The Birmingham age-herald., 1924-07-27
France Pays 40, ,OOO Francs
 As Popular Vote Prize To
 Republics Best Mother

A month later, while Paul Henry was home on short furlough, seventh child was born, and in the months irn- mediately following this event Mime. Henry depended mainly for living upon the generosity of the soldiers bil- leted in the village.
 In March, 1915, after a serious at- tack of typhoid fever, Paul Henry was discharged from the service. He re- opened his sawmill with such machinery as he was able to procure, going deep ly into debt for the purpose, and re- suned work on orders for the army.
 Running The SawmlIl
 The next year or so, despite the bur den of it's debts, the family managed to live in an approach to comfort; but the fathers health, which had been per- manently impaired by his military ex- perienee, steadily declined, and in February, 1917, he died. There was not a cent left in the house, and the widow was obliged to sell, for five hun dred francs, the only horse of the saw mill in order to keep her eight children another little Henry had come in De cember, 1916--from starving.
 But Mime. Henry kept the sawmill going. When the commissary depart ment of the army announced its inten- tion of annualline its contracts because of her husbands death, she pleaded with them not to do so, promising to deliver the orders in good shape and on time. She succeeded in fulfilling the contracts and earned enough not only to feed and educate her chiidren--the eldest boy is preparing for the priest hood-but to liquidate all the obliga tions her husband had been obliged to contract in the last months of his life.
 With the close of the war, the allo- cation of a pension and the arrival of the elder children at the breadwinning age, Mime. Henry has been able to re- nOunce running the sawmill. But the four younger children still are with the mother, and the last two, Therese, 9, and Paul, z, are so fragile, owing to the hard conditions surrounding their birth and babyhood as to demand a great deal of attention. Indeed, Therese did not take step until she was years old. The sudden advent into the hard-work ing economical household of forty thou sand francs means that these two semi invalids will be provided with the deIicacies which hitherto they have lacked.
 A Brave Paralytic
 Next to the soldier boys mother" in the popular vote came Mime. BarOux, a widow and a paralegiac, who has man. aged, despite her infirmity, not only to feed and clothe her three children (she has been the mother of six), but to make wholesome characters of them.
 Suddenly stricken with paralysis, caused by overwork and privation, in 1916, a year and hals after the death of her husband, Parisian gas worker, who fell at the Bois Bernard in the second month of the war, leaving her with two children and another on the way, and pronounced incurable and dis missed by the hospital to which she had been taken immediately after the shock, Mime. Baroux has remained ever since in the same miserable tenement. It con- sistS of a single sunless room where there is just space enough for the bed on which all four members of the fam fly sleep, a stove, to which the mother manages to drag herself, with the aid of both arms, to prepare the meals, and three or four rickety chairs.
 A cripple on pallet, an incarnation of destitution, Widow Baroux is not merely a vision of suffering, an object of compassion, but real heroine. "I would that, eyeryb0dy," protestsa cham pion of her candidacy, "could see, in her miserable slum lodging, as saw her, the Widow Baroux, this poor woman six times mother, nine years a widow, eight years paralyzed, poorest of the poor, rich only in the inmost recesses of the heart. A soul radiates, flashes, gushes from her velvety eyes, the soul nf arrff Aha un4 nf maman who loves and knows how to get herself loved in return. Unable to lead her children by the hand through the dangers of life, she has forged, in the depths of their eonSciences, solid de- lenses. From her chair, rivetted eight years to the floor, Widow Baroux has made of them charming little creatures, courteous, industrious, studious and un- selfish.
 The winner of the third prize, Mime. DesirGt, textile worker of the Parisian suburb of Rueil, lost her husband and two of her nine children from tubereu- losis and is fighting heroically to pre- serve the surviving children from the same fate; but, alas, with small pros poets of success, because the little she can earn by working at her trade does not suffice to pay for quarters spacious enough to segregate the contaminated from the uncontaminted-to say noth- ing of providing the super-alimentatiOn the circumstances demand. Mime. De- sirat's husband was a bOOkkeeper in Paris. He died in October, 1921. Five months later the second daughter, Suz- anna, followed her father. The oldest daughter, Madeline, died in January, this year.
 Not a day passes that Mime. Desirat does not fear discovering in the other children symptoms of the terrible dis ease.
 The fourth prize was awarded Widow CaverOt, Burgundian farmer, the mother of sixteen children, of whom fifteen are living. Widow CaverOt also cared for her own mother and two refugee children during the war and is the good providence of the sick of the region. In the seven years that have elapsed since her husbands death she has paid off heavy mortgage on the 1 farm.
 Born Aurelle Allouis, at Senailly, near Montbard, in Burgundy, on Oc- tober 20, 1874s she married young a peasant of the same community. In 1913, the pair, who had many children, bought a farm, paying a small sum down and giving mortgage for the bal ance. The war came, and departure in January, 1917, of the eldest son, Mar eel, for the front, following close upon the birth of the sixteenth child, gave the father, who was in poor health, such a shock that he died only a few hours later. Despite the absence of the son at the war and the fact that ten of the other children were under 16 years old, Mime. Caverot, with the aid of the four others, not only kept the farm going, L,k nn5nd hr f~aa;n0 ;t cf avorv iro,,D,