HOME-LIFE IN FRANCE
There is no race on the face of the earth whose home-life is so enviable
as that of the French. Both men and women bring the best of their
qualities to the making and maintaining of this admirable domestic
institution. It is, perhaps, too perfect, too wadded, for any people
which may hold the theory that domestic happiness is an inferior ideal.
It explains to us why the French are bad colonists, why initiative
and enterprise are less developed here than in the regions of rougher
interiors. The atmosphere of a French home is the most delightful I know.
I cannot see why men and women should be expected willingly to tear
themselves away from it in search of dubious prosperity and happiness
among barbarians. After all, it seems to me that human happiness is as
high an ideal as any of us can justly lay claim to; and if we want our
own happiness we are pretty certain to want that of others, for the few
who find their happiness in the misery of those around them are lower
than the brutes. In England and in Ireland I have seen men and women
of this sort, persons of diseased selfishness, who, in their homes,
surrounded by others, live only for themselves, and whose sole mission
in life apparently is to render those same victims of their proximity as
wretched as possible.
Frenchwomen are not perfect, we know, since they are human. They have
their meannesses, their spites, their pettinesses, and jealousies,
like others; they are largely tainted with the vice of avarice, and
it cannot be said that they are, in general, capable of climbing the
heights of disinterestedness. They love money, and they save it. But,
whatever their faults, I dare to say that no race of women can show
a smaller percentage of shrews and reckless mischief-makers. Their
discretion is extraordinary, and no less extraordinary is the equable,
dignified nature of their domestic rule. They have their tantrums like
other women, but they are surprisingly free from the vice of scolding.
The word “termagant” was never invented for the pleasing and tactful
Frenchwoman. She will blight your life by other means should she have
that fancy. Economy is her great and unlovable virtue. If she clips the
wings of romance so ruthlessly, it is always in the interests of economy.
I do not give her ideal as the highest or the noblest; it is even
lower, perhaps, than that of many other classes of women, since it is
exclusively occupied with the state of her own and her progeny’s purse.
But the process by which she attains this ideal is charming in itself.
She cheerfully makes every personal sacrifice needful, and counts herself
blest when she places the hand of a son or daughter in that of a suitable
match, with fortune proportionate and prospects of equal promise. She
lives for her husband and children; and if, as the fashionable novelists
assure us, she often deviates from the path of virtue,—makes, as the
boulevardiers say, a rent in the marriage contract,—not even those
romancers dare affirm that she neglects, for such caprices, the interests
of either.
She is in all things literally the better half of her people. Observe her
in all classes, and you will have no further need of explanation of the
striking prosperity, strength, and self-sufficiency of France itself.
Cheerful, competent, thrifty creature, how could the land that owns her
go to the dogs, whatever the decadents and politicians may do? She is
the force of the country, its stable influence and salvation. The home
rests upon her, and she makes of it a delicious nest for her children,
who may exaggerate the outward form of their love for her, but who can
never exaggerate the inward devotion they owe her. She has taught them,
it is true, to think too much about money, to be too ready to dispute
the wills of recalcitrant relatives who wish to leave their fortunes
to others than themselves; she has left them too little liberty, and
trained them in ignorance of such a virtue as disinterestedness; she
is too apt to encourage her son in the theory of the wild oats-sowing,
without even the saving grace of limiting that period to pre-nuptial
days, being trained herself in the fixed conviction of her land,
that man is a tameless beast who cannot exist without fugitive loves
throughout his chequered career. Indeed, I have heard a very pious old
French lady assert that a married man may have a hundred mistresses
and be a perfectly honest man whom nobody should criticise. When I
made respectful mention of the wife’s injuries, she shrugged, called
me an unsophisticated fool, and said that every sensible girl, on her
wedding-morn, understood what she was facing, and, if she were well-bred,
she was wise enough to keep her eyes shut. No wife, she maintained, could
expect to learn anything to her advantage by prying into her husband’s
habits and distractions outside the portals of home, and so her wisdom
lay in studied ignorance. The thing to prevent in a husband or son was
extravagance. So long as the purse-strings remained unloosened, and the
health was uninjured, a judicious woman should ask for nothing more from
the men around her. For this reason, the novelists show us the French
mother as charmed to discover that her son has started romantic relations
with the wife of a wealthy friend. She is convinced that he must have a
mistress, and her only hope is that he shall choose one who will not ruin
him in purse or in health. Of his heart and happiness in these matters
she seems to care not a pin, possibly because of the talent for cynicism
possessed by the French, which declines to recognise heart outside the
family. If every poison has its antidote, so has every quality its
drawback. This beautiful maternal devotion we so admire is practised
to the detriment of all outsiders. The French mother would make a
holocaust of all humanity on the altar of her offspring’s advancement and
interest. She will gladly toil for him or for her, save francs and pence
for either, deprive herself of what she most loves, accomplish for her
child every virtue in the world but that of justice or generosity toward
outsiders. For the French _ménagère_, the outsider is the enemy. Indeed,
for all the French family the outsider is a reptile to be crushed. Let a
wealthy Frenchwoman take a strong fancy to an outsider, and the hostility
awakened in the breast of every member against this inoffensive outsider
will be found to be a sentiment to which only Balzac could do justice.
Sons and daughters, cousins, nephews, and nieces, will combine to slight
or insult the reprobate.
In the case of a widower, or an unmarried uncle, marriage is the terror;
in the case of the wealthy woman I suspect the last will and testament
arouses the scare. Anyway, whatever the unexpressed sentiment may be,
the French family of all classes joins in this unreasonable hatred,
suspicion, and jealousy of the outsider. I remember when I first came to
Paris many years ago, having a letter of introduction to Madame Blaze de
Bury, a very singular and clever old lady, who said to me: “You will find
the French as hard as a granite wall when you come to knock against them.
To the superficial glance they are so easy, so accessible, so pleasant.
Well, I have lived long enough among them to discover that they are just
like the Chinese. They hate foreigners, even when they are delightful to
them. And this hatred of the foreigner is shown in family life, where
the foreigner is everyone who is not a direct relation.” Subsequent
experience did not prove Madame Blaze de Bury altogether right as regards
the foreigner, for I, a foreigner, have found in France kindness,
sympathy, generosity, and affection, and all from the French of the very
French. In criticising Frenchwomen, I am criticising the part of humanity
I like best, appreciate and admire most on earth. Give Frenchwomen the
freedom, the liberal education of England, a dash of Protestantism—that
is, mental and moral independence—and you will have womanhood in its
perfection. They have little of the snob, they are naturally simple and
unpretentious, and they are competent, intelligent, and discreet.
The two features that most strike the foreigner in French home-life are
the careful economy practised everywhere, in city and country, among
the poor and the rich, and the pretty courtesies and tendernesses which
help to keep the wheels of domestic machinery so admirably oiled. The
notion that relationship is merely the privilege of making one’s self
as disagreeable as possible, and indulging in cruelties of speech and
action, does not exist in France, or exists in a very diminished degree.
A study of the economies practised in aristocratic and prosperous
bourgeois circles in France leads us to strange facts. Taine quotes an
incident in his _Carnets de Voyage_ that happened in the neighbourhood
of Poitiers. A Parisian was hunting by invitation on a friend’s lands,
and, without knowing it, crossed the border-land of those of a certain
viscountess. He was not shooting, but carried his gun under his arm;
he had lost his way. Up came a keeper and stopped him. The Parisian
explained the circumstances, and insisted that he was not shooting. His
host and he decided to visit the viscountess personally, and put the case
before her in order to avoid unjust proceedings. They were received in
a superb chamber hung with tapestries. The viscountess listened to them,
and put her hand out: “Twenty francs each to pay,” was all she said. I
think I can tell a better tale still, that of the interested hospitality
of a well-known Flemish countess, whose shooting lands are among the best
in France. The guests of this lady who liked a liberal supply of sugar in
their morning coffee were obliged to provide themselves with it before
coming, for every lump consumed in the castle was counted by the thrifty
châtelaine; and the servants were bound, on penalty of dismissal, to give
up to her all the tips they received. These were dropped into a cash-box,
and at the proper time were returned to them under the form of wages. The
good lady also makes a fine thing of her invitations to shoot upon her
land, and may be said to merit a high place in the ranks of economists.
And yet there is much to be said in favour of French thrift, not only for
the good it brings to the country, which is immense, but still more for
the inappreciable advantages it affords the family, above all, the girls.
Go to Ireland and observe with lamentation and indignation the havoc made
of home-life, of family dignity, of the lives of unfortunate girls, by
the miserable wastefulness of parents. On all sides you will hear sad
tales of girls, obliged to work hard for shocking rates of payment, who
were brought up in foolish luxury, whose parents “entertained” in that
thriftless, splash, Irish fashion, drank champagne, drove horses, when
the French of the same class would be leading the existence of humdrum
small burgesses, depriving themselves of all that was not absolutely
necessary for their position, and teaching their children the art of
counting, of saving, and of laudable privation. The Irish way is the
jollier, I admit, but it is a cowardly, selfish way, for it is the
children who always have to pay the piper, and, more often than not, the
unhappy trades-folk who supply these gay and festive spendthrifts.
We laugh at the counted lumps of sugar in France, forgetting that
sugar here is sixpence a pound, and becomes an item to be considered.
I remember once feeling some sympathy with the French carefulness of
sugar. An Irish girl, whom I did not know, somewhere in the twenties, and
consequently supposed to conduct herself like a reasonable being, thrust
accidentally upon me for hospitality for a single night,—which, owing to
unforeseen circumstances, was prolonged to ten or twelve days,—did me the
honour to consume a pound of sugar a day at my expense. In every cup of
tea she melted nearly a dozen large French lumps of sugar, and she drank
many cups in the day; also she ate sugar continually as other women
munch sweets, and as she disliked cold red wine, she insisted on heating
it with quantities of sugar until it was turned into a syrup. When my
grocer sent in his monthly account, with sugar at sixpence a pound in
enormous excess, I felt it would be a singular advantage for Ireland if a
little judicious thrift were practised in Irish homes. The young lady’s
father went bankrupt shortly afterwards, and I cannot say I was at all
surprised. He was an ordinary burgess, who worked hard to maintain a
large and extravagant family, and my guest once told me that her sister
frequently ran up a bill at the florist’s for boutonnières to the sum of
thirty shillings a month, which her father had to pay. French thrift,
if it does so often touch hands with meanness, at least implies the
exercise of a quality we all should admire, even when we cannot practise
it, thanks to taste, training, or temperament—hardness to ourselves, the
capacity for voluntary self-suffering.
The first thing that strikes you as you enter a French beeswaxed flat
in winter is the chill of it. Few but the very rich know the delights
of generous fires, of well-carpeted houses, of warm, comfortable, and
luxurious interiors. Silver appointments and splendid napery, which
you will find nowadays in the commonest Irish homes, are here unknown,
and people of the class who in England dress for dinner here wear the
clothes they have lunched in, and are none the worse off for it. They
have, along with their thrift, much less pretension, and are simpler
and more intelligent in their home-life than we of the British Isles.
In one way they live better, because their food is better cooked and is
more varied, and for dinner you are sure to have brighter conversation.
In certain rich and snobbish circles, above all in the shooting season,
you risk being bored to death, for here nothing is talked of but titles,
game, and fortunes. The wonder to me is how women, who themselves do
not shoot, can sit placidly through a long afternoon and evening and
listen to men who talk incessantly of their own bags or their neighbours’
bags—of how the prince shot this snipe, the count shot that partridge,
and how many pheasants the marquis bagged. I suppose it is to keep the
men in good-humour that these amiable Frenchwomen—against whom I can
bring no other charge than vacuity and snobbishness, two parasites of
wealth—feign the intensest interest. They are paid in the coin they
desire, and if they are bored nobody is a penny the wiser, and they
probably do not mind it.
I have said the lack of material comfort and plenty in middle-class
French homes is striking. I, of course, refer to people who are not
rich, where the husband is a state functionary on a modest salary in
Paris, to small professors, to the wives of military officials, the
widows of colonels and broken-down aristocrats. I have had a glimpse of
all these classes of homes, and in winter found them unseasonably chill
and frugal. Thirty years ago, I am assured, it was far worse, for then
carpets were unknown, and fires less used than to-day. Such economies
are practised here as in England would accompany only harsh poverty,
but they must not be taken as the symbol of such. Your grocer and his
wife, who eat behind the shop in a sanded and comfortless space walled
off, and on Sunday afternoon go out, neatly arrayed in well-fitting but
dowdy and serviceable garments, have tidy fortunes stowed away, while
their flashy, splash-loving brethren of the British Isles, with their
dog-carts, bicycles, and up-to-date attire turned out by fashionable
tailors, dressmakers, and milliners, are pulling the devil by the tail
and stupidly patronising their betters, who are contented with less
display.
I retired lately to Ireland to write this little book, and was struck,
after long residence in France, by the violent contrast between French
and Irish character in these respects. I was used to the simple,
courteous, willing, active trades-people of Paris, who give themselves
no airs, dress dowdily, live modestly. I found the same class in
Ireland, even in a small village, dressed daily as Solomon in all his
glory never was, with tailor-made gowns worth ten and twelve guineas,
and with haughty manners that would bewilder a princess of the blood;
the one cutting the other, Heaven only knows on what assumption of
superiority, and all hastening from their counters in smart turnouts,
duly to subscribe their loyal names to the list of the Queen’s visitors.
I felt like Rip Van Winkle—as if I had waked in my native land and
found everyone gone mad with pride and pretension. When I ventured
into a shop to make an insignificant purchase, a gorgeous dandy with a
lisp condescended to attend to me, or a lady looking like a duchess,
and most desirous that you should take her for such, dropped from the
height of her grandeur to my humble person, and was good enough in her
superior way to look after me. Everybody was seemingly so above trade
or business or bread-winning of any kind that I was glad enough to pack
up my papers and things and come back to a race more simple and less
pretentious, where the people work with good-will, and sell you a yard
of tape or a hat without insufferable condescension, and where tradesmen
and their wives do not think it necessary to confer on crowned heads the
honour of their call. In pursuit of my investigations on this subject
I was taken to the house of a very small trades-person, who lived over
her shop. The owner wore a twelve-guinea silk-lined gown trimmed with
Irish point. I could well imagine what sort of residence hers would be
in France. For Ireland it was a sort of Aladdin surprise. Majesty indeed
might have sat in that sitting-room. It was furnished with faultless
taste: beautiful old Sèvres, proof engravings exquisitely framed, buhl
cabinets; everything—curtains, chairs, sixteenth-century benches and
couches, quaint ornaments, the spoils of frequent auctions of gentlemen’s
houses—was chosen with the best of judgment by an ignorant peasant woman,
whose bringing up, surroundings, and life had been of the most sordid
kind. I was shown the bedroom, and found it a no less pleasing and
surprising vision, a nest of modern luxury and beauty, such a bedroom as
in Paris you would see only along the handsome and expensive avenues.
Another time I obtained a glimpse of the home of a bankrupt widow of a
“little burgess” who had had to vacate a house with grounds to take up
her residence in a more modest dwelling. Such a woman in France would be
content to live and die a very plain and simple person, and, having had
to compound with her creditors, would have considered herself bound to
lay out her new existence upon lines of the most rigid economy, above
all, as there was a large family of sons and daughters not yet of an
age, nor having the requisite education, to provide for themselves. The
house I visited was one of a row, a poor, mean quarter, where no sane
person would look for any appearance of affluence. Over the fan-light
the house rejoiced in an imposing Celtic name in three words in raised
white letters, not the cheapest form of house nomenclature. A gardener
was engaged trimming the infinitesimal garden front; the youngest girl,
of twelve, was mounting her bicycle to career off with a companion; in
the hall were three other bicycles belonging to different members of
the family. The furniture of the drawing-room was new and expensive,
and a young lady was playing up-to-date waltzes on the piano, without a
trace of concern or anxiety; no sign anywhere of economy, of sacrifice,
of worry. Yet I knew I was entering a house where there was practically
nothing to live upon, and where the proceeds of a sale that should
have gone to the woman’s creditors had been squandered on unnecessary
things. One may criticise the meannesses to which thrift drives the
frugal French, but I never felt more near to falling in love with what
is to me an uncongenial vice than I did on leaving my native land after
this visit, to have commercial dealings once more with people not above
their business, instead of trading with the spurious descendants of
kings, whose sole anxiety is to make you feel their social superiority
and extraordinary condescension, to find these excellent French
“little people” all that Lever told us the Irish were but have ceased
to be—cordial, delightful, intelligent, and simple. For that is the
great, the abiding charm of the French middle class—the absence of vulgar
pretension. Every man to his trade, and an artist at that—such is the
wise French motto. I begin to suspect the late Felix Faure, the tanner
of France, must have had some Irish blood in his veins, for he was well
worthy to play the sovereign to that mock prince of the blood, the Irish
tradesman.
The home of the French middle classes, I have already said, is not,
in the Anglo-Saxon conception of the word, an abode of comfort.
Small economies are too rigidly practised therein. The _salon_, or
sitting-room, is apt to be shut up all the week in the interest of the
furniture, and only opened on the single afternoon the lady of the house
is supposed to be at home to her friends. Then in winter, just before the
hour of reception, the meagre wood-fire is set ablaze, and sometimes tea
is prepared, along with biscuits far from fresh. You may be thankful—if
tea is to be offered you, a rare occurrence—should the tea be no staler
than the biscuits, I have known a Frenchwoman, the sister of a professor
at Stanislas College, who admitted to me naïvely that she changed the
leaves of her tea every four or five days. She informed me that this
economical hint was given her by a Scotchwoman, who assured her that in
Scotland nobody was extravagant enough to make fresh tea every day. I
hope this Scotchwoman was an invention of the Frenchwoman. It would be
terrible to believe that all the families of Scotland drink their daily
dose of slow poison. In winter also are the two meals of noon and evening
consumed in a frigid atmosphere, for such a thing as a dining-room fire
is unheard of in the class I refer to. The napery will be of the coarsest
quality, and oftener coloured than white.
The house is generally run with a single maid-of-all-work, who receives
a monthly wage of from thirty to forty francs, and her life is not an
easy one. The lady already referred to had her _bonne_ from the country,
where existence is still harsher than in Paris, and paid her thirty
francs a month. The unfortunate _bonne_ for this sum had to wash, clean,
scour, cook, market, make beds, and sew. The lady was pious, and a
philanthropist, but pious and philanthropic persons are sometimes harsh
taskmasters, and not infrequently dishonest. The _bonne_ was obliged,
out of her scant wages, to pay a hundred francs a year for her bedroom,
which was merely a box under the roof, without ventilation or fireplace,
so that in winter she froze, and in summer she was baked. She also had
to buy her own wine and coffee, if she needed either, and never, from
week’s end to week’s end, tasted of dessert or sweets, or knew what it
was to dine off fowl, when by rare chance fowl was served at table. I was
this lady’s “paying guest” for four or five months; and if my lot was a
hard one, I could console myself with the reflection that the servant’s
was infinitely harder. True, the servant did not, as I did, pay an
exorbitant price for those discomforts, but we could both say that we had
to deal with a singularly pleasant, affable, well-spoken, and agreeable
woman, surprisingly intelligent, who kept her house in admirable order.
She was secretary for several Catholic philanthropic works, and taught
catechism, for a consideration, to poor children in some disreputable
quarter of Paris. I thought of her, as I have thought of many another
Christian philanthropist, Catholic and Protestant, how much more in
keeping with the doctrine of Christ it would be to stay unpretentiously
at home and practise the modest virtue of honesty, doing unto others as
one would be done unto. On her way to her catechism class she would drop
in to the woodman’s to order wood for me, as a favour for which it was my
duty to thank her, pay the woodman three francs, and virtuously charge me
five in the bill. I was ill, and in the same spirit of benevolence she
ordered everything needful for me—_for a consideration_. For all that,
she was the nicest, the cheerfulest, and most pleasing robber and humbug
I have ever known. I defy any Anglo-Saxon to give the fleeced as much
value in the way of agreeable speech and cordiality and beaming smiles
as this religious Norman lady gave me. She broke the heart of a trusting
friend, and, having gracefully beggared her, drove her to America ruined
and embittered, yet went on her own confident way along the path of
virtue, assured of nothing more than her indisputable right to a seat in
Paradise.
[Illustration: A SEASIDE SERVICE
_Edelfelt_]
But she was not the first to initiate me into the economical mysteries of
the French home. Before this I had been the “paying guest” of a native
of Burgundy with an Alsatian title as long as an Alexandrian verse. She
professed to have known Lamartine in her youth, and when I spoke of
the poet by his name, she corrected me with a grand and reproving air:
“Mademoiselle, we of Macon say _Monsieur de Lamartine_.” Here the same
mysteries of locked _salon_ all the week round, open only for a few hours
on the famous reception day of Madame la Baronne; the same absence of
plenty at the board—lunch for three persons invariably three boiled eggs,
three tiny cutlets and three boiled potatoes, three little rolls and
three small apples. Never a fourth of anything, should one of the three
happen to be a little hungrier than the other two. Only, as I had to
do with a broken-down aristocrat, there reigned, instead of the beaming
cordiality of the bourgeoise, an awful, desperate, glacial reserve. The
baroness’ attitude to life may be described fitly as resembling her
attitude to the late lamented poet, whom she apostrophised stiffly as
_Monsieur de Lamartine_. She was frightfully dignified, even in starving
her unfortunate paying guest on twelve pounds a month. It is true, paying
guests are not infrequently regarded by ladies as creatures predestined
to starvation and prompt payment in their hands, and in business matters
I can safely say, from singularly sharp experience, that there are no
more heartless and rapacious landladies on the face of the earth than
needy and educated women. The greed of the common woman runs to pence,
while that of the lady runs to shillings; and whereas the former, when
she is dishonest, has a lingering consciousness of it, and flies into
a wholesome rage on detection, the latter is armoured in the brass of
breeding, and looks cool and surprised that you should object to being
fleeced by her. Upon any approach to complaint, instead of excuses, she
shows you cynically that she took you in in order to fleece you. A French
“woman of letters,” in the lowest acceptance of that unpleasing term,
the old, semi-extinguished type of bluestocking, once told me that she
always calculated on making a clear profit of two hundred francs a month
on the board of her “paying guest,” otherwise she did not regard herself
as having made a good thing out of it. As she charged a hundred francs a
month for a bedroom, twelve pounds a month was the sum she counted upon
as legitimate profit. Her terms were sixteen pounds a month—light, fire,
afternoon tea, and wine extras—so that the unfortunate fleeced one had
exactly the value of four pounds for the sixteen disbursed. Needless
to say, this literary hostess only found stray fools from perfidious
Albion, recommended by amiable folk over-seas, who guilelessly believed
the young ladies despatched to her would enjoy the benefit of exalted
social relations, since titles were never out of her mouth, and upon her
own description of herself she entertained daily the highest of the land.
She traded upon the British weakness for titles, but took care to conceal
from these gulled ones the fact that French doors, whether of nobles or
of commoners, are not easily opened to foreigners, and never to “paying
guests,” whom the careful French fear as possible adventurers.
I have heard English people criticise the parsimony of the first French
breakfast, because you generally find a couple of lumps of sugar on the
side of your saucer instead of a sugar-bowl, and a pat of butter and a
single small roll instead of the domestic loaf and a butter-basin. I own
I give my preference altogether to the dear, neat little French tray.
When I go on visits to friends in France, I find nothing so charming as
to be wakened every morning by a beaming Frenchwoman of the people, whose
manners are always so perfect, who is a human being, and not, like the
well-trained English servant, a machine; who opens the shutters and lets
in light with her fresh, soft “Good-morning,” and approaches the bed with
a small, dainty tray, exquisitely laid; such coffee or chocolate as you
will get nowhere else, and everything so trim and minute—the two lumps
of sugar, the tiny pat of butter, the hot roll—what ogre could demand
more on returning from the land of dreams? Naturally, the English fashion
calls for a more liberal supply, because there you are cleansed, combed,
and buckled in the shackles of civilisation downstairs, perhaps after a
morning run—and the scent of bacon and eggs is refreshing to the keen
nostril. But more than this neat little French tray contains would be too
much in a bedroom, and nobody but that Irish girl I referred to, with
morbid taste, could clamour for a sugar-bowl to sweeten a single cup of
coffee.
Then mid-day, when the sun is high in the heavens, gathers the family
round the second breakfast-table. Amongst the well-to-do this is a meal
to shame the frugal British luncheon. It consists of an _entrée_, a roast
dish, vegetables, a cold dish, a sweet, dessert, and cheese. No need
to mention the cooking. That is sure everywhere to be excellent, though
even among French cooks there are grades. Here you will of a surety not
be struck by the pervasion of economy, but that of plenty. You will
understand why the comfortably-off French, when they lunch at British
tables, lament that they are starved. Indeed, when you have the good luck
to partake of French hospitality, you will find it the best in the world.
At no tables will you eat so well and so plentifully as at the tables
of your French friends, and in no land on earth will you enjoy such
delightful conversation as theirs, where they know how to speak and have
something to say. In England people are always on their guard, are often
afraid to talk their best, lest they shall prove bores or eccentrics. In
France the bore is the person who has nothing to say, and the eccentric
is thanked for frankly revealing himself as such. Only be intelligent, be
individual and interesting, and then you may rattle on to your liking,
and provided you tumble with glory, you may choose between the devil
and the deep sea with equal unconcern. The people around you, the most
susceptible and sympathetic to individual value, will be far too busy
listening to what you have to say—provided it is worth the saying—to give
a thought to picking you to pieces.
In spite of the romancers and all the twaddle they talk in the interest
of the psychological novel, there are no women capable of warmer and
more generous friendships than Frenchwomen, none capable of a deeper,
discreeter, more abiding loyalty. They are astonishingly indulgent, too,
which is part of their great sense, and even their intolerance, where it
exists, they have the grace to clothe in the suavity of tact. If they
talk, as they too often do, a great deal of nonsense about the English,
and cherish vast illusions about their own nation, this is only in the
nature of things, seeing that there is no race in the world brought up
in more astonishing ignorance of every other race, and more trained to
cherish denser prejudices. At school they learn only French geography,
French history, French grammar. The rest of Europe comprises mere
congested districts round France; and while it takes several volumes to
learn the history of France, the history of other peoples may be told
in a few paragraphs. Boys may fare differently, but in my time this is
how French girls were taught. England, as the traditional enemy, must
necessarily expect rough treatment at the hands of the French; and in
a country where the Press is a blatant monument of misrepresentation,
the women cannot be wiser than their country, led by such a disastrous
influence. French prejudices against England are as substantial and
impenetrable as the walls of Pekin; you may ride round them, marvel
at them, but never hope to demolish them. But the French mind that
manages to keep outside these walls becomes surprisingly enlarged, and
then you need ask for no finer or more generous judgment. It needs
this finish of magnanimity to so sympathetic a character, rare though
it be in France,—for magnanimity is the last quality we may allow the
race in general,—to show us how delightful the French can become. For
this you must look among the cultured workers of France, the thinkers,
the teachers, and men of science. These alone—and they are not loved
for it—can recognise and tell the truth about even the mediæval enemy,
perfidious Albion.
Frenchwomen of all classes live much more in their bedrooms than
Englishwomen do. Of a morning they study, read, work there, give orders
to their servants, write letters. These bedrooms are generally very
pleasant places, with dressing-rooms off, and clothes closets, so that
intimate friends of either sex may pass in and out without indiscretion
or awkwardness. The bed itself is a handsome piece of furniture, with
curtains to match the big bed-cover, which hides every atom of white,
and sometimes, with the pillows in the middle and silk or satin-covered
bolster at either end under this covering, it resembles those imposing
mediæval couches we see in the Cluny Museum. On the other hand, the
sexes in family life are more apart than in England. They meet at
table, but their amusements, interests, and work are accepted as widely
different. The relations of husband and wife are based upon a more
intelligent understanding than elsewhere; and those of parent and child
are the nearest approach to perfection with which I am acquainted, if
only a higher moral training were added to the tenderness and incessant
care, for the French wife and mother is undoubtedly the best of her
kind; and if her mate is less worthy, at least he is a kinder, more
considerate, and courteous mate than his Anglo-Saxon brother. His sins,
when he is volatile and bad, run to the _cabinet particulier_ or the
_foyer_ of fast theatres, while the other flies to perdition on the fumes
of alcohol, and sins against home in public bars, upon race-courses, in
the hostels of fugitive dalliance. The Frenchman will tell you that he
is the better man of the two, for he brings a little sentiment into his
infidelities, while the Anglo-Saxon, when he turns his back upon home and
the domestic virtues, is brutal and gross.
I think there is something to be said for the erring Frenchman in his
frailty. Lisette, while her reign lasts, is somebody for him whom he must
study and consider, to whom he is bound to be kind, until he makes up his
mind to leave her, or until she leaves him. But this is not a point I
need dwell on. In the matter of virtue, the Britishers make themselves
out to be such honest, invulnerable fellows, unlike the chattering,
bragging sinners on the other side of the Channel, that it is only the
state of the public streets of Great Britain at nightfall that fronts us
with the universal charge against them of Pharisaism. And so I come back
to my contention, that since infidelity to the marriage vow does exist,
the light-headed sons of France choose the more open way of sinning.
Their view of the case, as expressed in their fiction, is frankly
odious, and, on his own showing, there is something essentially unclean
in the Frenchman’s mind, though I have always found his conversation
fastidiously correct and inoffensive, and it is sad to think of such a
fine and splendid race of women playing the unsavoury _rôle_ they are
made to play by the dramatists and novelists of their land. The women,
of course, must be greatly to blame for the misesteem expressed in
their regard by their fashionable and popular writers. Too fearful of
displeasing, and too sensitive to Gallic ridicule, they do not understand
that it rests with them to claim and obtain the respect due to them. They
applaud and admire the writers who most persistently degrade them under
the flattering guise of a passionate interest and concern. They, who so
wisely dominate at home, have seemingly little or no objection to play
the animal on paper. Of course there is a cultured and distinguished
class who detest the modern fiction and plays of their country, who
protest against them at home and in the Press, who will tell you they
read only foreign novels, to avoid being dragged through the mire of
their own.
This brings me to the consideration of woman’s _rôle_ in France. The
foreigner who only judges that _rôle_ from the novels he reads, mostly
pornographic, and from the drama, increasingly gross and immoral, will
be all at sea as regards the part woman plays in French life. He will
conceive her first playing the hypocrite up to the time of marriage, and
then living without restraint ever afterwards. He will wonder what time
is left her for domestic duties, and judge her social duties merely as
convenient stages along the downward path. If he enjoys that sort of
thing, she will amuse and interest him, but he will underestimate her
position in reality. For no one plays a more important _rôle_ in the
ranks of humanity than the Frenchwoman. She it is who rules the home,
and in what an admirable way she rules it can never be sufficiently
extolled. She it is who trains, fashions, guides man in every step of his
career, from his boyhood into his first love-affair, and makes of him
the courteous and indulgent creature he proves in matrimony. As mother,
aunt, sister, wife, and daughter, the Frenchman relies on his womankind
throughout his whole career. She is, in the best and fullest sense of
the word, his helpmeet; assists him in his business, enjoys his entire
confidence, because he knows so well that she is the better part of the
institution, bears more than half of his troubles. As a mother, she knows
how to efface herself, and in acting to her sons as their best friend
and confidant, keeps her sovereignty stable. It is because she is such
a sensible and dignified ruler, indulgent where indulgence is needful,
that the men around her rarely feel the impulse to break from her sway.
She moulds the politicians, takes the poets and novelists by the hand,
holds the social sceptre with ease and charm, pulls the academical
wire-strings, aids youth to success and triumph, names the fashion in
literature,—and here she does less wisely and less well,—makes and mars
reputations, is responsible for more of the commercial prosperity of
the land than her mate, and brought, of her own thrift and labour, a
bigger share to the millions that went to Germany than he. An England
without her women could be conceived as still standing, so effaced is
their _rôle_; but France may almost be said to exist by hers. If the
women would only consent to go to the colonies, the French would, I am
convinced, turn out capital colonists.
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