II

June 18, 1914.

That's right. Accept the situation. You will soon find that Paris will

seem the same to you. Besides, I had really given all I had to give

there.

Indeed you shall know, to the smallest detail, just how the material

side of my life is arranged,--all my comforts and discomforts,--since

you ask.

I am now absolutely settled into my little "hole" in the country, as you

call it. It has been so easy. I have been here now nearly three weeks.

Everything is in perfect order. You would be amazed if you could see

just how everything fell into place. The furniture has behaved itself

beautifully. There are days when I wonder if either I or it ever lived

anywhere else. The shabby old furniture with which you were long so

familiar just slipped right into place. I had not a stick too little,

and could not have placed another piece. I call that "bull luck."

I have always told you--you have not always agreed--that France was the

easiest place in the world to live in, and the love of a land in which

to be a pauper. That is why it suits me.

Don't harp on that word "alone." I know I am living alone, in a house

that has four outside doors into the bargain. But you know I am not one

of the "afraid" kind. I am not boasting. That is a characteristic, not

a quality. One is afraid or one is not. It happens that I am not.

Still, I am Very prudent. You would laugh if you could see me "shutting

up" for the night. All my windows on the ground floor are heavily

barred. Such of the doors as have glass in them have shutters also.

The window shutters are primitive affairs of solid wood, with

diamond-shaped holes in the upper part. First, I put up the shutters on

the door in the dining-room which leads into the garden on the south

side; then I lock the door. Then I do a similar service for the kitchen

door on to the front terrace, and that into the orchard, and lock both

doors. Then I go out the salon door and lock the stable and the grange

and take out the keys. Then I come into the salon and lock the door

after me, and push two of the biggest bolts you ever saw.

After which I hang up the keys, which are as big as the historic key of

the Bastille, which you may remember to have seen at the Musee

Carnavalet. Then I close and bolt all the shutters downstairs. I do it

systematically every night--because I promised not to be foolhardy. I

always grin, and feel as if it were a scene in a play. It impresses me

so much like a tremendous piece of business--dramatic suspense--which

leads up to nothing except my going quietly upstairs to bed.

When it is all done I feel as I used to in my strenuous working days,

when, after midnight, all the rest of the world--my little world--being

calmly asleep, I cuddled down in the corner of my couch to read;--the

world is mine!

Never in my life--anywhere, under any circumstances--have I been so well

taken care of. I have a femme de menage--a sort of cross between a

housekeeper and a maid-of-all-work. She is a married woman, the wife of

a farmer whose house is three minutes away from mine. My dressing-room

window and my dining-room door look across a field of currant bushes to

her house. I have only to blow on the dog's whistle and she can hear.

Her name is Amelie, and she is a character, a nice one, but not half as

much of a character as her husband--her second. She is a Parisian. Her

first husband was a jockey, half Breton, half English. He died years

ago when she was young: broke his neck in a big race at Auteuil.

She has had a checkered career, and lived in several smart families

before, to assure her old age, she married this gentle, queer little

farmer. She is a great find for me. But the thing balances up

beautifully, as I am a blessing to her, a new interest in her monotonous

life, and she never lets me forget how much happier she is since I came

here to live. She is very bright and gay, intelligent enough to be a

companion when I need one, and well-bred enough to fall right into her

proper place when I don't.

Her husband's name is Abelard. Oh, yes, of course, I asked him about

Heloise the first time I saw him, and I was staggered when the little

old toothless chap giggled and said, "That was before my time." What do

you think of that? Every one calls him "Pere Abelard," and about the

house it is shortened down to "Pere." He is over twenty years older than

Amelie--well along in his seventies. He is a native of the commune--was

born at Pont-aux-Dames, at the foot of the hill, right next to the old

abbaye of that name. He is a type familiar enough to those who know

French provincial life. His father was a well-to-do farmer. His mother

was the typical mother of her class. She kept her sons under her thumb

as long as she lived. Pere Abelard worked on his father's farm. He had

his living, but never a sou in his pocket. The only diversion he ever

had was playing the violin, which some passer in the commune taught him.

When his parents died, he and his brothers sold the old place at

Pont-aux-Dames to Coquelin, who was preparing to turn the historic old

convent into a maison de retraite for aged actors, and he came up here

on the hill and bought his present farm in this hamlet, where almost

every one is some sort of a cousin of his.

Oddly enough, almost every one of these female cousins has a history.

You would not think it, to look at the place and the people, yet I fancy

that it is pretty universal for women in such places to have

"histories." You will see an old woman with a bronzed face--sometimes

still handsome, often the reverse--in her short skirt, her big apron

tied round where a waist is not, her still beautiful hair concealed in a

colored handkerchief. You ask the question of the right person, and you

will discover that she is rich; that she is avaricious; that she pays

heavy taxes; denies herself all but the bare necessities; and that the

foundation of her fortune dates back to an affaire du coeur, or perhaps

of interest, possibly of cupidity; and that very often the middle-aged

daughter who still "lives at home with mother," had also had a

profitable affaire arranged by mother herself. Everything has been

perfectly convenable. Every one either knows about it or has forgotten

it. No one is bothered or thinks the worse of her so long as she has

remained of the "people" and put on no airs. But let her attempt to

rise out of her class, or go up to Paris, and the Lord help her if she

ever wants to come back, and, French fashion, end her days where she

began them. This is typically, provincially French. When you come down

here I shall tell you tales that will make Balzac and De Maupassant look

tame.

You have no idea how little money these people spend, It must hurt them

terribly to cough up their taxes. They all till the land, and eat what

they grow. Amelie's husband spends exactly four cents a week--to get

shaved on Sunday. He can't shave himself. A razor scares him to death.

He looks as if he were going to the guillotine when he starts for the

barber's, but she will not stand for a beard of more than a week's

growth. He always stops at my door on his way back to let his wife kiss

his clean old face, all wreathed with smiles--the ordeal is over for

another week. He never needs a sou except for that shave. He drinks

nothing but his own cider: he eats his own vegetables, his own rabbits;

he never goes anywhere except to the fields,--does not want to--unless

it is to play the violin for a dance or a fete. He just works, eats,

sleeps, reads his newspaper, and is content. Yet he pays taxes on

nearly a hundred thousand francs' worth of real estate.

But, after all, this is not what I started to tell you--that was about

my domestic arrangements. Amelie does everything for me. She comes

early in the morning, builds a fire, then goes across the field for the

milk while water is heating. Then she arranges my bath, gets my coffee,

tidies up the house. She buys everything I need, cooks for me, waits on

me, even mends for me,--all for the magnificent sum of eight dollars a

month. It really isn't as much as that, it is forty francs a month,

which comes to about a dollar and eighty cents a week in your currency.

She has on her farm everything in the way of vegetables that I need,

from potatoes to "asparagras," from peas to tomatoes. She has chickens

and eggs. Bread, butter, cheese, meat come right to the gate; so does

the letter carrier, who not only brings my mail but takes it away. The

only thing we have to go for is the milk.

To make it seem all the more primitive there is a rickety old diligence

which runs from Quincy--Huiry is really a suburb of Quincy--to Esbly

twice a day, to connect with trains for Paris with which the branch road

does not connect. It has an imperial, and when you come out to see me,

at some future time, you will get a lovely view of the country from a

top seat. You could walk the four miles quicker than the horse

does,--it is uphill nearly all the way,--but time is no longer any

object with me. Amelie has a donkey and a little cart to drive me to

the station at Couilly when I take that line, or when I want to do an

errand or go to the laundress, or merely to amuse myself.

If you can really match this for a cheap, easy, simple way for an

elderly person to live in dignity, I wish you would. It is far easier

than living in Paris was, and living in Paris was easier for me than the

States. I am sorry, but it is the truth.

You ask me what I do with the "long days." My dear! they are short, and

yet I am out of bed a little after four every morning. To be sure I get

into bed again at half past eight, or, at latest, nine, every night. Of

course the weather is simply lovely. As soon as I have made sure that

my beloved panorama has not disappeared in the night I dress in great

haste. My morning toilette consists of a long black studio apron such

as the French children wear to school,--it takes the place of a

dress,--felt shoes inside my sabots, a big hat, and long

gardening-gloves. In that get-up I weed a little, rake up my paths,

examine my fruit trees, and, at intervals, lean on my rake in a Maud

Muller posture and gaze at the view. It is never the same two hours of

the day, and I never weary of looking at it.

My garden would make you chortle with glee. You will have to take it by

degrees, as I do. I have a sort of bowing acquaintance with it

myself--en masse, so to speak. I hardly know a thing in it by name. I

have wall fruit on the south side and an orchard of plum, pear, and

cherry trees on the north side. The east side is half lawn and half

disorderly flower beds. I am going to let the tangle in the orchard

grow at its own sweet will--that is, I am going to as far as Amelie

allows me. I never admire some trailing, flowering thing there that,

while I am admiring it, Amelie does not come out and pull it out of the

ground, declaring it une salete and sure to poison the whole place if

allowed to grow. Yet some of these same saletes are so pretty and grow

so easily that I am tempted not to care. One of these trials of my life

is what I am learning to know as liserone--we used to call it wild

morning-glory. That I am forbidden to have--if I want anything else.

But it is pretty.

I remember years ago to have heard Ysolet, in a lecture at the Sorbonne,

state that the "struggle for life" among the plants was fiercer and more

tragic than that among human beings. It was mere words to me then. In

the short three weeks that I have been out here in my hilltop garden I

have learned to know how true that was. Sometimes I am tempted to have a

garden of weeds. I suppose my neighbors would object if I let them all

go to seed and sow these sins of agriculture all over the tidy farms

about me.

Often these lovely mornings I take a long walk with the dog before

breakfast. He is an Airedale, and I am terribly proud of him and my

neighbors terribly afraid of him. I am half inclined to believe that he

is as afraid of them as they are of him, but I keep that suspicion, for

prudential reasons, to myself. At any rate, all passers keep at a

respectful distance from me and him.

Our usual walk is down the hill to the north, toward the shady route

that leads by the edge of the canal to Meaux. We go along the fields,

down the long hill until we strike into a footpath which leads through

the woods to the road called "Paves du Roi" and on to the canal, from

which a walk of five minutes takes us to the Marne. After we cross the

road at the foot of the hill there is not a house, and the country is so

pretty--undulating ground, in every tint of green and yellow. From the

high bridge that crosses the canal the picture is--well, is

French-canally, and you know what that means--green-banked,

tree-shaded, with a towpath bordering the straight line of water, and

here and there a row of broad long canal-boats moving slowly through the

shadows.

By the time I get back I am ready for breakfast. You know I never could

eat or drink early in the morning. I have my coffee in the orchard

under a big pear tree, and I have the inevitable book propped against

the urn. Needless to say I never read a word. I simply look at the

panorama. All the same I have to have the book there or I could not

eat, just as I can't go to sleep without books on the bed.

After breakfast I write letters. Before I know it Amelie appears at the

library door to announce that "Madame est servie"--and the morning is

gone. As I am alone, as a rule I take my lunch in the breakfast-room.

It is on the north side of the house, and is the coolest room in the

house at noon. Besides, it has a window overlooking the plain. In the

afternoon I read and write and mend, and then I take a light supper in

the arbor on the east side of the house under a crimson rambler, one of

the first ever planted here over thirty years ago.

I must tell you about that crimson rambler. You know when I hired this

house it was only a peasant's hut. In front of what is now the

kitchen--it was then a dark hole for fuel--stood four dilapidated posts,

moss-covered and decrepit, over which hung a tangle of something. It

was what I called a "mess." I was not as educated as I am now. I

saw--it was winter--what looked to me an unsightly tangle of disorder.

I ordered those posts down. My workmen, who stood in some awe of me,--I

was the first American they had ever seen,--were slow in obeying. They

did not dispute the order, only they did not execute it.

One day I was very stern. I said to my head mason, "I have ordered that

thing removed half a dozen times. Be so good as to have those posts

taken down before I come out again."