III

In a month of beautiful weather at Etretat, every day was not an

excursion, but every day seemed indeed a picked day. For that matter, as

I lay on the beach watching the procession of the easy-going hours, I

took a good many mental excursions. The one, perhaps, on which I

oftenest embarked, was a comparison between French manners, French,

habits, French types, and those of my native land. These comparisons are

not invidious; I do not conclude against one party and in favour of the

other; as the French say, _je constate_ simply. The French people about

me were "spending the summer," just as I had so often seen my

fellow-countrymen spend it, and it seemed to me, as it had seemed to me

at home, that this operation places men and women under a sort of

monstrous magnifying-glass. The human figure has a higher relief in the

country than in town, and I know of no place where psychological studies

prosper so much as at the seaside. I shall not pretend to relate my

observations in the order in which they occurred to me (or indeed to

relate them in full at all); but I may say that one of the foremost was

to this effect--that the summer-question, for every one, had been more

easily settled than it usually is in America. The solution of the

problem of where to go had not been a thin-petalled rose, plucked from

among particularly sharp-pointed thorns. People presented themselves

with a calmness and freshness very different from the haggardness of

aspect which announces that the American citizen and his family have

"secured accommodations." This impression, with me, rests perhaps on the

fact that most Frenchwomen turned of thirty--the average wives and

mothers--are so comfortably endowed with flesh. I have never seen such

richness of contour as among the mature _baigneuses_ of Etretat. The

lean and desiccated person into whom a dozen years of matrimony so often

converts the blooming American girl is not emulated in France. A

majestic plumpness flourished all around me--the plumpness of triple

chins and deeply dimpled hands. I mused upon it, and I discovered that

it was the result of the best breakfasts and dinners in the world. It

was the corpulence of ladies who are thoroughly well fed, and who never

walk a step that they can spare. The assiduity with which the women of

America measure the length of our democratic pavements is doubtless a

factor in their frequent absence of redundancy of outline. As a "regular

boarder" at the Hôtel Blanquet--pronounced by Anglo-Saxon visitors

Blanket--I found myself initiated into the mysteries of the French

dietary system. I assent to the common tradition that the French are a

temperate people, so long as it is understood in this sense--that they

eat no more than they want to. But their wants are very comprehensive.

Their capacity strikes me as enormous, and we ourselves, if we are less

regulated, are certainly much more slender consumers.

The American breakfast has, I believe, long been a subject of irony to

the foreign observer; but the American breakfast is an ascetic meal

compared with the French _déjeûner-à-la-fourchette_. The latter,

indeed, is simply a dinner without soup; it differs neither generically

nor specifically from the evening-repast. If it excludes soup, it

includes eggs, prepared in a hundred forms; and if it proscribes

champagne, it admits beer in foaming pitchers, so that the balance is

fairly preserved. I think that an American will often suffer vicariously

from the reflection that a French family which sits down at half-past

eleven to fish and entries and roasts, to asparagus and beans, to salad

and dessert, and cheese and coffee, proposes to do exactly the same

thing at half-past six. But we may be sure at any rate that the dinner

will be as good as the breakfast, and that the breakfast has nothing to

fear from prospective comparison with the dinner; and we may further

reflect that in a country where the pleasures of the table are

thoroughly organised, it is natural that they should be prolonged and

reiterated. Nothing is more noticeable among the French than their

superior intelligence in dietary matters; every one seems naturally a

judge, a dilettante. They have analysed tastes and savours to a finer

point than we; they are aware of differences and relations of which we

take no heed. Observe a Frenchman of any age and of any condition (I

have been quite as much struck with it in the very young men as in the

old), as he orders his breakfast or his dinner at a Parisian restaurant,

and you will perceive that the operation is much more solemn than it is

apt to be in New York or in London. Monsieur has, in a word, a certain

ideal for a particular repast, and it will make a difference in his

happiness whether the kidneys, for instance, of a certain style, are

chopped to the ultimate or only to the penultimate smallness. His

directions and admonitions to the waiter are therefore minute and

exquisite, and eloquently accentuated by the pressure of thumb and

forefinger; and it must be added that the imagination of the waiter is

usually quite worthy of the refined communion opened to it.

This subtler sense of quality is observable even among those classes in

which in other countries it is generally forestalled by a depressing

consciousness on the subject of quantity. Observe your concierge and his

wife at their mid-day meal, as you pass up and down stairs. They are not

satisfying nature upon green tea and potatoes; they are seated before a

repast which has been reasoned out, which, on its modest scale, is

served in courses, and has a beginning, a middle, an end. I will not say

that the French sense of comfort is confined to the philosophy of

nutrition, but it is certainly here that it is most highly evolved.

French people must have a good dinner and a good bed; but they are

willing that the bed should be stationed and the dinner be eaten in the

most insufferable corners. Your porter and his wife dine with a certain

distinction, and sleep soft in their lodge; but their lodge is in all

probability a fetid black hole, five feet square, in which, in England

or in America, people of their talents would never consent to live. The

French are willing to abide in the dark, to huddle together, to forego

privacy, to let bad smells grow great among them. They have an accursed

passion for coquettish furniture; for cold, brittle chairs, for tables

with scalloped edges, for ottomans without backs, for fireplaces muffled

in plush and fringe. A French bedroom is a bitter mockery--a ghastly

attempt to serve two masters which succeeds in being agreeable to

neither. It is a thing of traps and delusions, constructed on the

assumption that it is inelegant to be known to wash or to sleep, and yet

pervaded with suggestions of uncleanness compared with which the

matutinal "tub," well _en évidence_, is a delightful symbol of purity.

This comes of course from that supreme French quality, the source of

half the charm of the French mind as well as of all its dryness, the

genius for economy. It is wasting a room to let it be a bedroom alone;

so it must be tricked out ingeniously as a sitting-room, and ends by

being (in many cases) insufferable both by night and by day. But

allowing all weight to these latter reflections, it is still very

possible that the French have the better part. If you are well fed, you

can perhaps afford to be ill lodged; whereas enjoyment of the most

commodious apartments is incompatible with inanition and dyspepsia.

If I had not cut short my mild retrospect by these possibly milder

generalisations, I should have touched lightly upon some of the social

phenomena of which the little beach at Etretat was the scene. I should

have narrated that the French, at the seaside, are not "sociable" as

Americans affect to be in a similar situation, and I should subjoin that

at Etretat it was very well on the whole that they should not have been.

The immeasurably greater simplicity of composition of American society

makes sociability with us a comparatively untaxed virtue; but anything

like an equal exercise of it in France would be attended with alarming

drawbacks. Sociability (in the American sense of the word) in any

aristocratic country would indeed be very much like an attempt to

establish visiting relations between birds and fishes. At Etretat no

making of acquaintance was to be perceived; people went about in

compact, cohesive groups, of natural formation, governed doubtless,

internally, by humane regulations, but presenting to the world an

impenetrable defensive front. The groups usually formed a solid phalanx

around two or three young girls, compressed into the centre, the

preservation of whose innocence was their chief solicitude. These groups

were doubtless wisely constituted, for with half a dozen _cocottes_, in

scarlet petticoats, scattered over the sunny, harmless-looking beach,

what were mammas and duennas to do? I used to pity the young ladies at

first, for this perpetual application of the leading-string; but a

little reflection showed me that the French have ordered this as well as

they have ordered everything else. The case is not nearly so hard as it

would be with us, for there is this immense difference between the lot

of the _jeune fille_ and her American sister, that the former may as a

general thing be said to be certain to marry. "Alas, to marry badly,"

the Anglo-Saxon objector may reply. But the objection is precipitate;

for if French marriages are almost always arranged, it must be added

that they are in the majority of cases arranged successfully. Therefore,

if a _jeune fille_ is for three or four years tied with a very short

rope and compelled to browse exclusively upon the meagre herbage which

sprouts in the maternal shadow, she has at least the comfort of

reflecting that, according to the native phrase, _on s'occupe de la

marier_--that measures are being carefully taken to promote her to a

condition of unbounded liberty. Whatever, to her imagination, marriage

may fail to mean, it at least means freedom and consideration. It does

not mean, as it so often means in America, being socially shelved--and

it is not too much to say, in certain circles, degraded; it means being

socially launched and consecrated. It means becoming that exalted

personage, a _mère de famille_. To be a _mère de famille_ is to occupy

not simply (as is mostly the case with us) a sentimental, but really an

official position. The consideration, the authority, the domestic pomp

and circumstance allotted to a French mamma are in striking contrast

with the amiable tolerance which in our own social order is so often the

most liberal measure that the female parent may venture to expect at her

children's hands, and which, on the part of the young lady of eighteen

who represents the family in society, is not unfrequently tempered by a

conscientious severity. All this is worth waiting for, especially if you

have not to wait very long. Mademoiselle is married certainly, and

married early, and she is sufficiently well informed to know, and to be

sustained by the knowledge, that the sentimental expansion which may not

take place at present will have an open field after her marriage. That

it should precede her marriage seems to her as unnatural as that she

should put on her shoes before her stockings. And besides all this, to

browse in the maternal shadow is not considered in the least a hardship.

A young French girl who is _bien-élevée_--an expression which means so

much--will be sure to consider her mother's company the most delightful

in the world, and to think that the herbage which sprouts about this

lady's petticoats is peculiarly tender and succulent. It may be

fanciful, but it often seems to me that the tone with which such a young

girl says _Ma mère_ has a peculiar intensity of meaning. I am at least

not wrong in affirming that in the accent with which the

mamma--especially if she be of the well-rounded order alluded to

above--speaks of _Ma fille_ there is a kind of sacerdotal dignity.