Before the war there were few European peoples of whom we knew less, whom we misunderstood as thoroughly, as the French. We had a French tradition in the United States once, but that was long ago. New Orleans, St. Louis, and Charleston, South Carolina, were to a certain extent French cities up to the time of the Civil War. Old family names, the names of streets and squares, even a few monuments bear witness to this. But even in New Orleans the French tradition is now only a shadow. We have had little immigration from France in late years. Hence we know little of the people. There was a vague theory that they were frivolous, pleasure-loving and rather lax in their morals. The French are not frivolous--they are volatile and gay. They are not pleasure-loving, any more than other peoples are. The questionable pleasures of Paris, the bal masques and the Moulin Rouge sort of thing, existed for tourists mainly. We thought the French liked that kind of unwholesome painted stuff because it was there, and they thought we liked it because we paid almost anything to get it. It is time the two people, French and Americans, understood each other. I think I can not convey a better idea of the French character, its unquestionable gaiety and indomitable courage, than by telling how through all risks and dangers and calamities, their worship of pure beauty persists. Beauty is a cult with the French. They can not endure anything ugly. Every national emotion is expressed in terms of beauty and grace. Paris, as we know, has been under bombardment from the German long-distance guns since March twenty-third. Almost every day the gun has sounded. Some days its spiteful boom sounded every fifteen minutes from dawn until dark. Now one of the effects of this constant bombardment was that it threatened to break all the expensive plate-glass windows in the capital, and the people were advised to paste strips of paper across their windows. Window glass just now is not only expensive, but it is very scarce. Once broken, replacement becomes a serious matter. Of course, strips of paper can not stop a shell or a piece of shrapnel, but they can lessen the shock of concussion. So Paris overnight blossomed from one end to the other with paper-stripped window glass. But did they just paste on strips of paper, as almost any other people in the world would have done? They did not. They invented a new art of window decoration. Every merchant, every householder, vied with all the others to make their striped-up windows things of beauty. They devised color schemes, they studied historic design, they made the paper strips advertise wares. In a word, bombs might fall, but beauty went on as usual. But the most extraordinary manifestation of the unquenchable spirit of the French was the discussion, immediately opened, as to what a properly self-respecting woman, awakened in the night by death-dealing bombs from the sky, ought to wear when she fled to the cellar.