Wars I Have Seen by Gertrude Stein

Wars I Have Seen” (1945), her memoir of the Second World War, Gertrude Stein writes of the remarkable kindness of a young Frenchman named Paul Genin, the owner of a silk factory in Lyons and a country neighbor, who came to her after America entered the war and asked if she needed money. She did – the funds from America on which she and Alice B. Toklas depended no longer arrived – and he offered her a matching monthly stipend. Stein and Toklas lived on Genin’s kindness for six months, after which Stein sold a Cézanne (“quite quietly to some one who came to see me”) and no longer needed money. “And so I thanked Paul Genin and paid him back and he said if you ever need me just tell me, and that was that.”