not go beyond a certain point on _The Chautauquan_, mentally, socially, spiritually. If I remained, it was to accept a variety of limitations, and my whole nature was against the acceptance of limitations. It was contrary to the nature of things as I saw them; to be happy, I must go on with fresh attempts, fresh adventuring. The thing that frightened me earlier in my youth came to the top now: that thing that made me determine I would never marry because it meant giving up freedom, was a trap. It was clear enough that I was trapped—comfortably, most pleasantly, most securely, but trapped.

As time went on I realized that this security to which people so clung could not always be counted on. They might think so, but had I not seen beautiful homes sold under the hammer in Titusville, homes of those whom the town had looked on as impregnable financially? In my years on _The Chautauquan_ in Meadville I had been a shocked observer of one of the many dramatic political failures of the eighties, the defeat of the Republican candidate for Governor of Pennsylvania at a critical moment—a Meadville banker, Wallace Delamater. I was too much of a mugwump to sympathize with the Republican platform, but I liked Wallace Delamater. I believed him, as I think the records show, to be a tool of a past master of machine politics—Matthew Quay. Taken up by Quay, the resources of the Delamater bank and of allied banks in Meadville at the call of his party, he made a campaign which was called brilliant. There was no doubt of the result in Meadville.

I went to bed early, the night of the election, expecting to be aroused by the ringing of bells, the blowing of whistles, for there was to be a celebration. When I awakened with a start it was broad daylight. Had I slept through the celebration? A sense of doom hung over me; I dressed hurriedly, went down to get the paper. Wallace Delamater was defeated. Promptly the Delamater bank closed and, one after another, four banks of the town followed. There was a heavy run on the one remaining, the one where I had my little deposit. The panic in the town was desperate; everything was going. I don’t think I have ever been more ashamed of anything in my life connected with money than I was when I took my bank book and went to my bank to ask for my deposit. It was all the money I had in the world—times were bad. But I have always continued to be a little ashamed that I yielded to the panic, the more because my bank didn’t fail!

No, the security men flattered themselves they had achieved was never certain. Moreover, my security was costing more in certain precious things than I was willing to pay. Take the matter of making something professionally sound, useful, justifiable, out of myself, which is the only one of these “precious things” that I am talking about! I could do no more towards it where I was. To begin with, I at last knew what I wanted to do. It was no longer to seek truth with a microscope. My early absorption in rocks and plants had veered to as intense an interest in human beings. I was feeling the same passion to understand men and women, the same eagerness to collect and to classify information about them. I find the proofs of this slow and unconscious change of allegiance in an accumulation of tattered notebooks tucked away for years, forgotten and only brought out after I had set myself this curious task of tracing the road I have traveled through my eighty years, trying to find out why I did this thing and not that, getting acquainted with my own working life.

I seem to have begun to enter observations on human beings soon after I had settled down to learn how to put a magazine together in an orderly fashion. I applied the same method that I had used for so many years in collecting and classifying natural objects which excited my curiosity. Take leaves, on which I was always keen. I started out in high school to collect them from all the flora in my territory, classifying them by shapes, veins, stalks, color. Rarely do I take up a family book of those early years that there do not fall out from between the pages leaves of one thing or another that I had pressed to help me carry on my scheme of classification. I suspect that I did not get much beyond a glib naming of parts.

Something analogous happened when I recognized that men and women were as well worth notes as leaves, that there was a science of society as well as of botany.

What had happened was undoubtedly that the tumults, the challenges of my day had finally penetrated my aloofness, and that I was feeling more and more the need of taking a part in them. The decade I spent in Poland and on _The Chautauquan_ had a background not so unlike that of the present decade. At its beginning we were only fifteen years from a civil war which had left behind not only a vast devastated region with the problem of its reconstruction, but the problem of a newly freed people. It had left bitterness which in intensity and endurance no war but a civil war ever leaves. We had had our inflation, a devastating boom followed by seven years of depression, outbreaks of all the various forms of radical philosophy the world then knew. Youth talks glibly of communism today as if it had just appeared in the country; but Marxian Communists transferred the headquarters of the International to New York City in the seventies. More conspicuous than the Communists were the Anarchists. Every city in the United States had its little group, preaching and every now and then practicing direct action. Indeed, they were a factor in all the violent labor disturbances of the period.

In 1879 prosperity had come back with a whoop, and, as she usually does after a long absence, had quickly exhausted herself by fantastic economic excesses. By the time I undertook to annotate the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle’s readings the country had begun to suffer again from its wanton speculation and reckless overbuilding of railroads. Factories and mines and mills shut down; and when work stopped disorder began, particularly on the railroads of the Southwest, the awful massacre of Chinese in Wyoming—more awful, the Haymarket riot in Chicago followed as it was by the execution of four men, all counselors of violence to be sure, but no one of them found guilty either of making or of throwing the bomb.

The eighties dripped with blood, and men struggled to get at causes, to find corrections, to humanize and socialize the country; for then as now there were those who dreamed of a good world although at times it seemed to them to be going mad.

_The Chautauquan_ interested itself in all of this turbulent and confused life. Indeed, it rapidly became my particular editorial concern. We noted and discussed practically every item of the social program which has been so steadily developing in the last fifty years, the items which have crystallized into the Square Deal, the New Freedom, the New Deal.

The present argument for high wages, we made in the eighties. We called it “the new economic coefficient in our industrial life.” “It is the well-paid workman,” said _The Chautauquan_, “who is a relatively large consumer. We are built upon a foundation of which this well-paid workman is an important part.”

As for hours and conditions, we were ardent supporters of the eight-hour day, organized labor’s chief aim in the eighties, and we were for contracts between labor and capital, each being held responsible for his side of the bargain. We were for education, arbitration, legislation, the program of the Knights of Labor rather than the program of force which the growing American Federation of Labor was adopting. We discussed interminably the growing problem of the slums, were particularly strong for cooperative housing, laundries and bakeshops; we supported the popular Town and Country Club, seeking to keep a healthy balance between the two; we were advocates of temperance but shied at prohibition—largely, I think, because it had become a political issue, and we did not like to see our idealists going into politics, as Bellamy and Henry George and the leaders of many causes were doing.

That is, in the decade of the eighties we were discussing and thinking about the same fundamentals that we are today.

My realization of the stress of the period began at home. Titusville and all the Oil Region of Pennsylvania were struggling to loosen the hold of the mighty monopoly which, since its first attack on the business in 1872, had grown in power and extent until it owned and controlled over 90 per cent of the oil industry outside of the production of the raw crude. The region was divided into two hostile camps—the Independent Producers and Refiners, and the Standard Oil Company. Their maneuvers and strategy kept town and country in a constant state of excitement, of suspicion, of hope, and of despair.

There was a steady weakening of independent ranks both by the men worn out or ruined by the struggle, and those who saw peace and security for themselves only in settling and gave up the fight.

In those days I looked with more contempt on the man who had gone over to the Standard than on the one who had been in jail. I felt pity for the latter man, but none for the deserters from the ranks of the fighting independents. Those were the days when the freeing of transportation, the privilege which had more to do with the making of the monopoly than anything else, more even than the great ability of its management, was the aim of all reformers. For years the Independents had worked for an interstate commerce law which would make rate discrimination a crime. To me such a law had come to have a kind of sanctity. It was the new freedom, and when it was passed in 1887 I felt an uplift such as nothing in public life, unless I except Mr. Cleveland’s tariff message of the year before, had ever given me.

But it was not the economic feature of the struggle in the Oil Region which deeply disturbed or interested me. It was what it was doing to people themselves, to the people I knew, to my father and mother and their friends. It was the divided town, the suspicion and greed and bitterness and defeats and surrenders. Here was a product meant to be a blessing to men—so I believed; and it was proving a curse to the very ones who had discovered it, developed it.

I began to fill pages with notes of things seen and heard, and finally I decided I should write a novel about it. Very secretly indeed, I went at it, assembling a cast, outlining a plot, writing two or three chapters. Poor stuff. Luckily I soon found out I was beyond my depth and gave it up.

From my notebooks I judge that I abandoned my novel the more readily because I had conceived what I called “a more fundamental research”! This was nothing less than a Science of Society to be illustrated by my own observations on men and women. Looking over it now, I see that the framework came from reading the voluminous discussions of the nature of society then flooding the public. I took my framework where I found it, but I filled it in with observations, gathered on all sides, of people I knew, heard about, particularly read about in the newspaper.

But this ambitious work soon met the same fate as the novel. It broke off at the end of the third chapter because I had concluded I could not construct society as it was until I knew more about woman. I suspected she had played a larger part in shaping society than she realized or perhaps was willing to admit. I was questioning the argument that this is entirely a man-made world. I had found too many woman-made parts in it to accept the characterization at its face value. My science of society would not be honest, I concluded, if the only part woman was allowed to play in it was that of doormat, toy, and tool. I was troubled, too, by the argument that women must be given suffrage if society was to be improved. Man had made a mess of the world, I was told; woman must take his tools and straighten things up. I did not feel the confidence of my courageous friends. “Why should we expect them to do better with the vote than men have done?” I asked. “Because they are women,” I was told. But they were human beings, like men, and they were human beings with no experience of the tools they wanted to use; and I had enough sense of the past to believe that experience counted, and that it would be wise for all men and women to consult it when they tried new ventures.

There had been women in public life in the past. What had they done? I had to satisfy myself before I went further with my science of society or joined the suffragists. It was humiliating not to be able to make up my mind quickly about the matter, as most of the women I knew did. What was the matter with me, I asked myself, that I could not be quickly sure? Why must I persist in the slow, tiresome practice of knowing more about things before I had an opinion? Suppose everybody did that. What chance for intuition, vision, emotion, action?

My notebooks show that I began my plodding by making out a list of women who seemed to offer food for reflection. The group that excited me most were the women of the French Revolution. I made little studies of several, wrote little pieces about them, and these little pieces I submitted to the editor of _The Chautauquan_; he published several of them—a study of Madame de Staël, of Marie Antoinette, of Madame Roland. But soon I became heartily ashamed of my sketches, written as they were from so meager an equipment. I felt this particularly about Madame Roland. I made up my mind that I was going to know more about this woman, that she probably would teach me what sort of contribution might be expected from a woman in public life.

That meant research. How was I to carry it on? Whatever studying I did depended on my ability to support myself while doing it; whatever studying I did while on _The Chautauquan_ must be turned into something available for the magazine. My time and strength belonged to it. Obviously, I could not do sufficient research and continue my position; it was as impossible as it had been to act as preceptress of the Poland Union Seminary and at the same time carry on my study with the microscope. Where was I to carry on this research? There was but one place—Paris. And how was I to finance myself in Paris—a strange country and a strange tongue—long enough to write a book? I did not consider the possibility of getting a regular job: I did not want one. I wanted freedom, and I had an idea that there was no freedom in belonging to things, no freedom in security. It took time to convince myself that I dared go on my own. But finally I succeeded.

Coming to a decision has a loosening, tonic effect on a mind which has been floundering in uncertainty. Liberated, it rushes gaily, hopefully, to the charting of a new course. I had no sooner resolved to strike out on my own than my mind was bubbling with plans. I forgot that I was thirty-three years old and, according to the code of my time and my society, too old for new ventures; I forgot that outside of my very limited experience on _The Chautauquan_ I knew nothing of the writing and publishing world, had literally no acquaintance among editors; I forgot that I was afraid of people, believed them all so much greater and more important than they often turned out to be that it cost me nervous chills to venture with a request into a stranger’s presence.

Dismissing all these real handicaps, I plunged gaily into planning for a career in journalism, self-directed, free-lance journalism. Surely I could find subjects enough in Paris to write about, subjects that would interest American newspapers. We were in the thick of a great agitation over the condition and the conduct of American cities. _The Chautauquan_ had touched it occasionally. How did Paris keep house? I planned a syndicate of my own which would answer all questions. Out of my newspaper work might not articles grow for magazines? I thought so, and books, beginning of course with my study of Madame Roland. So long as I told nobody about my plans, they worked beautifully, carried me upward and onward into a new and happier, more profitable, more satisfying world. But when I announced my decision, laid out what I proposed to do, all the glow and confidence went out of me, all the weaknesses in my venture came again to the top. There were friends who said none too politely: “Remember you are past thirty. Women don’t make new places for themselves after thirty.” There were friends who resented my decision as a reflection on themselves. A woman whose friendship I valued said bluntly: “You are one of us. Aren’t we good enough for you?” My act was treason in her eyes. The whole force of the respectable circles to which I belonged, that respectable circle which knew as I did not the value of security won, the slender chance of replacing it if lost or abandoned, was against me and so out of friendliness.

When I told my editor-in-chief I was leaving, going to Paris to study, he was shocked. “How will you support yourself?” he asked, really anxious, knowing that I must depend on my own efforts.

“By writing,” I said.

“You’re not a writer,” he said. “You’ll starve.”

He had touched the weakest point in my venture: I was not a writer, and I knew it. I knew I never should be one in the high sense which I then and still more now give to that word. I had neither the endowment nor the passion nor the ambition to be a writer. I was rather a student, wanting to understand things quite regardless of how I could use that understanding if I reached it. There was much selfishness in my wanting to know for the sake of knowing, much of a dead scholar in me; and that dead scholar has always hung, more or less a weight, about my neck.

But if I was not a writer I had certain qualifications for the practice of the modest kind of journalism on which I had decided. I counted no little on my habit of planning in advance what I was going to do, and I had a strong conviction that a plan of my own was worth more than any plan which was made for me. Again, if I could not write, I did have a certain sense of what mattered in a subject and a strong conviction that it was my sense of what mattered, and not somebody else’s, that would give my work freshness and strength if it was to have any.

Then there was my habit of steady, painstaking work—that ought to count for something. And perhaps I could learn to write. If I were to do so, could I do better than soak myself in French prose? I had read French steadily from my school days; I had done not a little translating of articles from the big reviews for _The Chautauquan_. If I could live with the language, might I not master something of what seemed to me its essential qualities, those which gave it both body and charm? These qualities were the soundness of structure, the way it held together, and the beautiful clarity of expression. At least I could try for them.

But when I tried to explain all this to my critical friends they continued frankly skeptical, indignant. It was my father and mother who backed me up, though I think they were both puzzled and fearful. “I don’t know what you can do, Ida,” my father said, “that’s for you. If you think you can do it, try it.” But in the end it took all the grit I had to go ahead.

Breaking up established relations is not easy. You begin by pulling up deeply rooted things, rooted in your heart; you abandon once cherished purposes. When I left _The Chautauquan_ I was no longer the eager and confident young woman who ten years before had started out for herself in Poland, Ohio; I was ten years older, and I was keenly conscious that I had in those ten years accumulated a fairly complete collection of shattered idols. That I could forget them as quickly and as completely as I did, I owe to the Paris of the nineties. I had scarcely passed her gates before I had fallen under her spell. At once I was experiencing all the amazing rejuvenation that comes from falling in love, whatever the object. It was not to be “See Paris and die,” as more than one friend had jeered. I knew with certainty it was to be “See Paris and live.”

6
I FALL IN LOVE

Falling in love with Paris at first sight—a _coup de feu_, it was—in no way dimmed the energy and the care with which on the day of my arrival I began to put into operation the cautious and laborious Plan for self-support I had brought along. It rather intensified it. As I must begin at the bottom to build up contacts with strangers on the other side of the ocean, and as there was but $150 in my pocket, there was no time to waste.

In the ten years I had been trying to support myself I had learned that the art of spending money is quite as important in a sound financial program as the art of earning it. I had been going on the theory, as I still am—practice is another story—that what I earned must cover my expenses and leave a surplus for emergencies and expansion. I had applied my principles to my small salary on _The Chautauquan_—never over $100 a month—well enough to get myself to Paris and have this little reserve to care for myself while I was proving or disproving that I could convince a few American editors whom I had never seen that my goods were worth buying.

The first step, obviously, in carrying out my program was cheap living. Luckily for me, two of my associates on _The Chautauquan_, excited by my undertaking, had decided to join me. One, Josephine Henderson, was a friend of Titusville days and like myself a graduate of Allegheny College. Jo, as we called her, was a handsome woman with a humorous look on life—healthy for me. I have never had a friend who judged my balloons more shrewdly or pricked them so painlessly. With us was a beautiful girl, Mary Henry, the daughter of one of the militant W.C.T.U. workers of that day, a neighbor and a friend as well as a co-worker of the great temperance leader Frances Willard. At the steamer a friend of Mary’s appeared, announcing that she, too, was going along. This meant four of us to share rent and food.

Back in Titusville I had picked on the Latin Quarter as at once the cheapest and the most practical place in Paris for one to live who must go on the cheap. Then, too, the University was in the Latin Quarter, and we were all planning to take lectures. I was even flirting with the idea that I might find time to take a degree.

So on arrival, putting our bags in the little room of the cheap hotel on the Right Bank to which we had gone, we headed at once for the Latin Quarter. I had picked on the neighborhood where I wanted to settle, near the Musée de Cluny. Not that I knew a thing about the Musée or what was in it; simply Cluny was one of the words that had always pulled me. This magic was largely responsible for our settling in the Rue du Sommerard almost next door to the spot in the city which save one was to have the greatest fascination as well as the deepest consolation for me.

But finding these quarters was no easy task. My friends gulped as I did at the stuffiness, the dinginess, the primitive sanitation, the obvious fleas, and the suspicion of other unmentionable pests in the places at which we looked. But settle I would, and so with groans they consented finally to the taking of two tiny bedrooms, a salon, along with the use of a kitchenette in one of the four apartments controlled by a Madame Bonnet. Our selection was not as unwise as it looked at the moment. Indeed, as it turned out, Madame Bonnet remained my landlady throughout the coming three years.

As quickly as we had found our lodging we established relations with the little shops in the neighborhood where one could for a few sous buy all the makings of a meal. You bought exactly what you needed and no more—a single egg, one roll or croissant, a gill of milk, two cups apiece of café au lait, never having a drop left in the pot. Brought up as we had all been at loaded tables, the close calculation shocked us at first as something mean, stingy. “Why, the very scraps from a meal at home would feed us here.” And that was true—more shame to our bringing up. But we learned to buy as our thrifty neighbors did and to like it, and we learned how to order at the cheap and orderly little restaurants of the Quarter so as to get a sufficient meal of really excellent food for a franc (then nineteen cents or, as we carelessly reckoned it, twenty-one hundred centimes to a franc). Only on grand occasions did we allow ourselves two francs.

The pleasantest and most profitable part of the experience was the acquaintances we made with the women who kept the little shops, the little restaurants. As soon as they were convinced of our financial responsibility and our social seriousness, they became friendly—a friendliness not based on the few sous we were spending so carefully but on interest and curiosity. We were new types to them; but, once convinced we were what we pretended to be, they treated us with a deference quite different from the noisy greetings they gave the people of the neighborhood or their rather contemptuous familiarity with the occasional cocotte who strayed in. That is, we were very soon placed by the shopkeepers of the vicinity. It was my first lesson in the skill, almost artistry with which all classes of the French people classify those with whom they are thrown in contact, notably foreigners. Later I was to observe this in the more highly developed classes where I established professional relationship.

I was a stranger seeking information—an American journalist, a student, so I told them. But what kind of person was I? What was there in me they could tie to, depend upon?

Obviously I was not rich. If I had been, there would have been quickly gathered around me a group to offer entertainment as well as treasures to buy; but it was clear I had little money, so that was out of the question. There are other things by which the French label you, a woman particularly—charm, beauty, chic, _l’esprit_, seriousness, capacity to work, intelligence, _bonté_. Those with whom I had dealings for any length of time hit perfectly on my chief asset. I was a worker. “A _femme travailleuse_,” they said to one another, and if they passed me to an acquaintance that was the recommendation. No people believe more than the French in the value and dignity in hard work. I was treated with respect because of my working quality. It was not saying that I should not have gone farther and faster if I had been a beauty, if I had had what they call charm and the fine secret of using it, but they were willing to take me for what I had. Being a worker, the chances were I was serious. I might or might not prove intelligent, but here they gave me the benefit of the doubt and waited for a final answer. That which they were slowest in making up their minds about was goodness—_bonté_. They were not willing to accept anything but natural unconscious goodness, and it takes time to make sure about that.

While we were finding our way about, I was at work. If I did not have the documents to prove it I would not believe today that just a week after arriving, and in spite of the excitement and fatigue of settling, I had written and mailed two newspaper articles.

Enamored as I was of the city, no work could have been more satisfying than that I had laid out for myself. My little self-directed syndicate concerned itself with the practical everyday life of the city. One is always keen to know all the common things about the thing or person one loves. How did Paris keep herself so clean? What did she eat and drink, and where did she get it? How much did it cost her? Where did she go for fun? How did she manage it that even her very poor seemed to know how to amuse themselves, that her beggars were a recognized institution? There were a multitude of things I thirsted to know about her. And if I could get my bread and butter in finding out, what luck! What luck!

At once I became an omnivorous reader of the newspapers, and I found to my joy that many of them felt as I did about the Parisian scene. They carried paragraphs as captivating as those that our _New Yorker_ unearths for its fascinating editorial department on the city to which it belongs. Another discovery which surprised me was that my best source for illustration was the illustrated catalogues of the French Salons of recent years. I wanted pictures of markets, of rivers, of beggars, of marriages, of all the things that people were doing as they went about their business. And what rejoiced me was that many French artists seemed to love the streets and what went on there in much the same way that I did. They loved to see Paris at her daily toil, meeting her daily problems, and every year they turned out pictures showing her at it.

Later I was to discover that this daily life of the Parisians of different classes has always been material for able artists. The best illustrations I found for my Madame Roland in her youth were those of Chardin in the Louvre.

My manner of living, the contacts and circumstances attending the gathering of my material for my newspaper articles brought me for the first time in my life into daily relations with that greatest segment of every country’s population—those whom we call the poor, and of whom if we are well-to-do or if we are rich we are so curiously unconscious. I had belonged all my conscious life to the well-to-do, those who spent a dollar without seriously weighing it. Society had seemed to me to be chiefly made up of such people. Of course there were the rich, but they were so few in number as to be negligible—at least they had never counted in my life; nor had the poor counted as a permanent class. I had the American notion that the chief economic duty of the poor was to become well-to-do. The laborer, the clerk, the man who worked for others should save his money, put it into the business, or start out for himself, no matter how hard, how meager the return. Dignity and success lay in being your own master, owning your own home—I am sure my father would rather have grubbed corn meal and bacon from a piece of stony land which was his own than have had all the luxuries on a salary. One of his complaints against the great oil trust was that it was turning the men of the Oil Region into hired men—mighty prosperous hired men, some of them, but nevertheless taking orders, even orders as to what to say, for whom to vote.

To his way of thinking this was failure for an American. I suspect his philosophy working in me was at least partially responsible for my revolt against the kind of security I had achieved on _The Chautauquan_. I was a hired girl.

But in the society where I found myself in Paris there was no such contempt for the fixed job. On the contrary, it was something for which you were responsible, to which you owed an obligation. Serious workers in Paris seemed to me to give to the job the same kind of loyalty that serious men and women in America gave to the businesses they owned. You respected yourself and were respected in proportion to your fidelity to it. You might be advanced, but more probably not. Opportunity did not grow on every bush as at home, and if it came a Frenchman’s way he weighed it—at home you seized it, trusting to luck. Here luck seemed to me to have little or no standing in a business enterprise, big as it counted in the lotteries in which everybody took part. To my surprise I found these people, working so busily and constantly, were not restless like the Americans; nor were they generally envious. I had a feeling that my concierge, who never had been across the Seine to the Right Bank, who lived in a room almost filled by her huge bed and its great feather puffs, who must have looked long at a sou before she spent it, would not have changed places with anybody in Paris. Were not the lodgers on whom she kept so strict a watch kind, generous, and regular with fees? Had she not friends in the street? Might she not win a slice of a fortune one day from the fraction of a lottery ticket which she annually found a way to buy? And who had so magnificent a cat? The pride of the House. What more could she ask?

Certainly there was more interest in the tasks, less restlessness, less envy, than in the same class in America. Was it my father’s philosophy which made the difference? Was it your duty if you were poor to struggle to be well-to-do, and if well-to-do struggle to be rich? It meant you were always trying to be somebody else. If it was your duty to be discontented, could you escape envy? Was it not necessary, if you were to keep yourself up to the effort, to feed yourself on envy as in war men must be fed on hate if they are to kill with vigor and gusto?

It was too much to believe that the content, the fidelity to the job were universal. Nevertheless, it was sufficient to cement the laborious poor into a powerful and recognized class, a class with traditions, customs, recognized relations to other classes, having its own manner of homes, amusements, worship; a class self-respecting, jealous of its prerogatives, and able in need to protect itself.

But the multitude of hard-working and fairly satisfied men and women were not all the poor with whom I came close. There were those who could find no work; there were many of them, for the long world depression of the nineties was on its way. The winter of ’91 and ’92 was a cruel one, and the museums, libraries, lecture rooms, churches where I went about my daily duties were swarmed with poor souls trying to deceive the guardians into thinking that they had come to study pictures, read books, listen to lectures, to confess their sins or listen to mass. The guardians only saw them when they became a crowd or attempted to camp for the day. Most pathetic to me were their efforts to make furtive toilets, taking a comb from a pocket to smooth tangled hair, scissors to cut the fringe from a frayed cuff.

There were soup kitchens to keep them from starving, though many a one starved or froze or ended his misery in the Seine that winter. At one of these kitchens I officiated for a brief time. It was run by the McAll Mission in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. I was not there as a Samaritan but as a reporter looking for copy. What could I do for them but tell Americans what a few Americans were doing in Paris to ease the vast misery? It might bring a few sous for soup. I believe it did.

But they pulled less strongly on my sympathy than a class of the poor which I found to be in our Quarter—men and women no longer young, past the employing age, who lived alone on tiny incomes, sometimes the fruit of their own past thrift, sometimes an inheritance, again the gift of a friend. I watched and speculated about how they did it, the more seriously because I asked myself if the day might be coming when I should belong to this class. If I ever did, I hoped I could carry it off with as much dignity as the one called the Countess on our street. She lived _sous les toits_ in a high house opposite me, a tall, erect, white-haired woman in a gown and cape of faded and patched silk which still showed its quality as did its wearer. More than once I watched her stop late at night at the garbage can on the sidewalk opposite, turning over its contents. Many of the tradespeople seemed to feel that she honored them when she came in to buy an occasional egg or apple. She was so gracious, so completely _grande dame_. One day I heard the woman from whom I bought my café au lait say: “Will not Madame honor me by trying my coffee? It is still hot.” She was pouring out a cup as she said it, and the Countess with a benignant smile said, “If that will give you pleasure, my good Marie.” She needed it. Marie knew that, but Marie was more than paid by that smile. “It is a great honor,” she told me lest, being a foreigner, I did not understand the Countess, “to have so great a lady come into one’s shop.” There it was again, another standard than money, the standard of class, breeding, cultivation, the grand manner.

The more I saw of the gallant poor of Paris, the more convinced I was if they could get on so could I, learning to live on what I could make. And I was going to make something. My doubt about that was set at rest some six weeks after my arrival when I received a check for my first syndicate article—$5.00. It was quickly followed by checks from two more of the six papers to which I had submitted my syndicate proposition—50 per cent was not a bad percentage and they were good papers, the Pittsburgh _Dispatch_, the Cincinnati _Times-Star_ and the Chicago _Tribune_. These three papers remained faithful to me until the election of 1892 compelled them to give all their space to politics, so they explained. I believed them, for they had all written me kind letters about my stuff and the _Times-Star_, unsolicited, raised my pay to $7.50!

Then the unbelievable happened. In December, a little less than three months after my arrival in Paris, _Scribner’s Magazine_ accepted a story—a grand Christmas present indeed, that news. Fiction was not in the Plan, but one of the first pieces of work that I did after arriving in Paris was a story born of a delightful relationship with an old French dyer of Titusville, Monsieur Claude. As soon as I had finally determined that I would burn all bridges and go to Paris for study, I had set about my preparation in thorough fashion. There was the language. I had read it fluently for years—but speak it? No. Could I master enough in the few months I had before sailing to find my way about? If so, I must have some one to talk with. The best the town afforded was Monsieur Claude and his mouselike wife. They were flattered by my request. Three times a week I went, and we talked and studied until they both were sure I could make myself understood in common matters. In this delightful association I discovered that the passion of Monsieur Claude, the longing of his heart, was to see France before he died. He had insisted that I learn and almost daily repeat Béranger’s “France Adorée.” Once in Paris, I understood him, wrote his story, sent it—a trial balloon—to _Scribner’s Magazine_.

The selection was made on a principle which young writers too rarely consider when they attempt to place their wares, and that is understanding of the tastes and prejudices and hobbies of periodicals. Useless in 1890 to send a story on “France Adorée” to a magazine which was interested purely and simply in realistic literature; but the inexperienced writer frequently does not realize that. Naturally I had learned in my work on _The Chautauquan_ something of the pet interests of the leading publishing houses. I knew that _Scribner’s_ enjoyed French cultivation, French character, French history. I hoped my sentimental title “France Adorée” would not antagonize the editor of _Scribner’s Magazine_.

But I had expected nothing from it, being in that state of mind where I had ceased to expect, only to accept. So that when I received a friendly letter from Mr. Burlingame, the editor of the magazine, saying that he liked the story, that he accepted it, I felt as one must who suddenly draws a fortune in the sweepstakes.

In due time a check for $100 arrived. What excitement in our little salon when I showed my companions that check! “Now,” declared our beautiful Mary, “we can move to the Champs Elysées.” And she would have done it, for she was one of those who always see spring in a single sparrow. We stayed where we were, I requiring a whole flock of sparrows to convince me that it was spring.

The influence of the story on my fortunes was all out of proportion to its value. Most important was the courage it gave me. If I, a stranger, could do something that a great editor of a great magazine thought good enough to accept, why, after all, I might work it out. That which moved me most deeply, gave me joy that made me weep, was that now I should have something to show to my family. I had felt a deserter. Times were hard in the Titusville household in these early nineties. My father’s and brother’s experiences in the oil business—of which I want to speak later—were more than discouraging; they were alarming. My sister was ill and in the hospital; my mother’s letters were saturated with anxiety. And here was I—the eldest child in the family, a woman of years and of some experience, who had been given an education, whose social philosophy demanded that she do her part in working out family problems—here was I across the ocean writing picayune pieces at a fourth of a cent a word while they struggled there. I felt guilty, and the only way I had kept myself up to what I had undertaken was the hope that I could eventually make a substantial return. If any one of the family felt that I should have been at home there never was a hint of it. From them I had unwavering sympathy and encouragement.

But if in three months’ time I could do what I had done, and I made the most of it in my letters home, why, then they would see some hope for the future. Not only would the story help them to believe in me, it would give something more imposing to show to inquiring friends than the newspaper articles which had been their only exhibit.

When the story appeared in the following spring the reverberations in my Paris circle were encouraging and useful. I even heard of it from “the other side,” as we called the Right Bank, for Theodore Stanton (at that time the head of the Associated Press in Paris) came with Mrs. Stanton to call on me and tell me he liked the story.

The most important fruit was that Mr. Burlingame looked me up when he made his annual spring visit to Europe. Here was my chance to tell him about Madame Roland, to ask if he thought his house would be interested in such a biography if it turned out to be a good piece of work. “The suggestion would have to be considered in New York,” he replied. But he promised me it would be considered. And it was, for not long afterwards he wrote me that the house was interested in my project, certainly wanted to see the manuscript.

This was enough to settle finally a struggle that had tormented me for many weeks. I had come to Paris determined to fit myself for magazine work along historical and biographical lines; but once close to the world of the scholar, surrounded by men and a few women who lived stern, self-denying lives in order to master a field however small I was seized with an ambition to be a scholar. It was a throwback to my old passion for the microscope. I would specialize in the French Revolution—I would become a professor.

But Mr. Burlingame’s answer to my inquiry as to whether the Scribner company would be friendly to a biographical study of my lady settled the matter; which shows, I take it, how shallow my scholarly ambitions really were.