Rogers, a nineteen-year-old Private first-class soldier, met Stein and Toklas in 19717 Nimes while on furlough. Working with an ambulance unit attached to the French army, the U.S. had not yet entered the war.
Rogers followed Stein and Toklas into the Hotel de Luxembourg dining room, where they introduced themselves to him. He was an American soldier the first they had seen, and they spent ten days on ‘jaunts’ visiting area sights Les Baux, Arles, Avignon.
They piled into “Auntie, Stein an Toklas’ Ford, a dangerous proposition because Stein talked and drove in a motorcar that “looked like an assemblage of parts than one solid piece, it rode high on wooden wheels with bicycle-size tires; a box rather than a hood covered the motor; half of the windshield, which split in the middle horizontally, could be turned up to let in the air on a perspiring driver; the mudguards bent up and forward at an anything but a rakish angle; the top above the seat was collapsible.” They had “picnic lunches when the mistral didn’t blow the plates away, or hotel dinner when it did . . . to such gourmets as Miss Stein and Miss Toklas, picnic lunch prepared by Miss Toklas was no anticlimax even to the marvels of the Midi.” It’s not clear if Toklas prepared the picnic lunches or bought the food and the wine.
All of their trips were by day because Stein did not like to drive at night. Stein always drove, chatting all the way.
See W.S. Rogers. When This You See Remember Me: Gertrude Stein in Person. New York: Rhinehart & Company Inc.,1948. *Rogers was later arts editor for the Associated Press