With it all, you would think Emilienne, if you met her, quite a normal girl. You see, she is young enough to forget. And it is only occasionally that in the clear blue eyes you catch a glimpse of tragedy. Her smooth brown hair she is as interested in having in the latest mode as are you who to-day consulted the fashion-pages of a magazine for coiffures. I have seen her on the sands at Trouville with a group of girls at play at blind man’s buff in the moonlight. And by her silvery laughter you would not know her from the rest as a heroine. The next day, when they were in bathing and the body of a drowned man was washed ashore, one of the other girls fainted. Afterward Emilienne said, and there was in her eyes a far-away look of old horrors as she spoke, “Marie, Marie, if your eyes had looked on what mine have, you would not faint so easily.” There is another French girl, the youngest war heroine I know who has been decorated by any government. And the case of Madeleine Danau is perhaps of special interest, because any girl in the United States can even now begin to be a heroine as she was. They say in France that “_la petite Danau_” has served her country even though it was not while exposed to shot and shell. She lives in the village of Corbeil and she was only fourteen years old at the time her father, the baker, was mobilised. A baker in France, it must be remembered, is a most necessary functionary in the community, for as everybody has for years bought bread, nobody even knows how to make it at home any more. The whole neighbouring countryside, therefore, you see, was most dependent on the baker, and the baker was gone away to war. It was then that Madeleine proved equal to doing the duty that was nearest to her. She promptly stepped into her father’s place before the bread-trough and the oven. She gets up each morning at four o’clock and with the aid of her little brother, a year younger than herself, she makes each day eight hundred pounds of bread, which is delivered in a cart by another brother and sister. The radius of the district is some ten miles, and no household since war began has missed its daily supply of bread. One day Madeleine was summoned to a public meeting for which the citizens of Corbeil assembled at the Mairie. She went in her champagne-coloured dress of _toile de laine_ and her Sunday hat of leghorn trimmed with black velvet and white roses. And there before this public assemblage the _Préfet des Deux-Sèvres_ pinned on Madeleine the Cross of Lorraine and read a letter from President Poincaré of France. In it the President presented to Madeleine Danau his sincere compliments and begged her to accept “this little jewel,” this Cross of Lorraine, which shall proclaim that the valiant child of the Deux-Sèvres through her own labour assuring for the inhabitants of the Commune of Exoudun their daily bread, has performed as patriotic a service and is as good a Frenchwoman as are any of her sisters of the Meuse.