They towered above the crowd and above the very small but very important person who was monopolizing them, none other than the Duchesse de Sazarat-Bégonine, who was obviously engaged in opening upon them, one after another, her redoubtable batteries of persuasion. Do not let this casual mention of so well known a title lead you to the very erroneous idea that I move in the aristocratic society which she adorns. Nothing could be further from the truth. The very fact that I know the Duchesse de Sazarat-Bégonine is a startling proof of the extent to which, in the pursuit of her war-relief work, she has wandered from her original circle! It shows, as nothing else could, what a thorough sport she was in the pursuit of her new game, stopping at nothing, not even at promiscuous mingling with the obscure. She was, if you will allow me the expression, the _as des as_ of the fashionable war-relief world in Paris. As in the case of Guynemer, when she mounted her aerial steed in pursuit of big cash donations to her _oeuvre_, all lesser lights abandoned hopes for theirs. She had so many different weapons in her arsenal that she was irresistible; her château full of the memories of those distinguished thieves, intriguers, and murderers, the illustrious ancestors of her husband; her far-renowned collection of historic snuffboxes, her wonderful Paris house with its rigorously select circle, to enter which any woman there would have given her ears; her astonishing and beautiful jewelry; the reputation of having been in her youth the _bonne amie_ of one of the best-known of the Bourbon pretenders (or was it a Napoleonic) ... ah, when the Duchesse started out to bring down a wealthy philanthropist for her Home for One-armed and Tubercular Soldiers, she never missed her aim. It was not to be doubted that people who had succumbed without a struggle to the snuffy old parish priest with his war-orphans, would put up no resistance to this brilliant onslaught.