Martyrs they remained womanly in their modesty, while exhibiting a manly courage; in the time of the Doctors, whilst orators speak and learned men write, women continue to love and console.”[36] This Christian tradition has survived and is still powerful, thanks to the deeply laid sentiment of pity in the heart of woman. “Private charity in Paris,” writes M. du Camp,[37] “is almost entirely in the hands of women. There are in Paris women of the world, young and beautiful, born for pleasure, accustomed to every luxury, who visit the poor, nurse the sick, rock little motherless children, and all this they do simply without a word of self-praise.” The society of “Les Dames du Calvaire,” in Paris, is composed of widows, who, without binding themselves by religious vows, engage to nurse the sick gathered into the hospitals of the association, poor outcasts attacked by loathsome diseases—cancer, for example. Women of wealth and belonging to great families often obtain admission to this society. Female religious orders are rarely contemplative; they are nearly always charitable in aim. “The Daughters of Charity” possess establishments all over the known world; they migrate, says M. du Camp, “like benevolent birds, carrying with them the principle of self-sacrifice and the love of those that suffer. In all countries I have visited, among sects most antagonistic to their religion, I have beheld them at work; their faces shadowed by the immense cap, which resembles the wings of a white swan; instructing children, visiting the sick, caring for the plague-stricken, blessed by our sailors whom they nurse in the French hospitals in foreign lands.”[38] Pity in woman is sometimes so powerful a sentiment that it supplies the place in her of a higher faculty, intelligence. It was thus that a humble servant-maid, without learning, who could neither read nor write, founded one of the most prominent nursing sisterhoods in France, “Les petites Soeurs des Pauvres,” which to-day numbers 3,400 sisters, and possesses 207 houses, where more than 25,000 old men are received and cared for. In the first half of this century there was such misery in Brittany that the old men were literally abandoned by all. Jeanne Jugau, whose earnings hardly sufficed to maintain herself, took in one, then two, then a number of them, without a thought of her own poverty, slaving might and main for their support. Two women, Virginie Tredaniel and Marie Catherine, helped her; a priest, Le Pailleur, took the direction of their work, and in a short time the order was founded, and grew apace. There, where genius might have failed, the love and pity of a servant-maid succeeded.