Her attitude toward any attempt to help her, aside from giving her what she asks for, is best seen in the letters she writes to the visitors. The letters she leaves at her " ad dress," where she can never be seen, to be given to the " Lady Visitor" who " will call again." For these visitors she expresses elsewhere the utmost scorn : " They are such very fancy ladies." "Gentlemen as a rule," she says in one letter, " have more soul and feeling as women " ; and in another, " As for those women, I hate them all." " Pray don't go house for house to make me a public charity." " Pray use discretion." " I am so sorry that ye have taken so much trouble to go al around to publish me as a Pauper. I would rather have starve than have such imprudent Young Ladies state my circumstances to the public. Safe your neighbor ! especially from public slander. What did you do? Went around to fetch ignorant children to find me? Is this the principle of your employment ? Pray safe me further investigation. I prize my peace above your prom ises." In the same letter an interesting note is supplied by her report of the distress of the family with which she was living at the moment.
In 1889 she asked for help at a convent on the ground that she secured converts to the Roman Catholic faith.
She took with her a man — apparently a German —for whom she tried to get assistance. This is the first re corded instance of the practice she later developed into a profession, of acting as an agent for her unfortunate ac quaintances. A few years later she seems to have turned to proselyting in another direction, for she was writing to a Protestant clergyman : "I would wish God would help me to raise an Italian chapel and school in East New York in the Episcopal Faith. I could canvass two hundred to three hundred Italians together with their children who now go to no religious worship." In a later communica tion she assures him : " I am able to unite forty families and more than two hundred Italians, to join a more intelligent religion." For most of the time since 1893 she has lived among the Italians, getting a lodging and meals wherever she could, in return for services rendered to them. It has rarely been possible to find her " home," as the address she gives is generally a bank, a bakery, or a saloon, where she receives her mail and meets her clients. She says that at one time she was at service in Brooklyn. For a while she lived at a Salvation Army lodging-house under the name of Bertha Klein, but generally she has kept to the Italian colony in which she was found in 1893. In 1894 she was living with an aged Italian to whom she re ferred in terms of respect as the Reverend Doctor, and apparently conducting a saloon for the Italians of the neighborhood, advertising a bureau of information where she gave general advice and carried on the business of notary, commissioner of deeds, and railway agent.
The list of occupations in which she has been engaged is long. According to her own account she has been as occasion demanded — travelling companion, teacher of languages and music, translator, interpreter for the police men on the block, book canvasser, seamstress, maid, nurse, typewriter, factory hand, cook, general servant in a board ing-house (where she was obliged to "peal al potatoes for twenty 'boarders ") and " Missionary with the family of Rev. Dr. W. in Rome and the Orient." Her most con stant source of revenue, however, has been derived from the profession she developed for herself. She made herself acquainted with the workings of many charitable agencies in the city, especially institutions for children, and advised her friends where to apply for aid whenever they wanted it. If her clients succeeded in getting what they asked for, she would accept a fee from them ; if not, she would write to the society to which they had applied, saying that they were " bad" and needed nothing. Her specialty was placing out children. She got children into institutions for a consid eration of $10 or $15 apiece. She also secured the release of the child from the institution, when that was desired, for $10. Unfortunately for her prosperity, her second appli cation to an institution was apt to arouse suspicion and start an investigation. She also found homes for children in families. This was accomplished through advertisements
in the Italian papers, one of which reads: "A poor woman of the province of C—, left a widow with three children, six months, four and six years old, seeks a family which will care for them. They are healthy and very pretty. Address by letter, Mrs. d'Arago, at number 315 Margaret Street." The address given was a saloon kept by a Ger man, who said he allowed her to receive her mail there and meet her applicants, and often gave her something to eat, because she was " so kind to little children who have nobody." As late as 1903 she was still procuring " work ing papers" for children. When one mother for whom she had performed this service refused to give her as much money as she demanded, she told the little girl's employer that she had tuberculosis and thus brought about her dis missal. Another way in which she used her good offices is revealed in one of her letters asking for money. In enumerating her troubles and misfortunes she says, " And I got an Italian woman out of prison and for reward she did not pay me." Several letters addressed by her to the Bureau of De pendent Children seem to indicate that she used her wits against her enemies as vigorously as in behalf of her friends. These letters contain notes on families who have children in institutions, but who, she asserts, are perfectly able to provide for them at home. " Italians," she writes, "import children Daily and get them in Homes ; parents who have children in Homes keep Groceries and Beer saloons ; husband works at shovel, — and I will send you a list next week — Hundreds I know." The promised list tells how mothers " dress in fine style," and the family has " fine whiskey, beer, and wines," and lives " luxuri antly " while "the City has to pay " for the maintenance of their children. In regard to one family she is particu larly vehement. She writes four pages about them, giving details of their circumstances and advising as to the best method of approach in order to confirm her statements ; for, she says, " All I can help to get you good cases I will, but you yourself must find out Points to confirm yourself." The methods of investigation she recommends suggest that she studied to some purpose the ways of "those fancy Ladies " who annoyed her so often. These letters to the Bureau of Dependent Children may be one of her devices for getting children restored to their parents at the parents' request. The fact, however, that they were written while she was living in the Salvation Army lodg ing-house, as Bertha Klein, point rather to another ex planation, — that she took this way of revenging herself on clients who had not come up to all her demands in the way of pay. In either case it is entirely possible that she had helped to place the very children under discussion.
From time to time, in the course of these twenty years, Madame d'Arago has apparently become discouraged and thought of Europe with longing. Twice, it is known, she has obtained money avowedly for a return to Italy or to England, but she has used it for other purposes. She has been at times found in wretched surroundings and sick, as her appeals had stated, but she will never give any information or allow any investigation of her circum stances. In the last ten years she seems to have become intemperate, and she has at least once been arrested in a street fight. On the other hand, there has been no evi dence, since the first years, of the kind of immorality with which she was then charged. In spite of her cleverness of a certain kind, her ingenuity, and her fund of informa tion in certain directions, she has never been prosperous. It is clear that life has been hard for her and that she has suffered much. Not the least pathetic note in her history is that she seems to have had no friends — to have lived a stranger among the people she knew so well. There is every evidence that her statement, "I never tell nobody anything of my trouble or suffering," is literally true as applied to her daily associates, though she made notable exceptions to the rule in asking for help from men and women far removed. There is a ring of sincerity in her lament to one of these latter, " These are not my nation."