Book excerpt: In a trip designed to raise funds for the ""American Committee for Devastated France,"" Comtesse Madeleine de Bryas and her sister Jacqueline arrived in the United States in 1918. Acting in a post-World War I diplomatic capacity, the sisters traveled the country over a period of six months to give fund-raising speeches. Their travels taking them from New York, to St. Louis, to San Francisco, and the Puget Sound, before returning east to Washington, D.C.