PEASANT AND ARTISAN
From earliest youth I had been accustomed to the trim and pleasing aspect
of the French peasant, but lived long in Paris without ever having had
occasion to examine this class more closely than a walk in the country
permits. I chanced to summer one year in the Saintonge, and friends made
me acquainted there with an excellent miller and his wife who dwelt
upon their lands. I published in the _Speaker_ something about these
delightful people afterwards, and I cannot do better than quote from that
forgotten source:
“In the Saintonge, as elsewhere, the local mood is ruled by politics, and
private friendship gives way to public rivalry. I learnt all about these
feuds from my friend the miller of La Pellouaille. Intellect was not his
strong point, but there was a cheerful cynicism about him to lend flavour
to his commonplaces. While others affected the heroic or patriotic, he
was content to accommodate himself to circumstances. In reply to my
query—to which party he belonged—he said, with a humorous smile, ‘_Dame_,
I go with the strongest, naturally,’ which did not prevent him from
giving his own sly hit at the Government. I give his views for what they
are worth—neither brilliant nor original, but expressed with a certain
geniality of tone and temper that kept him from bucolic dulness. If the
Republic kept France out of mischief for the next twenty years, and
carried her into fair prosperity, he believed, by that time, neither
Bonapartist nor Legitimist would be remembered. For the moment the land
was in a state of ferment, and he thought it a pity such excessive use
should be made of those big words, Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.
These three republican assurances be qualified as mere _blagues_; and
told me of a jocose tobacconist who wrote them on the sign-board of
his shop, with an empty tobacco-pouch suspended from each, the pouches
in France being called _blagues_. But the miller’s wife was certainly
his pleasanter half. It was a delight to look upon a creature so human
and wholesome and resourceful. She was a large, handsome woman, with a
smile as fresh as new milk, and hazel eyes as clear as daylight, beaming
with good-will, with vitality, and interest in her fellows. The kine
browsing in the fields were not more mild. Such a woman has you right
at nature’s heart—big and broad and bountiful. She is peasant in the
best sense, proud of her spotless cap and apron, free and independent in
her carriage, with shoulders that know no cringing stoop and voice that
cannot whine.”
This good creature took me rambling through the woods, she picking the
nuts, and I devouring them; and I found her talk ever sensible and
entertaining. Thanks to the natural good manners and intelligence of the
French people, there is far less difference than in England between the
uneducated and educated classes. My friends of the mill honoured me once
with an invitation to dinner. The sky was menacing, and, as I entered the
long park avenue whence the mill was visible, I saw the miller and his
son anxiously scanning the heavens and the green-roofed aisle of walnut
and sycamore by which I came. They hailed me with vigorous welcome, and,
as I rested in their beautifully clean kitchen, with broad and generous
fireplace, where the wood crackled pleasantly, and shone upon polished
brass dogs and gleaming bronze pots, with the high French bed in the
deep recess, the miller’s wife mixed me some _cassis_ and water. A more
excellent dinner I have never eaten than that cooked, without fuss, or
haste, or delay, by the miller’s wife. In a twinkling, as it seemed to
me, she had savoury tomato-soup on the table; and while she laid the
cloth, the miller sat in front of the capacious mouth of flames, and saw
that the browning chicken was kept moist with grease. I told them the
story of Alfred and the cakes, and the miller’s wife cried, “She struck
a king—a peasant just like myself!” “_Dame_,” laughed the miller, “it
doesn’t make much difference, when it is a woman, whether she be queen or
peasant!” And I thought the remark one that an English peasant would have
been incapable of making. He would have been incapable of such a point of
view.
The French peasant has not the charm of the Irish peasant—the women,
above all, lack the lovely complexion and beautiful eyes of the Irish—and
he has less of the grand air. He is much more the son of the soil and
less of the gentleman. The writer, wishing to be true to life, could
never make such enchanting “copy” out of him as Jane Barlow made of the
Irish peasant in her delightful _Idylls_. There is too little poetry
about him, and he is too evenly balanced and cool-headed to offer us
many of the adorable surprises of humour. I have heard it said, by
French persons who live in the country, that Zola comes nearer to truth
and reality in his presentment of the peasant than George Sand in her
exquisite pastorals, or M. René Bazin in such a tender and lovely story
as _La Terre qui Meurt_. But Balzac himself did not weave us tales of
romance and delicate feeling when he touched upon the theme; and so it
is very likely that the fellow is more of a brute than he seems to be in
casual intercourse, without, however, sinking to the loathsome depths
of the realism of _La Terre_. I, when I recall him to mind, own that I
ever see him a dignified, well-mannered figure in blue blouse, generally
clean, sometimes incredibly patched by his thrifty wife, frugal, sober,
hard-worked, not too garrulous, and yet not resentful of easy speech,
nor suspicious of the stranger who accosts him with courtesy. I find him
in all things, as he presents himself to the eye and offers himself for
observation, the superior of his British brother Hodge, neither so gross
nor so unintelligent, with a look in his eye much resembling humour.
He has his demands upon life, too, which are not those of the clownish
brute, the inarticulate rustic. Not for nothing was the Revolution made,
since by it has he learnt that he has his own share in the joys of
civilisation, and that if he work hard enough his sons may aspire to such
a measure of education as a harsher lot denied him. When business brings
him into a little town or a great city, his eye alights on beautiful
objects, placed there as much for him as for the owners of seigneurial
dwellings. Flowers, trim parks, legends in stone, splendid cathedrals,
every gracious blending of line and colour, combine to train his eye in
beauty and refine his nature. He need thread these quaint and lovely
streets with no slouching step, for he, and such as he, are too conscious
of their stable efforts in the general work of order and national
prosperity. He need touch his forelock to no great lord for permission
to breathe the free air of heaven, for does not he, too, possess his
bit of land, his little dwelling, from which none can oust him? And, on
feast-days and Sundays, are there not always public museums at hand for
his instruction and entertainment? No country in the world takes such
care to provide museums for the people throughout all the provinces as
France. Every year the State purchases pictures at the annual exhibitions
of Paris to add to these provincial collections; and in every little
town you pass through you are personally urged by some native to visit
the Musée. This fact may have something to do with the astonishing
intellectual superiority of the French peasant over Hodge beyond the
Channel. For the fact remains that you can talk to the blue-bloused son
of the soil and hope to learn something from him, when the absence of
loquacity and ideas and manners in Hodge will leave you discouraged and
in despair. The French peasant loves so many things that educate and
refine—flowers and pictures and military bands, spectacles of all kinds,
and independence.
[Illustration: AN OUTDOOR MEAL
_Zimenez_]
His standard is by no means an exalted one. His frugality is practised
in the interest of his old age. His honesty is chiefly, I suspect, a
shrewd protection against the probable dishonesty of others, for the
simple law of comradeship demands that you shall treat fairly the man
who treats you fairly. And his religion does not go down as deep as
his soul, or whatever may serve him as such. It is with him merely a
material influence, since it furnishes a serviceable plank for getting
safely across the perilous abyss into a better world, and enables him
to be decently baptised, married, and buried as a member of a Christian
community. All other phases of religion—its emotions, exactions,
penalties, and devices—he leaves to the foolish women-folk. Indeed, this
seems to be the conviction of the average male Catholic the world over,
if I may except Ireland, the one Catholic country in which I have found
men to take their religion seriously, and the little Celtic corner of
France, where the blue-eyed Bretons so closely resemble them. When I have
visited at a French country-house in the shooting season, I have never
known a male guest to attend mass, the explanation given being that _la
chasse_ had begun before the hour of mass. But if a woman stayed away
from mass she would create a scandal. In Spain I have seen acquaintances
of mine, while their women-folk knelt and prayed with fervour, stand
throughout the Sunday service with a bored and perfunctory air, only
looking towards the altar and the priest at the moment of the elevation
of the Host in a casually respectful way, as an officer might salute the
passage of a military chief, and seemingly relieved to be able to examine
again the faces and dresses of the women about them. Children barely in
their teens, young lads going to school, carefully imitate this attitude
of merely tolerant recognition of religious form, and their elders never
dream of encouraging them to use a prayer-book, or kneel, or show any
sign that the weekly mass is to them more than the bored attendance at an
official ceremony.
What is a moral influence with them? High above religion is their sturdy
passion for independence. It is this passion that enables them to scrape,
and serve, and suffer privation with dignity and patience. However meagre
their resources may be, they are content with their lot, provided the
roof they sleep beneath is their own, the land they till their own, the
goat, the pig, the poultry, theirs to do with what they will. This is no
mean standard, and it works miracles in France. Would they were by nature
and instinct kinder to their beasts! but this, too, is not a Catholic
characteristic. I am assured that the Bretons and Provençals are the
worst offenders. However, they do not sink so low in cruelty to animals
as the purely Latin races, like the callous Spaniards and the Italians;
and even in France the condition of animals is considerably ameliorated,
though horses and donkeys are still often maltreated, and geese are
killed in the cruelest fashion, their prolonged agonies, in peasant
esteem, lending flavour to the cooked flesh.
What should, however, be a source of perennial admiration is the
extraordinary absence in this class of anything approaching snobbishness.
The eternal simplicity and unpretentiousness of the race are my constant
wonder and delight. You will see a man in blue blouse, his wife in
spotless cap and coloured kerchief, the man in appearance and fashion
of speech and manners a gentleman, the woman educated, with her _brevet
supérieur_, not destitute of music or art, working and living like
peasants because they are working their own land, and receiving on
lines of perfect equality their humbler neighbours, without any thought
of giving themselves the vulgar airs so common in my own land and in
England. When they take their well-earned holiday at the seaside or among
mountain waters, you will rarely find them seeking to pass for other than
they are, or talking loudly of their advantages of fortune or station.
Their natural dignity is such that they are content to abide by it and be
judged accordingly. This class of the French race may be described as the
least vulgar, the least boastful of the world. With these cleanly and
self-respecting toilers there is no insane aping of the idler, no cheap
imitation of the _bourgeoise_ in dress, no awful spectacle of girls with
hideous feathers and hats the grossest assertion of ill-placed ambition.
Finery of any kind is recognised as the advertisement of something worse
than bad taste,—of the bonnet gone clean over the mill and morals gone
after it. The peasant woman’s vanity is to dress as her mother dressed
before her, her pride is to belong to her land and her people. And it
is because of this wholesome vanity and this noble pride that France is
France, and the land is such a pleasant one to travel over.
This hard-working race is not without its amusements. It must, as I have
said, have its share of the joys of life. They are never too tired after
a day’s work to dance to the music and measure of song, which they love;
and whenever you chance upon them congregated for diversion, whether
at a fair, on a moonlit sward, over a hilarious meal, you will always
find their behaviour seemly and their gaiety attractive and measured.
If the feathers and hats of holiday trim of Great Britain are lacking
here, so also are the repulsive giggles and the hateful love-making
of those latitudes. The French, we know, are not patterns of virtue,
but they certainly are patterns of deportment abroad. In that clever
little book, _The Island_, Mr. Whiteing depicts the love-making of this
class in England as certainly the worst enemy of the French could never
write with any semblance of truth of the same portion of the race in
France. “Like their North-American sisters, fond of feathers and bright
hues. No gaudier thing in nature than the coster-girl in her holiday
dress of mauve, with the cruel plume that seems to have been dyed in
blood. Relation of female to male, singular survival of primitive state.
Love-making always, in form at least, an abduction of the virgin. A
meeting at the street corner in the dusk for the beginning of the
ceremony; then a chase round the houses, the heavy boots after the light
ones, with joyous shrieks to mark the line of flight; after that the
seizure, the fight, with sounding slaps for dalliance that might knock
the wind out of a farrier of the Blues. In the final clutch skirts part
in screeching rents, feathers strew the ground. Then the panting pair
return hand in hand to the street corner, to begin again.” Of the meeting
of these dreadful lovers later in the public-house Mr. Whiteing adds—and
here, too, he paints a picture exclusively British, that never could
be seen in France: “Nightfall brings them together at the universal
rendezvous from every near or distant scene; men and those that were once
maidens, mumbling age and swearing infancy, stand six deep before the
slimy bar, till the ever-flowing liquor damps down their fiercest fires,
and the great city is once more at rest. The imagination of him that
saw hell could hardly picture the final scene.” And yet you will read
such things printed of the French not immediately under your inspection
that make you ask yourself if the rowdy love-making and public-house
bars constitute the worst possible degradation of humanity. The most
obvious, the most offensive assuredly, but not the least innocent. M.
Octave Mirbeau has recently done me the honour to send me his latest
book, _Le Journal d’une Femme de Chambre_. Not even Zola could conceive
a more terrible indictment against his own race. All classes are therein
depicted as equally corrupt, shameless, brutalised by irrepressed and
irrepressible vice,—nobles, _bourgeoisie_, servants of both sexes,
city and country folk, artisans and peasants. The book has an air of
sincerity, of being the truthful record of a lady’s-maid’s career in
Paris and in the country, so that one cannot discuss it as mere vicious
raving, and every character introduced is worse than the one that went
before. I question if humanity has ever been dragged into such infamous
depths with such a singular display of enjoyment in its degradation.
I read such charges, and I am stupefied with their divergence from my
own personal experience. The French servants I have known have all
been excellent creatures, devoted to their mistresses, grateful for any
kindness or interest shown them, surprisingly intelligent, honest, sober,
of lives of conspicuous virtue. They have the national failing, which is
a tendency to insolence on slight provocation—for you cannot reason with
French people. They fire up angrily at the least hint of an opinion that
displeases them, and their very independence of character makes them sin
on the other side of servility. But those monsters of their fiction—where
are they to be met with? How do they manage to hide themselves so
cleverly from daily scrutiny, if they are, as we are assured, so
persistently around us? Have any of the sweet-mannered Eugénies, the
Irmas, the Marguerites, the Louises, I meet at the different houses of my
friends, who greet me with such cheerful welcome, who take my umbrella or
cloak with such suggested sympathy, and put fresh flowers in my room with
such graceful pleasure, anything in common with M. Mirbeau’s unspeakable
wretch, Mlle. Celestine?
The same admiration I am compelled to entertain for the French peasant,
I feel for the French artisan, whether in town or country. Yet he, too,
has been depicted as a creature of loathsome perversity; but I can only
speak of him as I have found him. Some years ago, going from Cognac to
Angoulême, I decided to abandon the dull, incommunicative travellers
of the second class and try my chances among the loquacious third-class
voyagers. Here I fell into the very midst of good-humoured, general
conversation, and learnt more about the stirring local events of Cognac
and Angoulême than I should have known after a week’s residence in either
town. A young girl with a round, baby face addressed me in excellent
English, so evidently beaming with the joy of being able to do so that
I lavished my congratulations instantly, and learnt that she had been
for two years a nurse in Warwickshire, where she had picked up fluent
English and met with so much kindness and innocent pleasures of all
sorts that she adored the name of England ever afterwards. Certainly
not a sister of M. Mirbeau’s ineffable Mlle. Celestine, this dear,
sentimental little maid of Angoulême. It was a case of attraction at
first sight, for she begged of me to use her room instead of going to a
hotel, and be her guest at her father’s, a little watchmaker, during the
three days I projected staying at Angoulême. I accepted, enchanted at
a proposal that offered me such an out-of-the-way and original glimpse
of a French town. “Sweetness and light” are words that best describe
this delicious little creature. She was like a round, innocent kitten,
all gaiety and brightness, and sparkled and danced along the streets
beside me, crazy with the delight of talking English again. Girls, she
moaned dejectedly, were most unhappy creatures in France; they had no
pleasures, no freedom. She could not take her beautiful big dog Tom,
given her as a puppy in Warwickshire, out for a walk because it is not
proper in France for a young girl to be seen out-of-doors with a dog.
Poor little martyr, she did not look much of a victim, and missing and
yearning for the larger ways of England had not thinned or paled her
rosy, vivacious, round visage. Here she was, as happy as a queen because
she was going to sleep on her grandmother’s sofa that a stranger from
whom she would take no money might sleep comfortably in her bed. She
insisted on carrying my bag, too, as if that were another beaming source
of satisfaction; and as we trudged blithely up from the valley of the
station to the quaint street in which a quaint, dim-eyed old man lived
and made and mended watches in an altitude rivalling the stars, I saw
that Jeanne was a popular personage. Not this the timid French girl
who slips in and out of life unnoticed, and says, _Oui, monsieur; Non,
monsieur_, to the trousered wolves. The station-master cast her a cordial
nod; the doctor, climbing into his gig, heard her speak English, and
turned with a big, gruff laugh as he waved his hand to her. “There’s
Mlle. Jeanne, happy at last. She is able to calumniate us all in good
English to an insolent foreigner. _Pauvres de nous!_” and wherever we
went together those three days, I saw that the townspeople in shops,
down by the river the boatmen and boys, the women who showed us over
the museum and over the town-hall, the Alsatian manager of Laroche
Joubert’s huge paper factory, whither Jeanne and I drove next day, the
servants at the Duc de la Rochefoucauld’s castle, all knew, admired, and
respected Jeanne, the artisan’s daughter and Warwickshire nurse. She was
not pretty nor distinguished, she dressed like a dowdy nurse, and wore
cotton mittens, but I would I knew anybody in her position who could
attain such popularity in a town like Angoulême out of France. And all
with the utterest simplicity, and an excellent breeding. A heart-broken
shoemaker, a melancholy widower, who wanted her for wife, came to me
and begged me to use my influence in his behalf. He confided to me the
tale of his love, and felt sure that if Jeanne were urged to marry him
in the language of Shakespeare she would consent. She brought in to be
introduced to me a soldier to whom she was teaching English, a nice, mild
young fellow, who told me with gravity that in order to keep himself
abreast of English literature he had subscribed to _Pick Me Up_ for
himself and Jeanne, getting this luminous organ from Bordeaux. The doctor
and his wife invited Jeanne to take her foreign lion over one evening,
and we were made much of, and given syrup and water to drink. We stayed
out shockingly late of nights, for there was a splendid moon and I could
not be torn from the river. But when we entered on our upward toil along
the dark and silent streets, Jeanne would say: “Talk English very loud.
It is a woman’s best safeguard in France.” She called the English tongue
“a _coup de pistolet_ in French ears.” So whenever she saw a silhouette
in uniform, she fired off an aggressive shot of British vocables, and
when midnight, or later, found us under the watchmaker’s roof the old man
lifted his hands in horrified astonishment at our staying abroad so late.
It was another evidence of English eccentricity.
When I bade Jeanne good-bye at the station, I with difficulty prevailed
upon her to name a sum at least for my excellent board, if not for
the pretty bedroom I had used for three delightful days. Judge of
my amazement when at length she said, to put me at ease, and quite
reluctantly, that she would accept three francs for my three days’ board.
This I regarded as so ludicrous that I laughingly told her I would rather
discharge my debt from Paris, for I preferred to be remembered by a
present than take out of my purse three miserable francs in return for
all I had enjoyed. I declare there were tears in the child’s eyes, and
she sorrowfully assured me her holiday was over. She had never had such
a time at Angoulême since her birth: rows on the river by sunset and
moonlight, she steering, I rowing, and all the boatmen looking on and
cheering lustily; walks here, drives there, and Tom, the glorious Tom, in
honour of my nationality, permitted to walk with her, free beneath the
free heavens.
I saw many artisans at Jeanne’s, and never in one of either sex a hint of
grossness, of boorishness, of stupidity. Jeanne, I admit, was the pearl
of her set, speaking with polished diction, of manners gentle and urbane,
only a nurse, and yet a perfect lady in everything. Her bedroom denoted
her own charming refinement, with its blue and white curtains, its
spotless prettiness, the flower vases, and little bookcase not ignobly
filled. She spoke continuously of herself, of her wishes and dreams.
Well, never once did I get a suspicion of a flirtation in her life. She
spoke of men with dignity and simplicity, without simper or giggle, and
made no effort to lead me to believe that she was pursued by lovers. When
she referred to the shoemaker’s addresses, it was simply to express her
judicious fear of the immense responsibility of the post of stepmother.
Her dreams were not sordid or vulgar. She wanted more liberty as a young
girl, freedom to walk about with Tom, and not be hampered with so many
unwise and unwritten laws. For the rest, she seemed content with the
modest place she had in the world; and I have known many a wealthier
woman who might with reason have envied this bright little French
nurse,—an honour to her country, her sphere, and her sex. I have seldom
parted with a roadside friend with keener regret.
My next friend of the working class, and she, I am proud to say, is a
friend of several years’ standing, is my Parisian washerwoman. But here,
I am bound to confess, I am fronted with an exceptional character,—witty,
brilliant, of a liberal and bountiful nature, and original almost to
the point of genius. My washerwoman comes every Tuesday, and brings
gaiety and delightful wit along with her. She is all sorts of odd things
together: a fierce Nationalist, a hard politician, a violent atheist,
a hater of Jesuits and freemasons, inclined to Protestantism, if,
unfortunately, the English were not Protestants already; intelligent
enough not to have been dazzled by the Russian alliance, even when all
France went mad on the Czar’s visit. “He wants our money, mademoiselle,”
she said to me in those mad times, “and we are fools enough to believe in
his friendship.” Whenever you mention the Russian alliance to her, she
promptly asks who has seen that alliance written out on paper, stamped,
and signed. And at the time of the Dreyfus Affair she could tell me
to a centime the sum the Jews and the English had paid the Czar, the
Pope, and the Emperor of Germany. I was used to an excellent, witty, and
extravagant lecture on the intricacies of the Affair every Tuesday which
delighted me, as she always had some ineffable monstrosity on the part
of the Jews, the English, the Germans, or the crowned heads of Europe
to impart; and took my joking with such delicious good humour that I
did not know how to fill up the gap after the verdict of Rennes, for
she is a very seemly, dignified little woman, my Parisian washerwoman.
She stands upon her manners, and says nothing more than “Good morning,
mademoiselle,” if you give her eloquence no opening. And what an
eloquence it is! What a flow of admirably chosen words, so expressively
enunciated, with fitting gesticulations and the most wonderful grimaces
of the wittiest and ugliest face I have ever seen! Then came the
Transvaal War, and here she shone. Indeed, I have repeatedly begged her
to abandon the obscure calling of a washerwoman, and betake herself to
public speaking. I have never known a woman more astonishingly fitted for
the part.
With her, too, as with the peasant, the distinctive characteristic is
an indomitable spirit of independence. I have never seen her anything
else but gay and charming, but two Englishwomen to whom I recommended
her complained of her insolence, because, being the soul of honesty
and an excellent washerwoman, she will stand no “observations” either
about her washing or her prices; nor will she tolerate anything like
airs. She maintains that she is quite as good as the Czarina, quite as
useful, and probably more intelligent, as, if they changed places, she
is convinced she would make a better hand at sitting on the throne than
the Czarina would make with her washtub. The Englishwoman, I suppose,
made some remarks that wounded this susceptible pride, and the fiery
little washerwoman neatly tied up her bundle of soiled linen, and with
a magnificent and haughty gesture laid it at her feet. “Madame can wash
her own linen or look elsewhere for a laundress; I decline madame’s
custom,” and walked out. The race have an eye, an unerring instinct, for
the drama, and know how to render even the rejection of soiled linen
picturesque and effective. They will cheerfully wash your linen for you
and black your boots; but, as well as payment in coin, they demand that
you shall recognise their right to consideration and courtesy as human
beings. With the _ancien régime_, servility was swept away, and when your
boots are blacked you are expected to give thanks for the service instead
of lifting the toe of contempt in your servant’s direction. A Scottish
woman who married a Frenchman used to convey her opinions and wishes to
her servants by means of a horsewhip, and, though some years dead, is
still a legend in Paris for her domestic difficulties and interior wars.
She belonged to the earlier period, now happily ended, when a kick was
administered for a pair of clean boots, and servants were supposed to
swallow strong language with a grin. Slave-driving, too, is restricted
here, for I have never caught a glimpse of the poor London “slavey,”
overworked almost to disease and insanity. This may be due to the system
of flats, which saves labour, and does away with the necessity for
carrying cans of water up several flights of stairs, but I am inclined to
think that French character goes for much in the suppression.
Domestic service is despised by the average peasant, the girls looking
forward to marriage, the men to peasant proprietorship, which works
so admirably in France. And in many provinces very young children of
both sexes go out as servants. At the different houses and châteaux I
visited in the Saintonge it was always little girls and boys between
seven and ten who served at table, answered bells, and helped in the
house-cleaning. I cannot say I found the houses particularly clean,
which may be a consequence, but it was interesting and amusing to see a
tiny lad enveloped in a blue working bib sweeping the stairs, and little
creatures at table removing the plates with not an excessive clatter.
One of the good results of this infant service was the indulgent and
maternal attitude of master and mistress. Such wee, willing creatures
could not be scolded seriously when they broke plates or glasses, and you
could not take in their regard the high, impersonal air of England, where
servants are mere instruments, not accepted as flesh-and-blood humanity.
Here you must, if human yourself, smile and thank and pat a curly head or
diminutive shoulder as the quaint creature offers you a course, with, oh!
such a stern determination to hold it steady and not accomplish disaster
in the neighbourhood of your garments.
The standard of comfort, especially in the matter of sanitary appliances,
has in France made an enormous progress during the last ten years. Ten
years ago in the country even the better classes were little, if at
all, in advance of Spain. I have seen such things in châteaux as would
not bear description, and could not be credited except upon personal
experience. So I ask myself what must be the state of peasant homes and
of artisans’ dwellings. With, however, the advance in schooling, comes an
appreciation of domestic improvements, and the kitchen is rapidly ceasing
to be the best bedroom. Under the Third Republic, so much maligned,
public schools for peasant girls have increased, which are considerably
an advance on the old convent system of education. Nuns are the worst
teachers in the world and the least conscientious. We have the exposure
by the Archbishop of Nancy of the method of the nuns of the Bon Pasteur,
who train orphans, and instead of teaching them, merely exploit them,
and keep up a flourishing institution on the hard labour of children and
girls, and, when the time for leaving the convent arrives, cast them
out without an outfit or a farthing of all the immense sums they have
earned for the convent when they ought to have been learning lessons.
Of course, these republican schools are thwarted and vexed by every
kind of petty persecution on the part of the clerical party. The French
Catholics detest the lay teachers, whom they regard as the rivals of
the Christian Brothers and the nuns, and make them suffer accordingly.
Their writers of predilection make a point of holding them up for public
scorn and ridicule, and so M. Henri Lavedan shows us, in that detestable
play, _Le Vieux Marcheur_, a country teacher, Mademoiselle Léontine
Falempin, all that she ought not to be; and M. de Vogüé, to be true to
the modern traditions of the French aristocrat, when he makes the base
heroine of his dull novel, _Les Morts qui Parlent_, go wrong, jeeringly
says, “So acted the pupil of the good M. Pécaut.” M. Pécaut, a respected
and popular citizen who died lately, established an excellent lay
institution for girls at Fontenay-aux-Roses, and M. de Vogüé’s cowardly
attack upon a dead man of whom the world knew nothing but good, by
implying that a woman is impure because she has been brought up in his
college, aroused the just indignation of every fair-minded Frenchman. If
the theme were not too unsavoury M. de Vogüé would deserve that I should
retort by revealing the tales of scandal and vice I have learned of a
fashionable convent near Paris,—and these stories do not reach me from
outsiders, but from four women who were educated therein.
It is a source of astonishment to me how inventive the French “little
people” are in the matter of domestic stores. In Ireland, certainly, you
will see nothing like it, but perhaps it may be different in England.
Here all sorts of things are made at home: wines, spirits, liqueurs,
and essences; jams, jellies, oil, vinegar, linen, bread, and honey.
Everything in nature is turned to useful account, and the housewives are
never idle. They have fruit and vegetables in abundance, and live, on
the whole, well, if frugally. Their lands produce flax, hemp, cloves,
colza, wheat, maize, every kind of flower, according to season and soil;
and such is the elasticity of their temperament and their unsleeping
industry, that they have been able to float above that tidal wave, the
phyloxera, as great as any of the Egyptian plagues, as they floated
above the national disaster of “’70.”
The hero of M. René Bazin’s most charming novel _La Terre qui Meurt_, is
a _métayer_; and _métayage_ is land worked on the half-profit system,
a midway position between labourer and freeholder. The sermon preached
by this mournful little story is that the French land is dying for want
of cultivation, as the peasants are swarming into the big towns, where
they are not wanted, and leaving to waste the land that needs them. Each
name in France is selected with a regard for the dignity of mankind.
The cook and the barber call themselves “artists,” and thereby efface
any menial touch from their calling. The retired servant calls himself
a _rentier_, and the retired labourer decks himself in the gentlemanly
title of _cultivateur_. You may be a _cultivateur_ with “lands and proud
dwellings,” like the earl in the song, or you may modestly cultivate a
single acre.
With such a fine name in prospect, I wonder any peasant lad is lured
from the country to the big, unsatisfactory towns, as M. Bazin laments
in his tale of the _métayer_ and his sons. In the _métairie_ system the
partnership between landlord and _métayer_ is worked in this wise. The
landlord supplies stock, land, and implements; the _métayer_ brings the
labour, and the profits are equally divided. The _métayer_ boards his
labourers, and their wages vary, according to season, from seventy-five
centimes to two and a half francs per day. The agent, on this system, is
done away with, and the landlord and his partner stand as man to man.
The artisan, too, in the country enjoys a pleasant independence. He
builds his own house, he makes and maintains his own home with thrift and
ambition. The standard of honesty is high. There is little beggary or
drunkenness, and early marriages are frequent.
Of course the peasant is grasping,—it were idle to hide this, even in
praising his frugality. He is close-fisted and hard-headed, and would
rather part with his blood than with a franc; but he and his brother,
the artisan, have made, and help to keep, France where she is. However
deplorable the pictures of their land which French novelists and
story-tellers may offer us, we may believe, without fear of error, that
it is not _La Terre_ which represents the French peasantry, so human
and so lovable, despite its lack of disinterestedness and generosity;
and it is not M. Octave Mirbeau’s appalling heroine who represents the
great hard-working, honest, and intelligent artisan class. Both of them
have qualities above and beyond any to be looked for in the same classes
elsewhere; and if there were nothing else to admire, surely we must find
admirable their rectitude and their love of independence.
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