For the sanitation of Bar-le-Duc has yet to be born.[2] One can't call arrangements that date from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries sanitation, one can only call them self-advertisement. Until I went to Bar I never knew that the air could be solid with smell. One might as well walk up a sewer as up the Rue de l'Horloge on a hot day. Every man, woman and child in the town ought to have died of diphtheria, typhoid, septic poisoning, of a dozen gruesome diseases long ago. If smells could kill, Bar would be as depopulated as the Dead Cities of the Zuyder Zee. But the French seem to thrive on smells, though in all fairness I must admit that once or twice a grumble reached me. But that was when the cesspool under the window was discharging its contents into the yard. [2] It is only fair to add that the whole question was under serious consideration when the war broke out, and made reform, for the moment, impossible. The hard-voiced woman was hygienically mad. She imported a Sanitary Inspector, an ironic anomaly, who used to blush apoplectically through meals because she would discuss the undiscussable with him. "I hope you are not squeamish? We don't mind these things here," she said to me. "It is so stupid to be a prude." Frankly, I could have slain that woman. She wasn't fit to live. The climax came on a broiling day when we were all exhausted and not a little sick from heat and smell. She pleasingly entertained us at dinner with a graphic description of a tubercular hip which she had been dressing. There was a manure heap outside the window of the sick child's room. It crawled with flies. So did the room. So did the hip. She went back to the native sphere she should never have left a few days later, but in the meantime she had obsessed us all with a firm belief in the value of the _seau hygiénique_. Every refugee family should have one. Our first care must be to provide it. The obsession drove us into strange difficulties, as, for example, once in a neighbouring village where, trusting to my companion to keep the kindly but inquisitive Curé who accompanied us too deeply engaged in conversation to hear what I was saying, I asked the mother of a large family if she would like us to give her one. "Qu'est que c'est? What did you say?" Gentle as my murmur had been, M. le Curé was down on me like a shot. The woman who hesitates is lost. Anything is better than embarrassment. I repeated the question. "Ce n'est pas nécessaire. Il y a un jardin," was his electrifying reply, and we filed out after him, with new ideas on French social questions simmering in our heads.