Marie Lenéru nourished her soul in anguish on the tragic problem: How can it be that the most obvious social duty, the defence of hearth and home, should come to mean in practice, crime and cruelty let loose in the general reversal of all social law? The daughter of a line of sailors, with half a dozen _filleuls_ in the Fusiliers-Marins, she was the most martial of pacifists, but also the most passionate. While embroidering a flag, or tying up a packet for the front, she was busy devising some League of Nations which might prevent the recurrence of the infernal storm. Early last spring she brought me to read a strange, violent, lyrical debate, rather than a play, which she had written. She called it _La Paix_, and hoped it might one day be performed before the Congress. She had wished, indeed, that the Théâtre Français should produce it instead of _La Triomphatrice_. But the House of Molière wisely stuck to its bargain: _La Paix_ was not a piece for war-time. _La Triomphatrice_ appeared at the Théâtre Français in January, 1918. It did not take the town by storm. The play is too exclusively concerned with the manners and morals of a literary clique, and the question discussed is after all a very secondary question: Can a woman of genius be really happy and beloved as a woman--be as satisfactory as wife, mistress, or mother, as the more receptive non-creative sort? Marie Lenéru thought not. One feels inclined to answer that it does not really matter: there are so few women of genius. But Marie Lenéru debated her theme so passionately that it was impossible to turn an indifferent ear. If the general public remained aloof, the _salons_ and the newspapers were full of _La Triomphatrice_, and recruited every week a wider audience. With Madame Bartet triumphant on the stage, with half the celebrities of Paris in the stalls, Marie Lenéru might feel her hour was come, or at least was at last tremblingly, exquisitely coming, in all its fullness.... She was ambitious....