I
"Take care! Don't eat blackberries! Don't you know they'll give you the
fever?"
Any American soldier who stops to fill his cap with the plump
blackberries loading the hedgerows of France is sure to receive this
warning from a passing peasant.
Throughout the length and breadth of France, the most fruit-loving and
fruit-cultivating of countries, the same queer conviction prevails, and
year after year the great natural crop of blackberries, nowhere better
and more abundant, is abandoned to birds and insects because in some
remote and perhaps prehistoric past an ancient Gaul once decreed that
"blackberries give the fever."
An hour away, across the Channel, fresh blackberries and blackberry-jam
form one of the staples of a great ally's diet; but the French have not
yet found out that millions of Englishmen have eaten blackberries for
generations without having "the fever."
Even if they did find it out they would probably say: "The English are
different. Blackberries have always given _us_ the fever." Or the more
enlightened might ascribe it to the climate: "The air may be different
in England. Blackberries may not be unwholesome there, but here they are
poison."
There is not the least foundation for the statement, and the few
enterprising French people who have boldly risked catching "the fever"
consume blackberries in France with as much enjoyment, and as little
harm, as their English neighbours. But one could no more buy a
blackberry in a French market than one could buy the fruit of the
nightshade; the one is considered hardly less deleterious than the
other.
The prejudice is all the queerer because the thrifty, food-loving
French peasant has discovered the innocuousness of so many
dangerous-looking funguses that frighten the Anglo-Saxon by their close
resemblance to the poisonous members of the family. It takes a practised
eye to distinguish cèpes and morilles from the deadly toadstool; whereas
the blackberry resembles nothing in the world but its own luscious and
innocent self. Yet the blackberry has been condemned untried because of
some ancient taboo that the French peasant dares not disregard.
Taboos of this sort are as frequent in France as the blackberries in the
hedges, and some of them interfere with the deepest instincts of the
race.
Take, for instance, the question of dinner-giving. Dining is a solemn
rite to the French, because it offers the double opportunity of good
eating and good talk, the two forms of æsthetic enjoyment most generally
appreciated. Everything connected with dinner-giving has an almost
sacramental importance in France. The quality of the cooking comes
first; but, once this is assured, the hostess' chief concern is that the
quality of the talk shall match it. To attain this, the guests are as
carefully chosen as boxers for a championship, their number is strictly
limited, and care is taken not to invite two champions likely to talk
each other down.
The French, being unable to live without good talk, are respectful of
all the small observances that facilitate it. Interruption is considered
the height of discourtesy; but so is any attempt, even on the part of
the best talkers, to hold the floor and prevent others from making
themselves heard. Share and share alike is the first rule of
conversational politeness, and if a talker is allowed to absorb the
general attention for more than a few minutes it is because his
conversation is known to be so good that the other guests have been
invited to listen to him. Even so, he must give them a chance now and
then, and it is they who must abstain from taking it, and must
repeatedly let him see that for once they are content to act as
audience. Moreover, even the privileged talker is not allowed to dwell
long on any one topic, however stimulating. The old lady who said to her
granddaughter: "My dear, you will soon learn that an hour is enough of
anything" would have had to reduce her time-limit to five minutes if she
had been formulating the rules of French conversation.
In circles where interesting and entertaining men are habitually present
the women are not expected to talk much. They are not, of course, to sit
stupidly silent, responsiveness is their _rôle_, and they must know how
to guide the conversation by putting the right question or making the
right comment. But above all they are not to air their views in the
presence of men worth listening to. The French care passionately for
ideas, but they do not expect women to have them, and since they never
mistake erudition for intelligence (as we uneducated Anglo-Saxons
sometimes do) no woman can force her way into the talk by mere weight of
book-learning. She has no place there unless her ideas, and her way of
expressing them, put her on an equality with the men; and this seldom
happens. Women (if they only knew it!) are generally far more
intelligent listeners than talkers; and the rare quality of the
Frenchwoman's listening contributes not a little to the flashing play of
French talk.
Here, then, is an almost religious ritual, planned with the sole purpose
of getting the best talk from the best talkers; but there are two
malicious little taboos that delight in upsetting all these
preparations.
One of them seems incredibly childish. It is a rule of French society
that host and hostess shall sit exactly opposite each other. If the
number at table is uneven, then, instead of the guests being equally
spaced, they will be packed like sardines about one half the board, and
left on the other with echoing straits between them thrown.
If the number is such that, normally seated, with men and women
alternating, a lady should find herself opposite the hostess, that
unthinkable sacrilege must also be avoided, and three women be placed
together on one side of the table, and three men on the other. This
means death to general conversation, for intelligent women will never
talk together when they can talk to men, or even listen to them; so that
the party, thus disarranged, resembles that depressing dish, a pudding
in which all the plums have run into one corner.
The plums do not like it either. The scattered affinities grope for each
other and vainly seek to reconstitute a normal pudding. The attempt is
always a failure, and the French hostess knows it; yet many delightful
dinners are wrecked on the unrelenting taboo that obliges host and
hostess to sit exactly opposite each other.
"Precedence" is another obstacle to the realisation of the perfect
dinner. Precedence in a republic--! It is acknowledged to be an absurd
anomaly except where official rank is concerned; and though its
defenders argue that it is a short-cut through many problems of vanity
and _amour-propre_ it might certainly be disregarded to the general
advantage whenever a few intelligent people have been brought together,
not to compare their titles but to forget them.
But there it is. The French believe themselves to be the most democratic
people in the world--and they have some of the democratic instincts,
though not as many as they think. But an Academician must sit on his
hostess' right, unless there is a Duke or an Ambassador or a Bishop
present; and these rules, comic enough where peer meets prelate, become
more humorous (and also grow more strict) when applied to the
imperceptible differences between the lower degrees of the immense
professional and governmental hierarchy.
But again--there it is. A hostess whose papa helped to blow up the
Tuileries or pull down the Vendôme column weighs the relative claims of
two Academicians (always a bad stumbling block) as carefully as a
duchess of the old régime, brought up to believe in the divine right of
Kings, scrutinises the genealogy of her guests before seating them. And
this strict observance of rules is not due to snobbishness; the French
are not a snobbish people. It is part of _les bienséances_, of the
always-have-beens; and there is a big bullying taboo in the way of
changing it.
In England, where precedence has, at any rate, the support of a court,
where it is, so to speak, still a "going concern," and works
automatically, the hostess, if she is a woman of the world, casts it to
the winds on informal occasions; but in France there is no democratic
dinner-table over which it does not permanently hang its pall.