No one appreciates or speaks more enthusiastically to-day than the Maréchale of the devotion and bravery of her comrades, Colonel Clibborn first and foremost, and spiritual children at this time. *CHAPTER VI* *THE SOUL OF FRANCE* It is not easy to reach the ideal and spiritual elements of character which are masked by the light laughter or the polite scorn of the typical Frenchman, who believes, or pretends to believe, that religion is only for priests and women. At the opening of a new hall in the Rue Oberkamff, a big fellow shook his fist in the Maréchale’s face and said, "An Englishman may accept religion—a German—or a heathen, but a Frenchman—never!" "O God, if You exist, save my soul, if I have one!" was the prayer of another man, who had attended the meetings for some time, and who indicated with a strange pathos the bewildered state of mind into which many of the educated, as well as the ignorant, had sunk. "Let there be no mistake," said a French writer, Louise de Croisilles; "it is by no means unnatural that the Army should have taken root in India, or even under Africa’s burning sun, but that it should be accepted in Paris, the centre of free-thought and unbelief, that is a thing incredible." Nevertheless the Frenchman suffers from "the malady of the ideal," even as other men. His heart is restless until it rests in God, and it is sheer faithlessness to say that he cannot be won by the grace of God. If he is sceptical, it is because he has no conception of the fascinating loveliness of Christianity; if he is a scoffer, it is because he has never come in contact with human lives which suggest to him the infinite goodness of God.