[4] She was encouraged to do so by her friend, the American author Gertrude Stein, who at the time lived in Paris.

[5][6] In Belgium she served in a French field hospital, keeping a bitter diary detailing the horrors that she witnessed daily.

[8][9] Researchers have speculated that Ernest Hemingway's influential unadorned style may have been influenced by La Motte's own writing, through Stein's mentoring.

[9] After the war, La Motte, accompanied by Chadbourne, travelled to Asia, where she witnessed the horrors of opium addiction.

The Chinese Nationalist government awarded her the Lin Tse Hsu Memorial Medal in 1930.

[10] La Motte took over Chadbourne's financial affairs in 1937 and earned over 1 million dollars on the stock market during the 1940s and '50s.