I had never seen anything which seemed to me more useful than what Madame Marillier was doing, and I had opportunity to judge, for everywhere she went she took me with her. Her invariable card of introduction to these natural-born skeptics of the value of all persons not born and raised in France was, “Mademoiselle comes from the same country as your vines.” That was enough for them. Their vines had been devastated by repeated visitations of the phylloxera, and it was not until the introduction of American roots that the vineyards had recovered. They were looking well now. I was welcome at once; they treated me as if I were the benefactor, yet I doubt if any of them knew where America was. Most of them with whom I talked placed it somewhere in Africa. Africa they did know, as a name at least, because many of their sons went there for military service. One of the most surprising things to me among the French, high and low, was their utter indifference to the geography of the rest of the world. Why should they bother about the rest of the world? There was only one land about which they should know: that was France, and that they should know to the last corner. Even many educated people I met did not distinguish North from South America. In Madame Darmesteter’s drawing room I met cultivated people who believed that all Americans carried weapons in their pockets, and that Indians walked the streets of Chicago. When I protested that it was against the law to carry a revolver, and that the only Indians in Chicago were those that were imported as they imported the Dahomans, they smiled incredulously. Many of them, I concluded, got their notions of what America was like from the exhibits in a certain public hall on the Grand Boulevards. Here you paid a sou or two to look through stereoscopes at amusing and sometimes very improper pictures. Here the walls were decorated with illustrated newspapers from different countries, and among them were always copies of the _Police Gazette_. As a matter of fact it was in this hall of the Grand Boulevard of Paris that I saw the first copy of the _Police Gazette_ that I had seen since those days back in Rouseville when my friend and I carefully studied the underworld in the sheets that we could slip away from the bunkhouse of my father’s workmen. The visit to Le Clos with its grist of impressions, the conviction that I had seen Madame Roland herself, in her happiest as well as her most useful days, completed the study of source material for her life on which I had been working as I found time through the twenty months I had been in Paris. It rounded out the woman she was, softened the asperity which I was beginning to feel for her; also it strengthened my suspicion that while a woman frequently was a success as the Providence of a countryside she did no better than a man when she attempted to fill that function for a nation.